Oh come on, no one is this stupid

| 10:59 pm EDT May 11, 2018
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It’s the end of yet another long and complex and embarrassing week in Donald Trump’s asserted criminal scandals, and I have to admit I’m stumped. It’s long been clear that Trump is surrounded by the most incompetent henchmen of all time. This has always made sense, as Trump chooses people based on whether they’re willing to stroke his narcissistic ego, not based on whether they’re smart or competent when it comes to doing his bidding. But see now I’m puzzled, because no one is this stupid, are they?

During the course of the election, Donald Trump’s goons and fixers were extraordinarily brazen and sloppy and stupid when it came to how they went about conspiring with the Russians. Conventional wisdom is that they weren’t trying particularly hard to cover their tracks because they didn’t think they had any real chance of winning the election anyway, and none of this would have been investigated once they lost. But now we’re learning that Trump’s goons became even more brazen and stupid after he won.

The minute Donald Trump was illegitimately named the winner of the election, I knew without a doubt that all of his scandals would be investigated, and that we’d eventually learn about everything that happened. Trump and his people should have seen this coming as well. It’s one thing to brazenly commit crimes while running a presidential campaign that everyone thought was going to lose anyway. Did these folks really think that after they hijacked the White House, no one was going to pay attention to their actions?

Michael Cohen was taking bribes from AT&T and a Russian oligarch while Donald Trump was in the White House. Did he really think no one was going to notice? Are these types just so locked in their ways that they couldn’t help themselves, or were they really too stupid to understand that the spotlight was on their actions from the minute Trump was declared the winner? Is anyone truly this stupid?