Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:47 pm
After watching Donald Trump orchestrate a witch-hunt first against President Barack Obama over his birtherism nonsense, and then against Hillary Clinton over bogus email claims during the presidential campaigns, it is amusing now to watch Donald Trump cry that he is the victim of a witch-hunt.
And that is precisely what he did when word came out that the Kremlin may know some things about Donald Trump that force his compliance:
FAKE NEWS – A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017
The man who so depended upon fake news to get himself elected – and who sent out so much of it himself – is now crying #FakeNews:
'BuzzFeed Runs Unverifiable Trump-Russia Claims' #FakeNews https://t.co/d6daCFZHNh
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 11, 2017
Trump doesn’t like it when the shoe is on the other foot. He reveled in dispensing invented facts and lies but even the hint that he might be the Kremlin’s stooge has him collapsing into paroxysms of hypocrisy. In the process, as The Washington Post‘s Mark Berman notes with some amusement, Trump managed to misquote the Kremlin statement:
President-elect Trump cites Russia's dismissal of the new allegations, misquotes the Kremlin statement pic.twitter.com/AY2ra8ftrI
— Mark Berman (@markberman) January 11, 2017
Of course, they WOULD say that, wouldn’t they? Of course, if it is true they will deny it, just as Trump himself regularly denies things that are true. If Trump knew it was true he would deny it too.
Trump is more than willing to throw around reckless hints of impropriety about others, and of all the people you can imagine, has the least right to cry witch hunt when at last, those rumors circle around himself instead.
There is some irony too, as CNBC’s John Harwood points out, that what we witnessed was “President-elect quoting Russia to make the case that allegations involving Russian influence are untrue.”
Nothing new there: Trump has already shown that the Kremlin is his favorite source of information.
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