House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) remains skeptical of pursuing presidential impeachment, but she acknowledged this morning that she’s painfully aware of Donald Trump’s misdeeds — and the eagerness with which the president is trying to hide the truth.
“We do believe that it’s important to follow the facts,” Pelosi told reporters. “We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States. And we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up.”
For some reason, this rather obvious observation apparently insulted Trump, who said during a brief press conference this morning that the Speaker’s comments were one of the reasons he derailed a scheduled meeting on infrastructure.
“[I]nstead of walking in happily into a meeting, I walk in to look at people that have just said that I was doing a cover up.
“I don’t do cover-ups. You people know that probably better than anybody.”
By “you people,” the president was apparently referring to political reporters, whom he assumed would agree with his self-assessment.
I don’t know why he would think that.
At this point, we could start exploring in detail each of the many lines of congressional inquiry that Trump is stonewalling as part of an elaborate scheme to cover up the truth.
Or we could talk about Trump’s extraordinary efforts to keep all kinds of information hidden from the public, from his tax returns to White House visitor logs to Mar-a-Lago membership lists.
We could even take some time to revisit the incident in which the president personally dictated a deceptive press statement about the infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting, directly implicating Trump in a cover-up. But I’d suggest putting each of these angles aside and focusing on something even more obvious: Donald Trump directed his personal fixer to make illegal hush-money payments to some of his alleged mistresses, in the hopes of keeping the controversies hidden. The president insists he doesn’t “do cover-ups,” which is true, just so long as one overlooks his many cover-ups. Postscript: The Washington Post published a related analysis, which touched on some additional details.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
