As Donald Trump gets caught committing a felony on one tape, he gets caught altering another tape

| 6:04 pm EDT July 25, 2018
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Last night Michael Cohen gave CNN a recording he’d secretly made of a conversation he had with Donald Trump about illegally paying off his mistress Karen McDougal during the election. Trump’s words on this tape constituted an unmistakable felony, and the tape instantly received so much attention, it overshadowed the fact that the Trump team had spent the day altering another tape in the feeble hope of rewriting history.

By now, unless you’ve spent the month of July in cave, you’ve heard Donald Trump siding with Vladimir Putin over the United States during their joint press conference. Trump insisted that he believed Putin’s claim that Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 U.S election, and that Russia wasn’t attempting to meddle in the 2018 U.S. election. For some reason Trump changed his position entirely yesterday, posting a tweet which comically asserted that Russia is planning to rig the November elections in favor of the Democrats.

Around that same time, Donald Trump’s White House released an edited video of the Trump-Putin press conference, with Trump’s remarks about Russian election meddling removed. Also removed from the video was Putin’s admission that he wanted Trump to win and helped Trump to win. The White House also released a transcript of the press conference, also with those remarks removed. The video and transcript even went so far as to remove the reporters’ questions on these topics. So not only are we supposed to believe Trump when he now claims Russia is going to rig the 2018 election for the Democrats, we’re supposed to believe that he never said what we all heard him say while he was standing next to Putin.

What kind of game is Donald Trump playing here? An utterly deranged one, but also an ineffective one. Was anyone actually supposed to fall for this edit job? No one out there is going to watch this altered tape and say to themselves, “You know what? I guess I didn’t actually hear Trump committing treason when I watched this live last week.” This release can’t possibly be about anything beyond Trump trying to rewrite history in his own deluded mind. The games he’s playing are not helping his cause, at a time when his sinking illegitimate presidency needs all the help it can get.