At the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, CNN asked Nancy Pelosi about statements by Donald Trump. Her answer was immediate. “I don’t talk about the president while I’m out of the country,” said Pelosi “That’s my principle.” Only Donald Trump has no principles, and he demonstrated that with soul-shredding effectiveness in the interview he provided to Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. With the white crosses of a military cemetery glowing in the background, Trump didn’t just attack Pelosi. He took that opportunity to go after everyone who failed to simply obey when he gave an order. And when it came to uniting the country, “irony” doesn’t begin to cover it.
Ingraham: What could you do to unite the country at a time of great polarization?
Trump: So, I think success should unite the country. But I will tell you, the more successful we’ve come, the more angry people like Nancy Pelosi, who don’t have what it takes, they don’t know what’s going on, they get angry. … We have Pelosi, we have crying Chuck Schumer—who’s a disaster by the way, he’s a total political, you know, jerk—but we have Schumer, we have all these people, they come out and they talk about ‘tariffs are bad,’ so they can, you know, they hurt my negotiation, because I go into the room with the Mexicans, I’m asking them for everything.
That’s seriously Trump’s response on how to unite the nation—by attacking, demonizing, and name calling. That’s because Trump has only one concept of what it means to “unite.”
Trump: They should be saying, “We’re with the president, we’ll do whatever he wants to do.”
Asked about D-Day itself, Trump responded by saying, "This is one of the true, in terms of war, in terms of, probably you can also say, in terms of peace ... because this led to something very special." That sentence, if it can be considered a sentence, may not contain any actual history, but it is one for the history books.
Then there was the point where Trump unleashed his full catalog of adjectives on Pelosi. "I think she’s a disgrace,” said Trump. “I actually don't think she's a talented person. I … I've tried to be nice to her because I would have liked to have gotten some deals done. She's incapable of doing deals. She's a nasty, vindictive, horrible person." Schumer was a jerk and a disaster. Republicans who disagreed with Trump on the tariffs were fools. But as an untalented, incapable, nasty, vindictive, horrible, nervous, disgusting person who is also a disaster … Pelosi certainly wins the war for Trump mind share.
If there’s anyone who threatens a bigger invasion of Trump’s empty beachhead, it’s former special counsel Robert Mueller. Or, as Trump said, "They thought their good friend Bobby Mueller was going to give them a great report." Mueller … wait, “Bobby” Mueller, also got called a “fool” and his staff got the now bog standard description of “angry Democrats.” Though in his fury, Trump did seem to forget the right number since he started with thirteen then amended it with “then he added five more.”
But the nadir of all this nadirity has to be when Trump admitted that he knew it was wrong of him to be criticizing his political opponents when on a state visit overseas, saying “If I made any statement about anybody it would be like a big headline—why would he do that when he's overseas?" If he made any statement. If. This little declaration came after all the nasties, disgracefuls, and disasters. Though it’s hard to dip it out from the stream of unselfconsciousness, Trump said this in response to a question that included something about Pelosi’s statement saying she rather see him in prison than impeached. And maybe Trump was paying so little attention that he thought Pelosi had said that while overseas … which she didn’t.
She didn’t. But Trump did. Over, and over, and over. And it really should make big headlines. But it won’t. Because “Donald Trump is an ass” isn’t news to anyone.