Donald Trump’s staffers begin trying to cover their own asses ahead of recount
Four days into the effort to get the vote totals in three suspicious states recounted, which would award the election to Hillary Clinton if she were named the revised winner in all three states, and Donald Trump still hasn’t bothered to whine or complain about it via his infamous Twitter account. This is noteworthy because he has spent the past two weeks complaining about everything from TV shows to Broadway actors to newspapers – but nary a whine about the effort to take the election away from him. This is even as his staff has been going apoplectic about the recount. And now they’ve released a “statement” on his behalf, which he clearly had no hand in.
The statement, which has been posted online by Frank Thorp of NBC News, is titled “Statement from President-Elect Donald J. Trump on the Ridiculous Green Party Recount Request” and goes on to span four paragraphs. The treatise largely reads as a personal attack on third party candidate Jill Stein, who filed the recount in question, and attempts to convince supporters of Hillary Clinton that Stein is running a “scam” on them. But this comes even after Clinton officially announced earlier today that she and her team will be participating in Stein’s recount effort. The statement also tries to paint Trump’s razor thin margins of victory in Wisconsin and Michigan as being much larger than they are, in the hope of making it sound like the recounts have no chance of working.
But what stands out the most strikingly about the “statement” from Donald Trump is that he clearly didn’t write it. Anyone familiar with his Twitter account has figured out that some of the tweets – the childish and misspelled ones – are from Trump directly, while the dryly strategic ones have been written by staff. Trump isn’t capable of coming up with a statement like the one that his campaign has been sent out on his behalf. And while it’s not unusual for staffers to write things on a candidate’s behalf, what’s shocking is that Trump hasn’t even tweeted a link to the statement in question.
It all further begs the question as to whether Donald Trump has even seen this statement that his handlers have written and released in his name. This comes even as it increasingly appears that Trump may be fully unaware that his own team may have rigged the election in his favor. He remains silent, even as his handlers begin screaming bloody murder and posting the statement in his name. With the recounts about to begin and any rigging about to be exposed, has the ass-covering among Trump’s staff already begun?
