Washington Post provides a vivid picture of Trump, sitting at Mar-a-Lago and lying. But why?

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Donald Trump’s influence is fading in the Republican Party and everyone outside of his die-hard supporters realizes that nothing he says can be trusted or believed, but The Washington Post is trumpeting an exclusive interview with him, giving Trump space to lie some more. Apparently it’s really newsworthy to hear that Trump still blames everyone else for his supporters attacking the U.S Capitol and still insists he didn’t lose fair and square in 2020.

The Post does offer context for some of what Trump lied about and omitted from his accounts, and notes that he “meandered during the interview and stonewalled questions with long answers.” But nothing here is newsworthy. “Liar continues to lie. Man who never admits error continues to insist he was right about everything.”

Trump’s nonsense included insisting that he was just waiting for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to put a stop to the attack on the Capitol by a mob of thousands of his supporters: “I thought it was a shame, and I kept asking why isn’t she doing something about it? Why isn’t Nancy Pelosi doing something about it? And the mayor of D.C. also. The mayor of D.C. and Nancy Pelosi are in charge,” he told the Post. “I hated seeing it. I hated seeing it. And I said, ‘It’s got to be taken care of,’ and I assumed they were taking care of it.”

While the Post notes that responsibility for the Capitol does not lie solely with the speaker of the House and that the Washington, D.C., mayor’s office repeatedly tried and failed to get through to Trump during the attack, it doesn’t mention the phone call that afternoon in which Trump responded to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s plea for Trump to tell the mob to stop attacking by saying, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

Trump also told the Post he really had wanted to march to the Capitol himself on January 6, but was prevented by the Secret Service. That would have been something else—a violent attack on Congress that the sitting president didn’t just incite through words but physically led to the scene. Of course, since Trump lies, it remains equally likely that he had no desire to do anything more strenuous than he had already done and preferred to go relax at the White House while watching what he’d unleashed from a comfortable seat in a heated room.

He bragged at some length about the size of the crowd at the rally on the Ellipse—the crowd from which the mob of attackers peeled off beginning while he was speaking. “The crowd was far bigger than I even thought. I believe it was the largest crowd I’ve ever spoken to. I don’t know what that means, but you see very few pictures. They don’t want to show pictures, the fake news doesn’t want to show pictures.”

A bigger crowd even than the “million, million and a half people” at the 2017 inauguration? Big, if true.

It was a “tremendous crowd” which he really wanted to lead straight to the Capitol, but once it arrived there, someone else should have stopped it from battering down the doors and windows and assaulting the police officers defending the building and the Congress inside.

On the subject of the 2020 election, which the mob was attempting to overturn on January 6, Trump continues to insist that he was robbed by massive voter fraud. (Again, this is news?) In a masterpiece of admitting something in the midst of denying it, he said of Rep. Mo Brooks’ allegations that he has asked Brooks to help him overturn the election since the inauguration of President Joe Biden, “I didn’t ask [Brooks] to do it. He’s in no position to do it. I certainly didn’t ask him to do it. But I believe when you see massive election fraud, I can’t imagine that somebody who won the election based on fraud, that something doesn’t happen? How has it not happened? If you are a bank robber, or you’re a jewelry store robber, and you go into Tiffany’s and you steal their diamonds and get caught, you have to give the diamonds back.”

I didn’t ask him to do a perfectly reasonable, even just, thing that someone should definitely do. Uh huh.

Nothing about Donald Trump has changed over the past 15 months except his position in the world. And his current position means that the media should not be trotting down to Mar-a-Lago to seek out more lies from him. When he speaks at a rally or endorses a candidate? Sure, that’s news—as much as we might look forward to the day when basically nothing he does is worth our attention. But Trump, sitting at Mar-a-Lago drinking a Diet Coke? Let that guy tell his lies to the people wandering the grounds eager for the chance to suck up to him. Let him rant to the guests of weddings held at the property. It’s not worth making an effort to hear what he has to say.

Let’s talk about the Trump White House call logs from Jan. 6

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