Even Trump's most die-hard minions struggle to defend him anymore
President Trump has always struggled to avoid saying the quiet part out loud. From lauding “very fine people on both sides” in the Charlottesville clash between white nationalists and counterprotesters in 2017 to admitting that he fired FBI Director James B. Comey over “this Russia thing,” Trump again and again has left his staff scrambling to explain that the president didn’t really mean what he said, that the media set him up or (when all else fails) that he was just “joking.”
One might have expected the pattern to change, though, given that his White House and campaign staffs are more uniformly right-wing die-hards than ever, including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who used to chair the tea party-sympathetic Freedom Caucus in the House, and new campaign adviser Steve Cortes, who thinks Trump’s response to Black Lives Matter should have been more “fascist.” But on the Sunday talk shows, these would-be rhetorical bomb-throwers have found themselves stuck defusing just as many land mines as their predecessors.
One walkback involved Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.). On Thursday, Trump falsely suggested that she “doesn’t meet the requirements” to be vice president, referring to a widely denounced op-ed that argued that the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants might not be a citizen by birth. In a news conference Saturday, Trump tried a partial walkback by saying his campaign wouldn’t be “pursuing” the issue, but still declined to state Harris was eligible.
On Sunday, White House representatives blamed the media for the controversy. “Y’all have spent more time on it than anybody in the White House has talking about this,” Meadows told CNN. Cortes insisted on “Fox News Sunday” that “members of the media … are trying to create a controversy that simply doesn’t exist.” But unlike Trump, when asked whether Harris was eligible to be vice president, both simply — and correctly — responded, “Yes.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/08/16/even-trumps-most-die-hard-minions-struggle-defend-him-anymore/
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