#DimensionTrump | #WhatTheyVotedFor
Somewhere between the joke about how conservatives in general cannot tell the difference, particular observations about the breathtaking naïveté we are supposed to believe about the Trump administration—
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway on Thursday dodged questions about the existence of possible recordings of conversations between President Trump and former FBI Director James Comey.
“I can’t comment on that,” Conway said on Fox News before moving to discuss other portions of Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier in the day.
Pressed twice more about the existence of possible tapes, Conway responded, “I can’t comment on that and actually the president himself has said he won’t comment any further on that.”
(Byrnes)
—we might find echoes of Sen. Martin Heinrich’s (D-NM) point to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats when the latter decided he simply did not feel like answering: “You realize how simple it would be to simply say no, that never happened?”
The obvious simile would be that pleading the Fifth does not work if one answers the innocence questions and ducks the guilt; with President Trump having raised the issue himself, it is, functionally speaking, a bit more difficult to justify ducking the question.
And, really, pretenses of naïveté being what they are, there comes a point at which saying, You’re doing it wrong! is an act of faith in the blind chaos of futility; this is the White House, and there are some things they just should be capable of knowing for their own selves, already. They should not always require explanations after the fact; their boundless ignorance ought to be disqualifying, either for the fact that they are indeed so dangerously stupid, or being so dangerously stupid as to put on such pretenses in the first place.
There is a reason nobody will say so; to the other, we really cannot rule out that latter. After all, the fact of something being untrue does not prevent the Trump administration from asserting it, anyway. Why this? In the spirit of the “epic own”, it seems fair enough to wonder if the White House is just trolling everyone.
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Image notes: Top — President Donald Trump (Photo by Carlos Barria/Reuters) Middle — Kellyanne Conway (Photo by Gage Skidmore) Bottom — Detail of cartoon by Matt Bors, via Daily Kos, 31 January 2017.
Byrnes, Jesse. “Conway dodges on existence of Trump-Comey ‘tapes'”. 8 June 2017.
C-SPAN. “Senators Express Frustration Over National Security Officials’ Answers on Russia Probe”. 8 June 2017.
Trump, Donald J. “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Twitter. 12 May 2017
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