Amazingly enough, he posed the same defense for Vladimir Putin. He cannot have ordered any meddling in the 2016 election because he continues to protest his innocence.
You see, guilty people admit their guilt. Always and every time! If you just keep asking them, every guilty person will eventually admit their guilty, so you know a person must be innocent if that person just continues to deny any wrongdoing! Who needs any fancy interrogation, forensics, or any of that stuff? Just keep asking, "did you do it?" Eventually, all guilty people will crack under the insurmountable pressure to admit guilt when posed with that simple, four-word question. Roy Moore, Vladimir Putin... They must be innocent or they would have cracked by now. Donald Trump has solved the age-old problem of how to interrogate suspects. Any day now, the FBI, CIA, and all police departments will be adopting the Donald Trump interrogation technique, and it will become admissible in any court.
Al Franken? See, now, he admitted it. Guilty. Charlie Rose? Same deal.
Hillary Clinton? Obviously, Trump must think she is innocent of everything because she has never admitted guilt for anything, right?
Anyway, this model does serve a purpose. Trump should be considered innocent of accusations because he protests his innocence. There is a startling level of consistency here for Trump (except for that HRC thing), but at its core, this is basic authoritarianism.
I haven't written much about authoritarianism here, and I probably should do so more. Legal procedures exist in order to standardize the application of the law so that everyone is subject to the same rules.
Yeah, that doesn't happen, but that's the theory.
Truth needs to matter. At the core of what we call "the authoritarian personality," though, is willingness to defer to authority based on valuing strength. Whoever is perceived as strong is perceived as right. This goes back to a controversial book called, um... The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. The research itself had a lot of flaws, but the concepts have aged well, in a lot of ways.
The critical point for today is that, for those of an authoritarian persuasion, truth is whatever is asserted by whoever is perceived as strong because they'll defer to Dear Leader. Why can Trump get away with lying brazenly? To be blunt, the same reason that every other demagog in history could. The brazenness is what sells it to those of an authoritarian bent.
You have to be
Trump has been accused of sexual assault by a dozen women and bragged on tape of his ability to "grab them by the pussy" and get away with it. You have to be
There is plenty of irony here, in that Trump is such a pathetic weakling. He has the thinnest skin of any politician ever, yet he preens as though he is the paragon of strength because he talks petty shit about people. To borrow and paraphrase from Mike Cooley, he's a loud-mouthed punk. I've scraped tougher off my shoe. Yet, a bunch of
Anyway... have you read that Flynn's lawyers aren't talking to Trump's lawyers anymore?
I wonder what Trump will say about that? What will you have to be to believe him?
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