Former-President Donald Trump is on tape admitting he was in possession of a classified document, knew it was classified, knew it was illegal for him to have it, knew he could have declassified it but had not done so, and yet was going to show it to a third party anyway just to prove a point.
Trump has admitted his guilt. The two most prominent questions that remain are what his punishment will be and whether Republican primary voters care, as they should.
REPUBLICAN PRIMARY: BIG TENT OR BIG TOP?
The context of the conversation, revealed in the Department of Justice's indictment released Friday afternoon, is a meeting at Mar-a-Lago between Trump, an unnamed staffer, and a writer working on a book about Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' time in the White House. Trump is trying to help Meadows prove his claim that then-Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley had pressed the president to invade Iran, not the other way around. To support this claim, Trump displays the written plan of attack Gen. Milley produced for him concerning Iran.
"Look what I found, this was [Milley's] plan of attack, read it and just show. it's interesting," Trump said. "I just found it, isn't that amazing? This totally wins my case," Trump continued. "Except it's like highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this."
That alone should convict Trump. But it gets worse.
"See as president I could have declassified it," Trump goes on. "Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret." To which an aide replies, "Yeah. Now we have a problem."
Yeah. Trump certainly has a problem. The evidence in the indictment looks very bad, but has to be proved in court. But even before meeting that exacting standard, it surely should indict him in the court of public opinion. He is manifestly unfit to be president. Republican voters must realize that the rest of the public will understand this and turn away from him. Thus, nominating Trump for a return to the presidency invites defeat and jhumiliation for the only party from which conservative governance is possible.
Republican must dump Trump and his glaring incompetence. He had four years as president to dismantle the Deep State, and by his own admission failed in the task. Now he claims he only needs six months to do what he couldn't do in four. He lost the House, lost the Senate, lost Georgia and he never came close to building the wall. He fraternizes with pornstars and despite claiming he hires only the best people, he routinely denigrates almost everyone who served him.
Trump may have pulled off an upset win against Hillary Clinton in 2016, but he ran behind almost every statewide Republican candidate, and he ended up with a lower percentage of the vote in 2016 (46.1%) than Romney did in 2012 (47.2%).
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Trump has moved the party in a positive direction on many issues, most prominently immigration where the pro-amnesty Jeb Bush wing of the party is the weakest it has been in decades. And he taught Republicans how to fight. The party is done with leaders like Vice President Mike Pence who caved to corporate pressure on Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act when he was governor. But there are other candidates, younger, wiser, and more disciplined candidates that have proven they are strong enough to fight back against corporate power too.
Republicans can't afford a party leader who flagrantly violates federal law to settle minor political grievances and gets caught on tape doing it. Trump has revealed his incompetence before and he has done so again. It is long beyond time for the nation to move on.
Tags: Editorials, Donald Trump, 2024 Elections, Classified Documents, Republican Party
Original Author: Washington Examiner
Original Location: Trump's incompetence revealed again