Political Irony

Of course Donald Trump is attacking Bob Woodward’s book. What else would we expect?

In fact, the strangest thing about this is that the book announcement caught Trump off guard initially (even though he knew about the book and that it would be negative). But after a couple of days, Trump eventually did what he always does, and tweeted:

Isn’t it a shame that someone can write an article or book, totally make up stories and form a picture of a person that is literally the exact opposite of the fact, and get away with it without retribution or cost. Don’t know why Washington politicians don’t change libel laws?

First of all, if the libel laws were changed to make it easier to respond to libel, Trump himself would end up being sued constantly for all the lies he has tweeted about people. If you don’t believe me, read the immediate responses to that tweet.

What takes this to the level of being a hypocritical lie is that before he was president, Trump berated the Obama administration for attacking Bob Woodward, tweeting “Only the Obama WH can get away with attacking Bob Woodward.” But now, Trump seems to think he can get away with attacking Woodward. Sad!

On top of that, Woodward already released an audio recording of a phone call from just a month ago, where Trump tells Woodward “I would’ve loved to have spoken to you [for the book] … I think you’ve always been fair.” But a month later, he claims that Woodward totally makes up stories?

And of course, we now have the NY Times op-ed that corroborates what Woodward says in his book. As if that weren’t enough, within hours additional senior administration officials reached out to Axios to validate the substance of the op-ed, saying that the author stole the words right out of their mouths. These people claimed that there are “dozens and dozens” of people in the Trump administration that feel the same way.

Has this become a full-blown coup? If not an actual coup, this is certainly a constitutional crisis. The constitution has tools for removing bad presidents: impeachment and the 25th amendment, but a group of administration officials (who were never elected) secretly subverting the president? That is a constitutional crisis.

In response to the anonymous op-ed, Trump tweeted “TREASON?”. Someone needs to inform him that verbally attacking the president isn’t treason. If it were, then Trump himself would be guilty for all the things he said about president Obama.

Trevor Noah does an excellent job of summing up why all this should scare the shit out of us: