He delivered a "fiery (AP) speech against the Special Counsel report, claimed his memory was fine (while identifying Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, president of Egypt, as the president of Mexico), flatly denied revealing top secret info, “I did not share classified information. I did not share it with my ghostwriter.”, and insinuated that he had deliberately stone-walled Hur's team on his son Beau's death: “I don’t need anyone, anyone, to remind me when he passed away. How the hell dare he raise that. Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, was it any of their damn business?”
Now, there is a psychological defense mechanism that kicks in when we react as strongly as I did today initially to the shock at 4:12 pm. I recognize the defense mechanism. You're so shocked, and I was so shocked by the report, and so taken by surprise, that your second reaction is instinctively to protect against the blow by minimizing it. "Ah, that didn't hurt too much." That is my self-aware caveat to the following.
I liked the president's angry retort. It showed he processed the information and the damage of the report accurately and he responded forcefully. If, as he categorically stated tonight, he did not share Top Secret intel with his ghostwriter, than Hur's team suffers a body blow. His retort tonight did contradict the characterizations of his mental state and memory.
He is a self-described, thus self-aware, "gaffe machine." I can think of no reasonable, generous take on mixing Abdel Fattah al-Sisi with AndrΓ©s Manuel LΓ³pez Obrador but it is, to me, less concerning than his recent comments at two fundraisers that he had communed with the dead Helmut Kohl (deceased 2017) and Francoise Mitterand (dod 1996) in 2021. And I had the thought that concerns about his age and mental acuity, which, I confess, I saw no, absolutely no, evidence of in the 2020 campaign when he debated Trumpie thrice and wiped the floor with him, and in his presidency, were already "baked in" to public perception of him. How many voters will be swayed by the Hur report I don't know. Some surely and that may be too many. But Trumpie's support has only increased and hardened with his indictments and his verbal gaffes (he thinks he's running against Obama (okay, but he has long been obsessed with him), he thinks Biden (or Obama) could start World War II, not three; he said Nikki Haley was in charge of security Jan. 6; magnets don't work in water. Trumpie said earlier that of all the bad things he has said about the president, "He's not too old!" So that's my psychologically predictable back-peddle to the shock to my system.
The most, to me sickening, part of the Hur report was that the president's faulty and in some cases absent, memory was a significant party in the declination to charge. The argument is a simple one: either you do remember and lied and fooled us, in which case we will charge you when you leave office, or you didn't lie and your memory really is as solid as swiss cheese, in which case you should be nowhere near the football with the nuclear codes. Hur boxed him in and Biden has no way out.
The reality is that Joe Biden is going to continue to run for reelection. And if Trumpie is fool enough to debate him again, the president will kick his ass again. That's my prediction.
This is a shocking blow to the president and to his campaign and his supporters, including me, but for the reasons above, it reasonably may not affect the outcome.
And with that blues, reds, purples, and fascist browns, I wish you enough of a good night.
