Trump unhingery continues in an interview with The Hill. Fact-checker Daniel Dale starts his job for CNN on fire, but not in the Black Hills, noting that the Hill can't really call Individual-1 on his interview lies because they don’t want to jeopardize their access.
President Donald Trump was asked on Tuesday whether his face should appear on Mount Rushmore along with other major American presidents.
“If I answer that question yes, I will end up with such bad publicity,” Trump told The Hill, before pivoting to an incoherent rant about fireworks.
Trump keeps repeating the same lies, including the alleged rape at Bergdorf Goodman.
THE HILL: I do want to ask you real quickly about Jean Carroll because she was on television all morning repeating her allegations. Is it your position that she’s lying about what happened?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Totally lying. I don't know anything about her. I see that I had a picture with her coat on where I was leaving and you know, with the back of my; I know nothing about this woman. I know nothing about her. She is... it’s just a terrible thing that people can make statements like that. Think of it. Any department store that's crowded. Okay? Bergdorf Goodman’s a crowded store. And I’ve never been up that I remember ever on that floor. They sell women’s dresses on that floor. Okay? But Bergdorf Goodman is..and this is, like, twenty-five years ago, but this store is packed. It’s on Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. And she made this charge up. And by the way, she’s made it up about , or she’s said it about other people too. I’m not the only one. She said it about other people. I’ll say it with great respect, number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened. Okay? I hope you can be strong. But I think it’s a crazy thing when, when people are allowed to make false accusations like that. I really do. And, and for twenty-five years she never said anything. She never said for twenty-five years. And then she said, where are the sales girls that walked, worked...where are the people on the floor? All the people there and they had nobody behind the counter, which is supposed to be right there? There was nobody working behind, the store’s packed. It’s a disgrace these false, a, a false accusation like that is a disgrace.
[The President Goes Off-The-Record]
thehill.com/...
Speaking of Iran, Trump told the Hill that John Kerry "talks to them all the time." A source close to Kerry told CNN that Kerry hasn't spoken to the Iranians in over a year, since Trump announced his withdrawal from the nuclear deal in May 2018.
In a Sir Story, Trump said he is personally responsible for the return of fireworks to Mount Rushmore.
Trump claimed that the New York Times's David Sanger did not ask the White House for comment for his story on US cyber efforts related to Russia's power grid. The story says they contacted National Security Advisor John Bolton and the National Security Council.
And Republicans seem happy to default to the standard Lindsey Graham is using. They’re taking at face value the word of a man who has lied at unprecedented rates about everything, has already lied about this specific case, who has faced credible accusations of similar behavior by other women, and has indeed boasted about his own propensity to do it.
And this is not even to mention the general fact that Trump is extremely comfortable undertaking actions that most people would consider, well, bad. This list of actions runs from small things like refusing to pay his contractors to asking a foreign dictator to steal his opponent’s emails. He is facing several current investigations at the state and federal levels for a number of alleged financial crimes. Before they completely abandoned all pretenses of the concept of morality for their posture of tribalistic relativism, conservatives used to be comfortable making judgments about the character of people who habitually lie and steal. Their decision to place their faith in Trump, against a mountain of circumstantial evidence pointing in the other direction, is a perfectly fitting emblem of their posture of submission to the Trump presidency.
nymag.com/...