CT Blue

I was just checking in at Crooks & Liars, and ran across this post, in which I learn that a Fox News host, Steve Hilton, of whose existence I had no prior knowledge (I do so thank the non-existent god that I don’t own a TV), is urging Trump to stuff not only Giuliani under the bus, but also Joe diGenova, Victoria Toensing, and John Solomon, the last person in that list being someone of whom, as a non-Fox viewer, I have also been blissfully unaware. He is, apparently, a regular Fox talking head who re-spouts Giuliani/diGenova/Toensing conspiracy theories.

I won’t rehash the contents of the post, but I will observe that poor Mr. Hilton is forced to tie himself in knots to make his argument, which boils down to an assertion that the four under-bus dwellers are grifters who are grifting the genius. In order to make his case, he has to explicitly assert that the entire Ukrainian conspiracy theory is ….. you know …. that stuff that comes out of male bovines, thus undercutting one of the genius’s other defenses. On top of that, he must implicitly concede that Trump was stupid enough to believe those conspiracy theories, in spite of what all of his intelligence officials have told him.

So, the defense comes down to this: Trump is a stupid man (despite being a genius) who, despite being a champion grifter himself, can’t spot a grift when he’s the victim, who is more sinned against than sinning (though, again the implication is that he did sin) and who, although he did commit criminal acts, did so because he was tricked into doing them and had no idea that what he was doing was wrong.

Now that last part is probably true. I worked with a client once, who, I was convinced, couldn’t tell right from wrong. He would suggest doing something inappropriate, and we would explain to him that what he was suggesting was wrong, and he would accept what we told him, though he clearly couldn’t see why it was wrong. Trump is like that, which is why he needs people around him to tell him when he is doing something wrong. Unlike my long ago client, however, he doesn’t tolerate being told he is wrong, and so he has, over the course of the past three years, gotten rid of anyone around him who will tell him he is wrong.

This “he was an innocent dupe” defense, is, of course, only one of the many defenses the Republicans and/or Fox have floated in the past several months. All have one thing in common: the implicit presumption that the genius is no genius. More than that, he never was one!

Addendum: Added bonus to anyone who can spot the Gilbert & Sullivan reference in the last paragraph. I couldn’t find an appropriate link.

Addendum the Second: Relevant to the foregoing discussion, Josh Marshall complains:

I just heard – to my great chagrin and distress – one of my favorite CNN hosts say “clearly President Trump doesn’t think he did anything wrong.” Not only is this not “clear” it is almost certainly false. We shouldn’t say this because it’s not true. He certainly knows he did something wrong. He simply doesn’t care.

It may be slightly inconsistent with my previous statements, but I don’t think he knows he did something wrong, because in his worldview, it can’t be wrong if he did it. It is simply a form of mental illness.