Donald Trump Accidentally Had a Good Idea in the Middle of This Shithole Disaster
Let's get this out of the way first: Donald Trump, the President of the United States, is indisputably racist. A mountain of evidence in support of this proposition existed long before we learned of his comments on Thursday that African countries and Haiti are "shitholes," and that the United States should be welcoming immigrants from places "like Norway" instead. There is a word that describes people who harbor such beliefs, and it is not "controversial," or "politically incorrect," or "straight talk." It's racist! And referring to it as anything else affords the benefit of the doubt to a man who deserves approximately none of it.
Donald Trump, the President of the United States, also happens to have a pretty good idea.
After the White House issued its umpteenth tepid non-denial of the president's bigoted comment du jour late on Thursday, Trump issued his own semi-retort on Friday, claiming that the alleged comments about the "very poor and troubled" Haiti were "made up by Dems." (He did not address the allegations with respect to his characterization of an entire continent as a collection of shithole nations, a notable omission about which you can draw your own conclusions.) Illinois senator Dick Durbin, one of the lawmakers in the room, responding by going on the record to confirm the Post's report, leaving us in a good old-fashioned he-said-he-said bind. "Probably," the president concluded this morning, citing to a lack of trust on all sides, we "should record future meetings" of this type.
This is a great idea! Threatening his political opponents with the specter of secret recordings is one of Trump's very favorite stunts, as you may remember from his suggestion that Jim Comey, the former FBI director who he admitted firing in order to end a law enforcement investigation into Russian election interference, should "hope" that no tapes existed of their White House conversations. For a man to whom the evidence captured on previous tapes has not been kind, this stance struck everyone with a brain as a particularly bold one to take. In news that will doubtless shock you, we eventually learned that no system for creating such tapes, at the time, existed after all.
I don't mean to suggest that everything that occurs in the Oval Office should be, say, broadcasted live to the entire world on CSPAN48. Some of the things that the president does, such as receiving important briefings related to issues of national security, are obviously too sensitive to share publicly. But when a particular moment or exchange is at issue, the ability to pull a clip of it could end these inane allegation-and-denial cycles once and for all. It could settle whether the president is, in fact, in the midst of as precipitous a cognitive decline as it currently seems. Maybe the mere existence of a recording system would—stay with me here—deter the president from saying and doing racist things!
If Donald Trump really believes that recording his conversations would exonerate him of accusations like those leveled at him yesterday, then we should be all for it, too. My hunch is that it will prove less useful to the elderly conspiracy theorist than he believes. But there's only one way to find out.
