The supposed intellectual heavyweights of today’s conservative movement are pushing hard on a defense of President Donald Trump’s behavior toward Ukraine that argues Trump did not extort a foreign country into launching an investigation of his political opponent — because he is too stupid to do something so elaborate and systematic.
While Wednesday’s first round of impeachment inquiry hearings was still going on, The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro rolled out this peculiar line of advocacy on his podcast. “I don’t actually see objectively that Trump has ever had the level of intent necessary to do anything,” Shapiro said, adding with a laugh: “I don’t think that he’s ever had the level of intent to put a — to eat a hamburger. I think that it’s half-accident when he eats a hamburger.”
Media Matters published a story on this emerging development last week, with the somewhat jocular title “New right-wing defense: Trump is too incompetent to be impeached.” (We also explained why this proposition — summed up as “no harm, no foul” — simply doesn’t work.)
But ironically, today’s column in The Washington Post by Marc Thiessen, a Fox News contributor and former speechwriter in the George W. Bush administration, literally takes on that very same phrasing: “Incompetence is not an impeachable offense.”
Thiessen writes:
The Wall Street Journal published an editorial Thursday that called Trump’s decision to have his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani “lobby” Ukrainian officials “dumb” and “self-destructive,” but argued that his actions were not impeachable in part because, “Like much else in this Administration, Mr. Trump’s worst impulses were blocked.”
For all this talk, however, it remains to be explained why it’s a good thing to say that an incompetent person should legitimately continue to hold office.
And of course, there’s always an old Trump tweet about everything:
