Trump’s Pathetic Response to the Recording of Him Discussing Classified Documents

Donald Trump is sticking to a tried-and-true method of responding to bad news: Deny everything.

Prosecutors for special counsel Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, obtained an audio recording of a meeting held in July 2021, during which the former president essentially admitted that he knows he can’t declassify documents at will. He brags explicitly about having kept a classified Pentagon document, and the sound of rustling papers can be overheard, as if Trump were waving that document around.

During a Fox News town hall on Thursday, Sean Hannity—a longtime Trump confidant—asked Trump about the recording.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Trump replied. “All I know is this: Everything I did was right.”

Trump then went on to accuse President Joe Biden of having almost 2,000 boxes of classified documents, “seven or eight” of which he had stashed in Chinatown, in Washington, D.C.

“Chinatown is very—it’s, it’s, it’s in favor of China,” Trump said, throwing a nice bit of xenophobia into the mix.

It’s no good denying or deflecting anymore, though. In addition to the recording of Trump acknowledging that he can’t declassify materials whenever he wants, Smith’s team also recently acquired a slew of records including handwritten notes, transcriptions of audio recordings, and invoices from Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran. A judge ruled in March that some of Trump’s attorney-client privileges could be “pierced” after prosecutors for Smith’s team found that Trump intentionally misled his own lawyers, including Corcoran, about keeping classified materials when he left office.

Those records reveal that Trump knew he wasn’t supposed to keep classified documents. Not only did he do so anyway, but Corcoran was also prevented from searching Trump’s office at Mar-a-Lago, where the FBI later found some of the most sensitive material.

Smith has not yet issued any criminal charges, but Trump has plenty of other legal struggles to keep him busy in the meantime. He is under investigation in Georgia for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and he was indicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

Trump also was found civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll—and last week, she sued him for defamation again over comments he made about her during a CNN town hall.

“Every parent should watch this.” This is what Elon Musk—one of the world’s most powerful elites—said about The Daily Wire’s transphobic documentary What Is a Woman? hosted by the vicious and intellectually dull Matt Walsh.

Musk’s personal promotion of the video follows his total capitulation to the far-right media company’s personal complaints of being suppressed. On Thursday, Daily Wire co-founder and co-CEO Jeremy Boreing posted a Twitter thread explaining that Twitter reneged on a commitment to buy a package to host the showing of the entire 90-some-minute movie on a “dedicated event page and to promote the event to every Twitter user over the first 10 hours” (something that has never been done in such a way for any kind of content).

According to Boreing, after Twitter reviewed the film, they said they would not purchase the package and would limit the reach of the film, calling it “hateful conduct” due to misgendering. Twitter had removed “misgendering” from its safety policies, but the company told The Daily Wire they still consider it to be abuse and harassment.

After Boreing and company personally appealed to Musk, however, the tide turned.

“This was a mistake,” Musk said on Twitter. “Whether or not you agree with using someone’s preferred pronouns, not doing so is at most rude and certainly breaks no laws.” Musk went on to say he personally uses someone’s preferred pronouns, just as he would someone’s preferred names, for the sake of “good manners.”

“However,” he continued, “for the same reason, I object to rude behavior, ostracism or threats of violence if the wrong pronoun or name is used.”

Afterward, the prospects for What Is a Woman?’s exclusive treatment crystallized. “Commenting & deliberate sharing will be allowed. Sensitive content just won’t be pushed to people unless they ask for it or a friend sends it to them,” Musk said Thursday night, explaining that the post would not be recommended to people who don’t follow The Daily Wire, nor would any advertising be associated with it.

Of course, this whole seemingly compromising, “measured” response blew up by Musk’s own hand, when he told his 141.8 million followers that “every parent should watch” the documentary. Which is to say, the content would be pushed to anyone who follows Musk or even follows someone who follows him, even if they did not ask for it—explicitly contradicting Musk’s own statement (setting aside the irony of Musk giving any parenting advice, given his own transgender daughter disowned him as a father after she turned 18).

What’s more, though, is that the contradiction certainly did not seem accidental.

“The Streisand Effect on this will set an all-time record!” Musk tweeted in response to a user encouraging people to watch the movie.

“The controversy will drive viewership,” Musk assured Boreing after The Daily Wire’s head complained about the “terrible day.”

Walsh, for his part, called the final outcome of “Elon Musk himself tweeting out the film and urging people to watch it” a “huge win.”

Again, Musk’s decision-making did not have all interests in mind. Also on Thursday, Musk tweeted that gender-affirming care “is a major problem” and that he will “be actively lobbying to criminalize” such care for people under the age of 18.

The episode comes after Musk has been quick to heed requests from Turkey and India to suppress free speech; the common denominator being a complete lack of principle or standards and a pathetic subservience to power interests on the far right. Musk, who often pretends to be a moderate, is neither, in his politics nor in his role as Twitter CEO.

