Just when you think it can’t possibly get any more absurd, it invariably does.
On Tuesday afternoon, Donald Trump attempted to walk back one of the many controversial statements he made in Helsinki on Monday during his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin.
Specifically, Trump addressed the following quote, which certainly seemed to amount to the President of the United States saying that, despite what the U.S. intelligence community was saying about Russian interference in the 2016 election, he didn’t see any reason to believe Moscow was “in the meddle” (so to speak):
My people came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin, he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this, I don’t see any reason why it would be.
Again, that’s what he said on Monday in Finland.
This is what he said on Tuesday, following the intense bi-partisan backlash:
On Wednesday, asked by reporters during a cabinet meeting at the White House whether Russia was still targeting the U.S., Trump said “no.” And he said it repeatedly. Here’s the clip:
That, despite the fact that his own Director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats, said the following earlier this week:
The U.S. intelligence community has been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy.
Well, on Wednesday afternoon, Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that in the clip above, Trump didn’t actually say “no” to the Russian meddling question. Rather, Sanders contends that he was answering another question about whether or not he would take more questions. Here’s Sanders:
Now let’s watch her double and triple down, shall we?
Obviously, this is yet another PR disaster for this administration and you’ll note that this makes twice in two days that the White House has been forced to try and figure out how to suggest that Trump either misspoke or, in this case, contend that he wasn’t responding to what everyone thought he was responding to.
You’ll also note that Sanders takes it a step further by contending that the Trump administration is more concerned than the Obama administration about Russian election meddling.
What else can you say? May the farce be with you.
