In case you’re keeping track, we’ve now reached the point in the unmonitored, unguided hell simulation where Republican members of Congress are using the barmy brain nuggets Donald Trump drops on the daily and recycling them as talking points. Because Trump’s every utterance is genius, and like a frontiersman on his hardscrabble farmstead pulling hearty fistfuls of offal from hens who died in the dead of winter of some as-yet-unidentified bird flu, Republicans have decided to savor every last morsel of Hickory Farms All-Natural Offal ‘n’ Beak-Bits Summer Sausage.
As you may recall, on May 10, when CNN opted to napalm our great nation with ipecac instead of jellied gasoline, Trump let loose a fusillade of feral, head-scratching nonsense that left Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler pining for an elysian future in which he’s secured part-time, minimum-wage employment as Chris Christie’s personal bathtub attendant. But Trump’s lies weren’t the only things on lurid display. He also said the U.S. “might as well” default on its debt (which would naturally crater the economy, leading to a deep recession and millions of lost jobs) and that his previous insistence that the debt ceiling should never be used as negotiating leverage no longer applied because he was no longer president.
Any which way you slice it, that’s a rancid hunk of bologna, and yet Republicans expect you to slurp it up through a straw. And Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida (you may remember him from his 15 minutes in the spotlight as a GOP speaker candidate back in January) believes you simply need to get accustomed to the taste.
On Sunday’s edition of “Meet the Press,” host Chuck Todd asked Donalds about Trump’s highly partisan, hyper-hypocritical statement. And Donalds turned the gaslight up to 11.
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