On Friday morning, Donald Trump made his all-too-regular phone call to Fox & Friends so that he could rant mostly uninterrupted, and certainly uncorrected, to millions of Americans on his personal media channel. Speaking for over 53 minutes, Trump used the time to call impeachment witnesses liars, make disconnected statements about forthcoming counterattacks from the White House, and lean way, way in on a conspiracy theory so ridiculous it had the Fox couch crew wincing.
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At the top of the chart of things that Trump said that are likely to be repeated, he completely denied the existence of the conversation between him and Gordon Sondland that was recounted in Thursday’s testimony by Foreign Service officer David Holmes. Holmes testified that Sondland called Trump from a Kyiv restaurant, and that during the call he could overhear Trump asking about progress on investigations he had demanded into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. Sondland testified on Wednesday that he remembered making the call, but did not remember the contents.
Trump at first wasn’t even willing to admit that much. “I guarantee you that never took place,” he said. But moments later, he seemed to admit that there may have been a call, but, “There's no way David Holmes could've overheard me talking on the phone with Sondland.” All this delivered at a shout that could likely have been heard all the way in Kyiv without a phone.
That was just one of the topics on the call in which Trump rambled, mostly without prompting, from making unsubstantiated claims about his border wall to making incoherent statements on the protests in Hong Kong. After saying that he “stood with” the protesters, Trump followed up with, “I also stand with President Xi.” He then pointed out the real hero of the situation by saying, “If it weren’t for me, Hong Kong would have been obliterated in 14 minutes.” Why? No one knows. How? Anyone’s guess.
But the biggest theme in the spiel, which went on so long that even Trump’s Fox friends made multiple, increasingly less gentle attempts to get him to just. stop. talking, was paranoia. Trump’s paranoia. Which is clearly a vast, ever-expanding net that dominates his thinking.
And that paranoia defines where Trump, and the nation, are going from here.
If it seems that Trump is constantly on Fox & Friends, it’s because he is. This was his 67th appearance on Fox News. He knows that he can make a call to Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy and company while counting on nothing but gentle head pats and encouragement no matter what he says. And Trump knows that after he finally drops his phone, the folks on the couch will continue his rant for him, repeating his statements and smoothing off the edges to make it seem more coherent. By evening, Trump’s fragmentary, unintelligible statements will be remade into talking points—and marching orders. And if there’s anything clear on the day after the last scheduled hearing in the House impeachment inquiry, the direction of the march is the same as it has ever been: attack.
The biggest section of Trump’s rant didn’t just dismiss the impeachment inquiry as “another hoax,” but also resurfaced claims that he was the subject of a vast conspiracy of the left, the “deep state,” the “never Trumpers,” and those insidious Ukrainians. Trump’s claims extended back to repeating assertions that President Obama had directly ordered spying on him and his campaign, and planted a big sloppy kiss on the CrowdStrike conspiracy theory. This theory says that Russia never hacked the DNC, and that the whole thing was a setup engineered by Hillary Clinton and a “wealthy Ukrainian” in order to trap Trump into … impeachment hearings three years later.
This conspiracy theory is so ridiculous that even the majority of Trump-supporting Republicans have steered away. And Brian Kilmeade and Steve Doocy were still wincing at the idea on Friday morning.
Trump: They have the server from the DNC.
Kilmeade: Who has the server?
Trump: They gave the server to CrowdStrike ... which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian.
Doocy: Are you sure they did that?
To be clear, there is no server. There never was any server. But:
- This is the conspiracy theory Trump pushed in his call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
- This is the conspiracy theory Rudy Giuliani has been pushing in interviews since May.
- This is the conspiracy theory that Attorney General William Barr is pursuing in Italy, Australia, and the U.K.
- This is the conspiracy theory that exonerates not just Trump, but also Vladimir Putin, and that instead inserts Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as the real villains who deserve to be locked up.
As with everything else he comes to believe, Trump will not back away from these claims, even though not just is there zero evidence, but they are also utterly ridiculous, counterfactual, scurrilous, and transparently wrong. He likes this theory because it supports him and attacks Hillary. That’s all that matters to Trump. There are no facts—only weaponized statements.
This theory has also already become the de facto position of the Republican Party, which will defend these claims because Trump demands that they be defended just as much as he demands investigations into Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. The next time Trump brings this up on Fox & Friends, Doocy will be all over it. But by then, this thing could be all over.