Donald Trump has never fully appreciated the value of nuance or diplomacy, which is why he has a breathtaking record for blurting out controversial comments, seemingly indifferent to their importance.
Take last night, for example.
“Our Supreme Court and our courts didn’t have the courage to overturn elections that should have been overturned,” he told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo on Tuesday evening in a rare media appearance since leaving office in January.
The former president, apparently making things up as he went along, also said there were “hundreds of thousands and even millions of votes” at issue, which the Republican believes could’ve given him power he didn’t earn.
There’s literally nothing to suggest there were “millions” of improper ballots cast last year, but to know anything about Trump is to know his relationship with reality is broken.
That said, his choice of words last night was nevertheless extraordinary. As GQ‘s Julia Ioffe put it, “‘The courage to overturn elections’ is quite a sentence.”
The former president went on to tell Fox News last night, “The Supreme Court should be ashamed of itself.” In context, he was again referring to the justices’ rejection of Trump’s baseless anti-election lawsuits.
I can appreciate why all of this has a dog-bites-man quality. Indeed, the familiarity of the circumstances is hard to miss: Trump runs to Fox News; he rants and raves for a while; he expresses hostility for democracy, and he touts the ridiculous fantasy world in which he won the election he lost.
The failed former president has done this before, and he will almost certainly do it again. But there are some contextual details that arguably make the Republican’s latest nonsense notable. It was, after all, exactly 10 weeks ago today that a violent insurrectionist mob, fueled by lies peddled by Trump, launched a deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol in the hopes of overturning the will of American voters. It was nine weeks ago today that Trump was impeached — again — and it was five weeks ago when a bipartisan majority of the Senate agreed that he was guilty of inciting an insurrection, though that majority fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to secure a conviction. Those hoping that Trump is still capable of learning lessons should note his “courage to overturn elections” rhetoric and realize that he will never let go of his Big Lie delusion, and the former president expects his rabid base to continue to accept his nonsense as true.
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."
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