It’s been a busy couple of weeks for President Donald Trump. He disappeared for six days with no explanation. He took the world’s most expensive taxpayer-funded nap at Game 3 of the NBA Finals. He announced that the war with Iran will be won in two weeks because it exists in the same temporal anomaly as his health care plan: always two weeks away but also never coming.
The highlight, if you can call it that, came last Sunday when Trump was interviewed by Kristen Welker of NBC News for an episode of “Meet the Press.”
The interview was fairly disastrous, but to Trump’s credit, Welker used the cunning underhanded technique of “remembering things Trump said previously and then asking him about them.”
When she called him out on his campaign promise that he was the anti-war candidate and would keep America out of needless wars, Trump replied, “First of all, I didn’t guarantee no war.”
He did, of course. In fact, in his November 2024 victory speech, he said, “We had no wars. Four years, we had no wars. … They said, ‘He will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars.” You can’t get much clearer than that, especially if you possess a vocabulary appropriate for a Scholastic First Little Readers book.
The interview took a turn for the worse when Trump trotted out his shopworn accusation that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from him. Welker pushed back, pointing out that whatever evidence Trump may or may not have has never been presented in a court of law.
Trump said that the election was obviously stolen, just as the California Governor’s election is currently being stolen because it’s taking too long to count the votes (California is notoriously slow when it comes to vote counting because they send mail-in ballots to every voter and the process is time-consuming).
“They’re crooked just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked,” Trump said. “And Meet the Press is crooked. … You’re either crooked or you’re stupid. … You play right into their hands with this stuff. You know that these elections are rigged.”
Trump went on to continually cut Welker off, ramble about how there’s a ton of evidence that every election that doesn’t favor Republicans is rigged, and then ramble about how everyone but him is crooked. He was red in the face, as angry as I can ever recall seeing him, before cutting the interview short and leaving.
Trump did the same thing to Lesley Stahl back in October of 2020 when she pushed back on his lies. It’s become his signature move: make an outrageous claim, and then when someone asks for evidence, insist that the evidence is obvious and they’re a big stupid idiot and a bad person for even questioning the existence of the evidence, and then angrily waddle away.
There are two points to consider here. The first point is that Trump and his cronies have had six years to offer evidence that the 2020 election was stolen. In the aftermath of the election, they filed 62 lawsuits over election fraud and every one of them was thrown out due to a lack of evidence.
Are we to believe that in 2020, the Democrats were able to steal the election from Trump without leaving a single shred of evidence, and then when 2024 rolled around, they just forgot to do it again? Are we to believe that a party that seems hell-bent on squandering goodwill and fumbling easy victories managed to pull off some kind of Ocean’s 11 election heist?
But the greater point is this:
Imagine if you had a coworker like Donald Trump, or a father-in-law like Donald Trump, or, God forbid, a father like Donald Trump. Imagine if you were connected to a person like that in some way, a man who lies as easily as breathing, and the moment you call him out on it, he resorts to personal insults and calls you a crooked idiot and flees the room.
You would not think he was a strong man. You would not think he was a respectable man. You would not think he was a smart man.
No, you would HATE him. You would hate his weakness, his cowardice, his fragility and emotional outbursts. You would avoid him like the plague.
And yet, there are millions of people in this country who can watch Trump turn red with rage while shouting the same tired lies at a woman (it’s always a woman) as he flails his way through yet another bout of narcissistic collapse and think, “Yes, that’s my guy.”
But maybe I’m wrong, and maybe the evidence of election fraud is coming.
I assume in two weeks.
Thanks, Ben. I have felt sorry for his children. He is the product of his dysfunctional grandfather and father. His children didn’t have a chance to become whole, moral, compassionate humans. There is no authentic love visible. Then power hungry people used him to try to take over our nation.
We must continue to speak out, resist, and vote to build a new, “more perfect union.”