Trump responds with usual mix of self-pity, lies

The biggest challenge in following the antics of Donald Trump has always been that he lies so frequently, and so shamelessly, you can’t keep up.

Once a few of those lies seep through the cultural cracks, with great assistance from Fox News, Newsmax and the rest of the Trump Propaganda Machine, you can’t get rid of them.

This past week, Trump became the first former president in this country’s history to be indicted on federal charges. The 37count indictment cites Trump for detention of national defense information and conspiracy to obstruct justice.

In his patented fashion, Trump immediately issued a four-minute Truth Social video denouncing the indictment, proclaiming his innocence and insisting that the United States is capsizing without his steady hand to guide it. The following day, he called special counsel Jack Smith a “deranged lunatic.”

Apart from the historic weight of the occasion, there was nothing particularly special about Trump’s video.

It was just the latest iteration of his persecution-complex blues; a stale mix of narcissism, selfpity, paranoia, resentment and self-aggrandizement (including multiple brags about the number of votes he received in a 2020 election that he falsely continues to insist was “taken” from him).

A happy warrior this guy ain’t.

Early on, Trump complains that with this indictment, the Department of Justice “goes after a popular president.”

In fact, Trump is the only president in the history of the Gallup poll who never had a single day in which his approval rating reached as high as 50 percent. He lost the 2020 popular vote by 7 million votes, and his presence as the Republican standard bearer doomed his party to disappointing midterm performances in both 2018 and 2022.

But the big issue here is not that Trump harbors delusions about his popularity. It’s that he carries the warped notion that popularity should put someone above the law and make them immune from prosecution.

Later in the video, Trump says the indictment is part of a sevenyear deep-state crusade against him, initiated by Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation into Russian government interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Trump states that the “Mueller hoax” was “set up by Hillary Clinton and Democrats.”

In fact, Mueller received his special counsel appointment from Rod Rosenstein, a Republican whom Trump had hired to serve as deputy attorney general.

In his May 17, 2017, letter appointing Mueller, Rosenstein authorized Mueller to investigate

“any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald

Trump.” That’s what Mueller’s team did, and they produced indictments against 34 individuals, including Trump associates Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and Michael Flynn.

In his Thursday video, Trump also accused Democratic President Joe Biden of “weaponizing the Justice Department.”

It’s a popular gripe from Trump’s GOP sycophants. They’d prefer to ignore the fact that this investigation was carried out by an independent special counsel and that the indictment came from a grand jury in the Southern District of Florida.

Say this for Trump: He knows a thing or two about weaponizing the Justice Department.

During his second 2016 presidential debate with Clinton, he warned her that if he won the election, he would push for a federal investigation into her use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state.

“If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” Trump said.

Later that night, he told Clinton that if he were president, “You’d be in jail.”

Also, in December

2020, Trump pressured Jeffrey Rosen, his acting attorney general, to weaponize the power of the Justice Department to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump loyalists tend to ignore those details when they talk about him.

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick tweeted Friday, “If this type of continued targeting can happen to a former U.S. President, it can happen to any citizen.”

That’s true. It can happen to any citizen who takes sensitive national security documents to their home and obstructs efforts by the National Archives and Records Administration to retrieve those documents.

It can happen to any citizen who attempts to use the levers of government to overturn the results of a presidential election and incites a mob to go to the U.S. Capitol and intimidate the members of Congress out of certifying the election.

It can happen to any citizen who makes secret payments in the final weeks of an election campaign to a porn star to buy her silence about an affair.

It can happen to any citizen who, according to the testimony of their own former legal fixer, engages in a pattern of tax and bank fraud.

If you’ve done all those things, watch out. You, too, might be targeted.

Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Press file photo Former President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago after being arraigned on April 4. On Friday, he posted a four-minute video on his Truth Social site.