Last updated on July 18th, 2023 at 11:33 am
Donald Trump held his first press conference since House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry, and he was unable to offer a credible defense for why he pressured a foreign leader to interfere in an American election.
Instead, Trump talked about his Electoral College victory and attacked Hillary Clinton for not visiting Wisconsin in 2016.
“Why should the American people, then, be comfortable with an American president asking a foreign leader for information about an American citizen?” one reporter asked Trump.
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What came next from the president was a rambling dose of word salad in which he stumbled into a rant about the 2016 election.
Video:
Trump was asked why the American people should be okay with him pressuring Ukraine for dirt on Joe Biden. His response was to attack Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign strategy. #ctl #p2 #impeachment pic.twitter.com/LrMQpB4byd
— PoliticusUSA (@politicususa) September 25, 2019
Trump said:
Well, I think you can look at your senators and you can look at Biden and you can at all these other people. But what we’re looking for is corruption. An investigation started called the Russian witch hunt, affectionately, and it was a total phony scam. It was set up by people within the government to try and stop somebody from getting elected, and after that — after that person, namely me, won and convincingly won at 306 to 223 in the Electoral College. Which, by the way, when you run a race if you’re running electoral, you know, if you go by the college, electoral college, that’s a much different race than running popular vote. And it’s like the 100-yard dash or the mile. You train differently. And I can’t help it that my opponent didn’t go to Wisconsin and should have gone much more to Michigan and Pennsylvania and other places, but that’s the way it is. We won an election convincingly. Convincingly.
Trump doesn’t have a leg to stand on
The “transcript” of Trump’s call with the president of Ukraine that the White House released on Wednesday was far more damning than most observers expected it to be, and this is just what the president wanted the public to see.
What hasn’t been released to the public is the whistleblower complaint, which will likely be even worse than the “transcript” put out by the White House today. It’s why Trump’s team has been working overtime to block its release and damage the credibility of the whistleblower.
Ultimately, the president doesn’t have a leg to stand on as this scandal threatens to bury his presidency. His deflated performance at the UN on Wednesday seemed to indicate that even he knows this.
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Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
