Now that Donald Trump has been caught dead to rights bragging, on tape, as he showed classified national security secrets to aides and a pair of ghostwriters inside his Bedminster, New Jersey, club and vacation home, Trump's still-loyal sycophants have to come up with brand new excuses for why their coup-attempting orange-hued god-king now caught giddily violating the Espionage Act for funsies is still not guilty.
Leave it to the Newsmax team to come up with the new defense.
Look, everybody knows that Donald Trump is a pathological liar. The man lies about everything, all the time! He lies so much you can't possibly believe a single word that comes out of his mouth! Therefore, Trump is lying and he was actually holding up, uh, an old People magazine. That he said was classified. That he said he could have declassified, as president, but could no longer declassify now.
Far be it from me to dispute the crack news team that took time away from uncovering Martian-owned pizza restaurants or whatever the hell they had to break away from in order to cover the new Trump news, but it might behoove us all to remember that special counsel Jack Smith and his team have this recording because they got it from one of the participants. It was almost certainly one of the ghostwriters who was working on former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' supposed autobiography before they landed in this particular soup. All of these participants laid eyes on the document Trump was waving in their direction, and they can and probably already have told prosecutors exactly what they saw.
None of these people are going to commit perjury for Donald Trump when they all know everybody else in the room saw the same thing they did and will say so. The Newsmax "well he was probably just lying about it being a classified document because he's a lying liar who lies about that stuff" excuse is good for a fake news segment or two, but prosecutors and the grand jury almost certainly already know, from eyewitness testimony, the type of document being waved around.
That excuse died long before Newsmax ever put voice to it, but you can't fault Trump's supporters for immediately insisting that no, their guy is just such an infamous liar that you really can't trust a single thing that comes out of his mouth. It's not clear why you'd want to put a person like that back in the White House, even after he closed out the first go-round with the nation’s very first attempted coup. But that's just who they are.
What might be just as interesting is that former congressman Devin Nunes himself resurfaced to put some spin on the new recording. Nunes is ostensibly still the CEO of "Trump Media," but it's anyone's guess as to what his actual job is because he's been so quiet for so long. But nope, Nunes resurfaced and was scrambling to do damage control.
He didn't do it well, mind you. But he tried.
Ha, says Nunes: Trump was merely showing off classified military plans for striking Iran in order to prove to a gaggle of collected nobodies that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Gen. Mark Milley was woke!
If that doesn't make any sense to you, don't worry. The target audience here is viewers who believe Martian-owned pizza restaurants are a front for taking away your gas stoves and putting vaccines in your Raisin Bran. If you're not about 50 layers deep into the lore of the Newsmax Extended Universe, you aren't going to get why calling someone "woke" means that Republicans can now violate the Espionage Act.
Republished with permission from Daily Kos.
