What the bleep does this new Donald Trump tweet about “Russian hacking” even mean?
Donald Trump promised the American public on New Years Eve that he would address us all on Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday, and tell us what was really going on with all that Russian hacking that he thinks wasn’t really the Russians. He even teased us that he knew something about it that we did’t, even though we all know he hasn’t been bothering with his daily intelligence briefings. And now, naturally, he’s stalling. But the tweet he posted to announce the delay is so bizarre that we can’t even figure out what the hell he’s talking about.
It’s been long established that seventeen United States intelligence agencies agree the Russians interfered with the United States presidential election. And it’s been long publicly known that the CIA and FBI agree the Russians did it with the specific intent of getting Donald Trump elected. And yet now that strong voices in both parties have begun demanding an investigation into the matter, Trump responded by saying he’d finally sit down for an intelligence briefing. Except now for some reason he’s insisting that his briefing on Russian hacking – which he could have gotten at any time – has been delayed, and he professes not to know why. Trump’s tweet in question reads:
The “Intelligence” briefing on so-called “Russian hacking” was delayed until Friday, perhaps more time needed to build a case. Very strange!
That leads us to ask a number of questions. First, was he really trying to insult the intelligence community by putting the word “Intelligence” in quotation marks, or have his poor spelling and grammar skills now extended to punctuation mishaps? Who in the intelligence community does he think is now building a case, and why would they need a few extra days to build a case that’s been publicly known for months? And is “Very strange” an actual attempt at quoting the surreal Beatles song Penny Lane, or was that just unintentionally Freudian? So many questions, so little coherence.
