Perfection can be elusive. Unless you are President Donald J. Trump.
“When you see the call, when you see the readout of the call, which I assume you’ll see at some point, that call was perfect. It couldn’t have been nicer,” Trump told reporters Tuesday.
His declaration came in defense of his now-infamous phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
That “perfect” call, and the whistleblower report that revealed it, are at the center of a congressional impeachment inquiry.
Trump vehemently denies the now-widespread notion that he strong-armed Zelensky to investigate his political rival and former Vice President Joe Biden. There was “absolutely no pressure,” he said.
If the call was so perfect, why did White House officials frantically scramble to hide it?
One man’s perfection is another man’s disaster.
Therein lies the conundrum that is Trump. In Trump’s world, everything he does is quintessentially perfect. Even when it’s not, and everyone knows it. Except him.
The day after Trump bragged of his perfection, the White House released the readout that detailed the contents of the phone call.
The July 25 call began with an exchange of pleasantries and flattery, according to the five-page document.
Zelensky thanked Trump for providing Ukraine with military aid. Trump replied by asking the Ukrainian leader “to do us a favor.”
Trump went on to ask Zelensky to connect with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr and investigate some unsubstantiated allegations against Biden and his son, Hunter.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great,” Trump told Zelensky.
“Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it...It sounds horrible to me,” Trump said.
Horrible, indeed. That call was so horrible that White House officials promptly moved to deep-six the evidence of its existence, according to the whistleblower’s complaint, released Thursday by the U.S. House Intelligence Committee.
In fact, White House officials were “deeply disturbed” by Trump’s comments to Zelensky, the whistleblower wrote.
Discussions between the officials and White House lawyers quickly commenced “because of the likelihood,” that they believed, “that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain,” the whistleblower said.
“I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials has intervened to ‘lock down’ all records of the phone call,” the whistleblower wrote.
That “underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.”
The whistleblower was further alarmed to learn that the official transcript of the call had been removed for the computer system where it would normally be kept, and “loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”
Mr. President, why would your people want to hide such a “perfect” phone call?”
Trump thought the call was so perfect that he released the readout, a highly unusual decision that reportedly stunned national security experts. Our presidents typically shield the content of private communications with foreign leaders.
Trump thought his perfect call would exonerate him and rid him of those pesky impeachers. The president believes he is invincible. Little wonder, given all that he has gotten away with.
Trump is the sole occupant of his alternate reality. God help the rest of us.
Laura Washington is a columnist for the Sun-Times and a political analyst for ABC 7.
Follow her on Twitter @MediaDervish
Send letters to letters@suntimes.com
