In case you missed it, Wednesday morning’s edition of The Washington Post led with a potentially devastating story about Donald Trump’s charity. It seems that Trump dipped into the coffers of the Trump Foundation to pay Trump’s legal bills. Well, it turns out that the Trump campaign’s attempt to defend itself didn’t start so well. Trump’s running mate whined that The Post got its story wrong–but couldn’t tell us why.
Hours after the story went online, Mike Pence stopped by MSNBC’s “11th Hour” to try to start the pushback on a story that, in a sane world, would end Trump’s campaign. I say “try” because the Indiana governor wound up looking like a fool on national television. Watch here.
When host Brian Williams asked Pence what he thought about this latest revelation, Pence claimed that there were “a number of factual errors” in reporter David Fahrenthold’s story–as he claimed was the case with a number of other stories about the Trump Foundation.
Pence tried to pivot to the supposed controversies surrounding the Clinton Foundation, but Williams was having none of it. He asked Pence to tell him exactly what those errors were. Pence punted to the Trump Foundation, saying it would “be able to lay those out.”
We already knew that the Trump campaign was an amateurish operation. But this is just staggering. You roll out your running mate to claim that a story that could potentially bring your campaign down in flames is bogus–and yet, your running mate isn’t prepared to tell why said story is bogus? For all intents and purposes, when Williams pressed Pence for details on the supposed “factual errors,” Pence’s only response was “humina, humina, humina.”
This response largely echoes the Trump campaign’s only formal statement on the matter. Campaign spokesman Jason Miller harrumphed that The Post “had gotten their facts wrong”–but then preceded to trash the Clinton Foundation as the really shady outfit.
In response, senior political editor Steven Ginsberg replied that this statement, like virtually every other statement about his paper’s reporting on the Trump Foundation, was “full of personal insults and devoid of any discussion of the facts.” He added that The Post has “reached out repeatedly” to Trump for some answers–and has yet to get any. On Wednesday’s edition of “All In With Chris Hayes,” Fahrenthold himself said that Trump still hasn’t bothered to respond.
If Trump and Pence think they can dissemble their way out of this, they are sadly mistaken. I know it’s been said before, but the way things are going, the Trump campaign has finally jumped the shark.
