Donald Trump continued his Wednesday morning tweetstorm with a rant against Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) that was, as fellow Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said, “unhinged.” Talk about fake news—Trump’s attack on Blumenthal was disconnected from reality in addition to once again providing the bizarre sight of a sitting president personally attacking his political opponents.
Blumenthal’s great sin in Trump’s eyes was apparently to dare to appear on CNN and give a totally routine interview for a senator responding to a major news story. Trump’s response (1, 2, 3) was that “Watching Senator Richard Blumenthal speak of Comey is a joke.” Why a joke? “’Richie’ devised one of the greatest military frauds in U.S. history.” Wow! Really? “For years, as a pol in Connecticut, Blumenthal would talk of his great bravery and conquests in Vietnam—except he was never there.” Trump went on to claim that, “when caught,” Blumenthal “cried like a baby and begged for forgiveness...and now he is judge & jury. He should be the one who is investigated for his acts.”
Well, who’s going to investigate him now that there’s no FBI director, Donald? Maybe that will be one of Trump’s leading criteria for a new attorney general: “Will not investigate my campaign’s ties to Russia, will investigate Richard Blumenthal’s past misstatements about his Vietnam-era military service.” So what did Blumenthal do that was “one of the greatest military frauds in U.S. history” that merits investigation? On occasion he said that he had served “in Vietnam” rather than “in a Marine reserve unit during the Vietnam era” or otherwise left the impression that he had been in Vietnam, though he did not “talk of his great bravery and conquests.” It’s something to apologize for, as Blumenthal did, but it’s not like Blumenthal claimed that possible exposure to sexually transmitted diseases was his “personal Vietnam” Or said that attending a military-style boarding school gave him “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military.”
Seriously, Donald Trump is in the middle of a major political crisis of his own making and he’s sitting around watching cable news and then going on Twitter to personally attack Democrats for saying what literally everyone but diehard Trump loyalists is saying: that Trump’s firing of Comey is dangerous and disturbing. Unhinged is absolutely the right word.
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