Donald Trump’s fireside chat is a flaming dumpster fire

| 7:00 pm EDT November 1, 2019
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

Donald Trump just keeps insisting on following Richard Nixon’s impeachment defense, note for note, with seemingly no awareness that the strategy resulted in Nixon getting tossed out on the street. This time around Trump is publicly floating the idea of copying yet another of Nixon’s failed ideas by going on television and spelling out why he’s supposedly innocent.

This would be a bad enough idea in its own right, considering the majority of Americans already want him ousted, and would be tuning in just to see if he gets flustered and confesses to any additional crimes. But Trump has decided to take a bad idea and make it far worse. Here’s what he told the Washington Examiner about it:

“At some point, I’m going to sit down, perhaps as a fireside chat on live television, and I will read the transcript of the call, because people have to hear it. When you read it, it’s a straight call.”

That’s right, Donald Trump wants to go on live national television and read the transcript that directly incriminates him in a felony. Nevermind that we learned this week that the “transcript” has actually been somewhat sanitized; the whitewashed version that Trump publicly released is damning enough.

If Donald Trump goes on TV and reads the transcript aloud that he’s already publicly released, it’ll be so bad for him, he might as well just end it with the words “I hereby resign.” And if he tries to read a further-altered version of the transcript, the media will crucify him for that. This is such an astoundingly bad idea, you have to figure that even Trump’s sycophantic remaining handlers will quash it. Too bad, we’d love to have seen this dumpster fire of a fireside chat happen.

Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.