Nicolle Wallace explains how Trump totally 'destroyed' his own 'political superpower'
President Donald Trump is abusing his power to persecute political opponents, but at least one recent effort was so transparently absurd that even a major Trump supporter could not get behind it.
Reporting for MS NOW on Wednesday, anchor Nicolle Wallace pointed out that Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey is being widely mocked, even by conservatives otherwise inclined to back the president. In the indictment, Blanche claimed that Comey threatened Trump’s life because he “publicly posted a photograph on the internet social media site Instagram which depicted seashells arranged in a pattern making out ‘86 47’, which a reasonable recipient who is familiar with the circumstances would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm to the President of the United States.”
Much to Wallace’s surprise Jonathan Turley, who defended Trump against his first impeachment attempt and has repeatedly backed his controversial legal moves, spoke out against the Comey indictment.
“I remain skeptical of the accounts of the two criminal charges. This has to overcome towering free speech protections,” the law professor, columnist and New York Times best-selling author posted on X. “We will have to wait to see if the administration has a ‘smoking shell’ allegation that makes Comey's shell speech more menacing as a willful and knowing threat.”
Speaking to Wallace, President Barack Obama's former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting Ben Rhodes explained that Trump’s lawfare against critics like Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) and others speak to the president craving power.
“I think that he is totally focused on power,” Rhodes told Wallace. “He is in a position of power. He wants to keep that power, and he is essentially drunk with power and making decisions that have no place in an official capacity like the one that he serves. I mean, this indictment — it really is a betrayal of the integrity of the justice system. He's misusing the justice system in a way that should really offend every single American.”
Wallace took solace in the fact that some of Trump’s supporters are turning on him, although she qualified that by pointing out that they have still otherwise backed his anti-democratic measures.
“We gut-check ourselves a thousand times when we present to our audience anything Megyn Kelly says about anything, or Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan, because they're not partners in the effort to protect democracy,” Wallace told Rhodes. “Double and triple that gut check when — as Jonathan, who testified on behalf of Donald Trump, who has laundered some of Trump's policies over the last ten years, who before Trump was also a Fox News fixer and has sort of stood at that fork in the road and then threw in all in with Donald Trump — his view is sharper than just about anything I saw on this network or the mainstream outlets over the last 24 hours.”
After Rhodes speculated that these erstwhile die-hard Trumpers are turning on him because they are beginning to imagine a political world without him, Wallace added that “the more unpopular Trump gets, the more desperate and in some ways shocking his conduct is, the more sort of out of the authoritarian closet he gets. But that has this ancillary effect of letting anyone trying to separate themselves from him smack him down before any political opponent does.”
Rhodes agreed with Wallace but added a word of caution.
“Look, if some people listen to us and say, ‘Well, this is great, the sun's setting on Trump’ — it's kind of scary too, because I do think he will not so easily accept irrelevance,” Rhodes told Wallace. “He's someone who's probably acutely aware that the sand is running through the hourglass of his time as president. I mean, he might get more extreme. He may very well get more extreme in his actions.”