After acquittal, Trump unleashes fury at impeachment, by Jill Colvin.
Exulting in his impeachment acquittal, President Donald Trump took a scorched-earth victory lap Thursday, unleashing his fury against those who tried to remove him from office while looking ahead to his reelection campaign.
Trump, triumphantly waving a newspaper front page — “ACQUITTED” — denounced his political foes, declared the impeachment proceedings a “disgrace” and portrayed himself as a victim rather than a president accused of serious corruption. …
“It was evil, it was corrupt,” Trump declared at the White House. “This should never ever happen to another president, ever.”
“We went through hell, unfairly. We did nothing wrong,” he continued. …
“Now we have that gorgeous word. I never thought it would sound so good,” Trump said. Ït’s called ’total acquittal.” …
Earlier, speaking from a stage where he was joined by congressional leaders, including Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led the impeachment charge against him, Trump shattered the usual veneer of bipartisanship at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.
“As everybody knows, my family, our great country and your president have been put through a terrible ordeal by some very dishonest and corrupt people,” Trump said at the annual event.
“They have done everything possible to destroy us and by so doing very badly hurt our nation,” said Trump …
His remarks were especially jarring and whiplash-inducing coming after a series of scripture-quoting speeches, including a keynote address by Arthur Brooks, a Harvard professor and president of a conservative think tank, who had bemoaned a “crisis of contempt and polarization” in the nation and urged those gathered to ”love your enemies.”
“I don’t know if I agree with you,” Trump said as he took the microphone, and then he proceeded to demonstrate it.
“I don’t like people who use their faith as justification for doing what they know is wrong,” he said in an apparent reference to Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, a longtime Trump critic who cited his faith in becoming the only Republican to vote for Trump’s removal.
“Nor do I like people who say ‘I pray for you’ when you know that is not so,’” he said, in a reference to Pelosi, who has offered that message for the president when the two leaders have sparred publicly.
The House speaker shook her head at various points during Trump’s remarks, but did not appear to interact with Trump personally. Earlier she had offered a prayer for the poor and the persecuted.
At the White House later, Trump defended his prayer breakfast attacks on Pelosi, saying “I had Nancy Pelosi sitting four seats away and I’m saying things a lot of people wouldn’t have said. I meant every word.”
No wonder Trump’s up. Look at this: Record-High Optimism on Personal Finances in U.S., by R.J. Reinhart at Gallup.
Like Reagan, Trump cut back on regulations, rekindled a spirit of optimism, and stoked a bubble of newly manufactured money. Clinton did the last two of the three, and rode the ongoing Reagan Bubble.
Any fool can make the economy feel good in the short term by borrowing or manufacturing enough money, but without deregulation and optimism there is little improvement. Obama falls into that latter category, coming out of the GFC debt crisis on a wave of new money.
And of course, there is the debt hangover to be dealt with later.
