Still undecided on whether the Mueller report is exculpatory or full of lies, Donald Trump inadvertently recalled the evidence against him Monday when he half-heartedly promised that his re-election campaign wouldn’t be quite so . . . collusion-y this time around. “I don’t need it,” the president explained during a White House press conference with illiberal strongman Viktor Orbán of Hungary, insisting falsely that he “never did” use any foreign dirt in 2016.
“All I need is the opponents I’m looking at,” he continued, perhaps forgetting the time he implored Russia to hack his opponent’s e-mail, which Russia promptly did. “I’m liking what I see.” In the same breath, Trump said he “would certainly agree” to not use information from foreign countries in the next election.
Hilariously, Trump’s spur-of-the-moment integrity comes just a few days after his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, canceled a controversial trip to Ukraine, where he had planned to push Kiev to reopen an investigation involving Joe Biden’s son Hunter. Giuliani had initially defended the trip as “nothing illegal,” which even Republicans seemed to agree was a low bar, and later repeatedly insisted that Biden deserved to have the Ukrainian government breathing down his neck. “Explain to me why Biden shouldn’t be investigated if his son got millions from a Russian-loving crooked Ukrainian oligarch while He was VP and point man for Ukraine,” Giuliani rage-tweeted at Rep. Jerry Nadler. Could it be that Rudy’s boss, Donald Trump, is taking the higher road?
Though he could simply have been free-associating when he said that he would accept no foreign help, Trump and the White House are quite confident that he will win re-election on his own—as long as Democrats manage to tear themselves apart in the primary first. As my colleague Gabe Sherman reported shortly before the Mueller report’s release, the Trump campaign playbook is premised on a fair amount of liberal-on-leftist bloodshed. So far, Trump bogeyman “Amtrak Joe” Biden is leading the polls, making West Wing aides and Republican strategists nervous. But the president is banking on Democratic overreach—in Congress and on the campaign trail—to unnerve swing voters and solidify his base. “All they’re doing is trying to win an election in 2020,” Trump gloated on Monday, referring to all the investigations that House Democrats have launched. “And I think we’re in very good shape.”
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