Another disgusting snippet from that Fox & Friends interview

As I said in my post yesterday about the VSG's call-in to the FNC morning show, I don't watch daytime TV as a general rule, so I'm picking up the various humdingers he let loose with as I poke around.

And this one is right up there with the business about Yovanovitch not hanging his picture in the Ukraine embassy and the tinfoil hat theory about CrowdStrike:

President Trump toed the line on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests amid trade negotiations with China on Friday, telling Fox & Friends that “we have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi.”

Trump said Friday that there is “a very good chance to make a deal,” with China, after reports in October suggested that a phase-one deal had been agreed to in principle, only for the Chinese to stall the process. The president also said that the Hong Kong situation was “a complicating factor” in negotiations, but also claimed negotiations were the reason China had not cracked down harder on protestors.

“If it weren’t for me, Hong Kong would’ve been obliterated in 14 minutes,” Trump said. “He’s got one million soldiers standing outside of Hong Kong, that aren’t going in only because I ask him ‘please don’t do that, you’ll be making a big mistake, it’s going to have a tremendous negative impact on the trade deal.’ And he wants to make a trade deal.

“I stand with Hong Kong, I stand with freedom, I stand with all of the things that I want to do,” the president continued. “But we are also in the process of making the largest trade deals in history.”

The president did not comment on whether he would sign the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which was passed by the Senate with a bipartisan veto-proof majority on Tuesday.

So many layers of the VSG approach to being president on display here. There's the equivocation. (Someone on Twitter posed the question, can you imagine Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 saying, "Well, Mr. Gorbachev, it would be nice to see this wall come down, but you have to do what's right for the Soviet Union.") There's the wildly inflated view of his influence. There's the prioritization of deal-cutting over all else.

I think Daren Jonescu brings the laser focus of moral clarity to it:

Being on the winning side of history, where Trump so desperately yearns to be — think of how often he makes “winning” his own claim to fame and chief promise to supporters — is an unprincipled coward’s concern. That is why Trump, the unprincipled coward par excellence, supports every brutal dictator at the expense of that dictator’s slaves or potential victims. He does not see right and wrong, good and evil, freedom and tyranny. He sees only “power” and “winning” vs. “weakness” and “losing.” (The scare quotes in that last sentence are meant to indicate that Trump’s perspective on power and victory is the backwards outlook of a moral coward and intellectual weakling.) He therefore admires those who show an ability to maintain or expand their power, regardless of how they do it.

To my friends, past and present, who are willfully blinding themselves, or at best pretending the above concerns are mere peccadilloes or minor reservations about Trump’s judgment, I present a simple and sincere challenge: Please defend this punk’s actions on the world stage as anything less than treasonous.

This stuff has to be said. And stop it with the binary-choice attempt to shut down the discussion. That is not the only matter before us. And people sound stupid when they reduce it to that.