New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is defending President Trump from the released testimony of former FBI Director James Comey today, basically saying that as an outsider, Trump doesn’t speak government-ese. What James Comey heard was New York speak.
During an interview with MSNBC’s “Deadline: White House,” Christie argued that American voters “don’t understand” that in electing Trump they put “an outsider president” in the Oval Office.
Wait… I thought that was the exact reason Trump’s base gave for voting for him?
“They elected someone who had never been inside government and quite frankly didn’t spend a lot of time interacting with government except at the local level,” Christie said of Trump.
So he doesn’t know what he’s doing?
Clearly.
Christie went on to explain that Trump’s inexperience and lack of knowledge about how government and all the associated offices work mean he’s in the middle of on-the-job training.
“The idea of the way the tradition of these agencies is not something he’s ever been steeped in,” Christie said.
“So I think over the course of time, we can talk about different examples, what you’re seeing is a president who is now very publicly learning about the way people react to what he considers to be normal New York City conversation.”
My first reaction to this whitewash is to say Trump asked everybody to step out when he spoke with Comey. He could have left some of them in, if he didn’t know how what he was about to say would be taken.
He didn’t do that.
So maybe it is inexperience and New York values that brought about what we saw in James Comey’s written testimony, but there’s a healthy dose of arrogance, as well.
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