Rhetorical fusillades in all directions
Trump has sent an idiotic “letter” to Speaker Pelosi, to underline how stupid and uncomprehending he really is.
Over six pages, on White House letterhead, the president piles adjectives like cords of wood, fires rhetorical fusillades in all directions and invokes the judgement of the American people, the nation’s founding fathers and history itself.
As if we hadn’t been judging him all along. He’s given us bales of evidence, and we’ve made our judgement: he’s a disaster in almost every category one can think of. (Possible exceptions: he’s probably not a literal pollutant; he hasn’t so far burned down the White House.)
Here are five choice lines from a president whose capacity for the extraordinary and unprecedented is ever-expanding.
“You have cheapened the importance of the very ugly word, impeachment!”
Heh, yes, that’s a good one. Here is this very ugly word, and you have cheapened it! He forgot what he was saying four words in, and apparently nobody around him feels safe enough to fix it.
“Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying ‘I pray for the president’, when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in the negative sense.”
And my rattle. You broke my rattle!!!
“You are turning a policy disagreement between two branches of government into an impeachable offence – it is no more legitimate than the Executive Branch charging members of Congress with crimes for lawful exercise of legislative power.”
Obviously someone else wrote that bit, but it’s still bullshit. It’s in no sense national “policy” to try to bribe and extort vulnerable allies to do the president personal favors related to the next election. Nope. That is not anyone’s policy, it’s just straight-up Mafia behavior but from the seat of government.
“I write this letter to you for the purpose of history and to put my thoughts on a permanent and indelible record. One hundred years from now, when people look back at this affair, I want them to understand it, and learn from it, so that it can never happen to another president again.”
He wants to put his thoughts on an indelible record. What thoughts? He doesn’t have any thoughts. He has reactions, rages, eruptions – thoughts don’t come into it.
It really is the most extraordinary letter. Parts of it read like someone with a passing acquaintance with English, and some of it is incoherent ranting. Like you, I think there was more than one editor of this letter. My guess is, he dictated a whole mess to some poor typist who then had to wrangle some kind of sense out of it. Mulvaney or someone similar probably edited it, added some of the more coherent language and set it front of Trump.
Cue more raging, insisting some of the incomprehensible crap be reinserted or maybe all new incomprehensible crap, who knows. Eventually they get to a point of something he will sign (it wouldn’t be more than a few rounds of editing given his short attention span). Then, without even a flash of embarrassment or shame by those who really ought to know better, this monstrosity is thrust upon history.
Poor history, being grabbed by the pussy like that. But he’s a star, so he can do it.
Oh, excellent punch line.
Sure. You know. The negative sense. Like, when you say something, but you mean the opposite thing. Everyone has always referred to this as the “negative sense.”
Oh, and he wants to make sure that people learn from this in 100 years so they don’t make this mistake again. So… everyone between now and 100 years from now is free to make this mistake again?
He is really is a remarkable mind.
If this were a student’s assignment, I would flag it for plagiarism immediately. The abrupt switches in tone and sentence sophistication would stand out as probably cut-and-pasted from an online source, SparkNotes nine times out of ten. Here, of course, it marks the passages where Trump’s various lackeys edited it as much as their childish-ranter-in-chief would allow.
But the thing about the letter that offends me most is that it will be effective. It may have been sent TO Nancy Pelosi, but it was written FOR the consumption of Trump’s increasingly gullible voter base, who will eat up the passages of angry ranting written at a third-grade-at-most level, and be citing the letter as gospel henceforth.
I, too, would like this to become part of the indelible record (I almost wrote inedible; Freudian slip, the president often makes me want to vomit). I want to make sure no one in 100 years (or in any year in between, or after) makes the same mistake. It isn’t the President I hope never has to be put through this again (no one worried about that with Clinton, though). It’s the country.
A permanent and indelible record!
Eructations.
FactCheck.org did a detailed analysis of the letter and produced this annotated version.
https://transcripts.factcheck.org/trump-letter-to-pelosi-on-impeachment/