Amazing someone with a lifelong ambition of being a mafia don never learned to just stfu when you’re doing crime.
Spewing whatever is on his mind in any given moment never got him in trouble before, so he thought it’s just a thing he can keep doing.
If this is true, then I really don’t see any way that people could possibly defend his actions. It looks like he admitted, on tape, knowing he was being recorded, with three different witnesses, that he had classified information that he had not declassified, that he KNEW IT WAS STILL CLASSIFIED, then SHOWED THEM THE DOCUMENTS. On tape.
I really don’t know how anyone can compare this to the actions of any other politicians, this is just utterly insane. Hillary Clinton didn’t knowingly and deliberately try to show other people classified information, at best she stored some classified information improperly, at worst her improper storage may have led to people who weren’t cleared to see it to see it. And either way she coorperated with investigators at every step of the way, endured hours of congressional testimony, and didn’t try to hide it or delay the investigation.
And I also think that it’s fair to treat the President and Cabinet members differently than other people with security clearance when it comes to the improper handling and storage of classified materials. The president is constantly handling classified information, on a daily basis, anywhere he works. He handles so much classified information that I think it becomes nearly impossible for him to actually keep track of what he has that is and isn’t classified. All it takes is one page of a file being removed from its folder and put somewhere else by mistake- and the president handles hundreds of such pages per day. And, of course, notes about a classified document or discussion are by default also classified- and the president is constantly taking notes to keep up with everything. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect the President to be 100% perfect with this, they expect their aides and assistants to help to do it for them. But even with that mistakes will be made. The president handles more classified information in a day than most people with clearance will handle in months. The same goes for cabinet members and the Vice President.
The important thing is that when other presidents have discovered classified information in their belongings after their term expires, they have immediately contacted the current executive, told them about it, and asked them to double check that they don’t have more. I don’t think it would be good to prosecute, say, Mike Pence or Joe Biden for this, because they cooperated with the investigation and the nature of their office makes it likely things will slip through the cracks.
But if they start showing off the classified info they found and bragging that it’s classified to people without clearance? Throw the book at them, that’s 100% crossing the line.
I tend to view that Trump’s power, as is Fox News & Newsmaxx, is doing as many “Big Lie” in front of people as they can. They deliberately go out of their way to contradict reality. It’s an exploit of the human brain. I think at a young age these people learned how to listen what really shocks other people and they know how to stun people around them with odd behaviors and mannerisms. Their talent does not lie in accomplishment with earnest sincerity, it’s in convincing human beings of outlandish things.
I think it’s something different, tbh. I think that most people feel that something is wrong with the world we live in. They see inequality and injustice happening, they recognize that their entire life is going to be spent being exploited by companies and not taking home much pay, they recognize that none of that is fair… but they have been taught from day 1 that the system is fine, that the individual needs to do better for themselves and “not blame other people.”
So instead of pointing and saying “hey this whole capitalism thing seems to be really fucking over a large segment of the population, can we maybe not do that?” they have to find ANY other outlet to offload the crushing hopelessness they feel onto- and rightwing politicians give them that outlet. They direct that hopelessness onto whatever boogieman the rightwing leadership wants- and use the language they were taught from birth to accept about “individualism” and “hard work” to make them think that those people over there are the problem, not the system, and if we just remove them from the system then everything will be fine!