Again, even if Musk was some universal free-speech maximalist, he wouldn’t have to personally promote videos that only happen to punch down against transgender people. He could, for instance, be promoting content that confronts the corruption of fossil fuel or weapon companies, or Big Pharma, or Israel’s treatment of Palestine. Instead, it just coincidentally happens that the “free speech” Musk advocates for is often language that attacks already marginalized people, and seldom challenges corporate interests that harm all of us.

Funny too Musk, again, one of the world’s biggest elites, thinks he is speaking truth to power. Fellow delusionally self-proclaimed moderate Tim Pool proclaimed Friday that “Elon is facing the reality of going up against the world’s political powers.”

“I am on team humanity,” Musk responded simply.

Like Rasputin, the Biden economy refuses to die even as the Federal Reserve, Congress, and the nation’s bank executives try to club it to death. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, reported Friday morning that 339,000 jobs were created in May. That’s pretty much in line with the average over the previous 12 months (341,000).

The Fed won’t be pleased. It has raised interest rates 10 times since March 22, with three quarter-point hikes this year, and Fed governor Philip Jefferson signaled in a speech this week that the Fed would not raise them again in June while it assessed the state of the economy. It may have to reconsider. Inflation has been drifting down for nearly a year, but Fed Chairman Jerome Powell believes it necessary to increase unemployment significantly to keep it down. The BLS report said unemployment ticked up slightly in May, to 3.7 percent, which is still extremely low. (How can job growth increase while unemployment rises, you may wonder? The numbers are taken from different surveys.)

The Republican-controlled House did its best to wreck the Biden economy with its threatened refusal to raise the debt limit. But that dream died when it reached agreement this week with Biden on a package projected to reduce spending by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. The debt ceiling bill cleared the House Wednesday and the Senate late Thursday, well in advance of the so-called “X date.” We’re still waiting to see what kind of revenge House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s hard-right flank will take.

Executives of three now-defunct midsize banks—Silicon Valley, Signature, and First Republic—threatened to bring on a recession through enthusiastic mismanagement enabled by deregulation. It’s mostly on the banking sector’s behalf that the Fed is contemplating a pause in interest rate hikes. But the Biden expansion continues, undaunted and undead.

On Thursday, twice-impeached, criminally indicted, and liable-for-sexual-abuse former President Donald Trump told a room of faith leaders in Iowa that “we have to bring religion back into our country.”

It’s unclear when or how religion exactly “left” the United States, according to Trump. As far as Christianity goes, it still is deeply baked in an array of American institutions, not least in the pledge of allegiance children are forced to recite every morning in their supposedly politics-free classrooms. Moreover, we have representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who proudly proclaimed herself to be a Christian nationalist, or Lauren Boebert, who said, “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

Bar nothing, Republicans’ most drawn-upon course of action in the face of tragedies is not government action or policy change, but prayer.

Recall that as president, Trump explicitly brought religion into politics by targeting religious minorities with things like his infamous Muslim ban, regularly sharing antisemitic conspiracy theories, and nominating a Supreme Court justice who was part of a religious covenant that called for women to be subservient to men.

More likely than not, Trump’s comments are part of a broader handwave toward vilifying LGBTQ people (framed by the far right as perverse or “ungodly”) at the beginning of Pride Month, and a token of reminder toward conservative religious groups that have jostled to erode abortion rights in this country. Given Trump is in primary mode for now, he’s looking to harden all bases of support, especially in the wake of groups like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America condemning the former president for refusing to declare his support for a federal abortion ban.

Of course, whether Trump is encouraging even further encroachment of religion into our institutions, or whether he’s specifically nodding toward vilifying LGBTQ people or eroding abortion rights, it’s all unpopular. So he can throw the comments out as much as he wants—funnier too given that every other primary candidate will try to one-up everything he says. Once the primary is all said and done, the output will be a Republican candidate whose agenda is enveloped in the kind of extreme conservative objectives that have led the party to lose over and over and over again.

A public library in Montana on Thursday canceled a talk that would feature a transgender speaker, due to the state’s newly implemented drag ban.

The Butte-Silver Bow Public Library hosts a monthly series called First Fridays, which features a speaker or documentary on the first Friday of each month. The library was set to host trans Indigenous journalist Adria Jawort on June 2 to discuss the history of two-spirit (the Indigenous term for trans and nonbinary) people in Montana and the community’s current experiences.

But on Thursday, the library announced they were canceling Jawort’s appearance out of concern it would violate the law. “Our ‘First Friday’ speaker has been cancelled due to recent legislation (HB359) and at the recommendation of Butte-Silver Bow County legal council,” the library wrote on its Facebook page.

“Our commitment to promoting inclusivity and intellectual exploration remains, but not in violation of law.”

Jawort told The New Republic that she was “surprised” and “shocked” the library had canceled her lecture. There had already been complaints, to the point that the library was considering having a police presence during her speech, but she did not expect the event to be canceled altogether.

“The lecture was how LGBTQ2s, trans, two-spirit people have existed since time immemorial in the Americas,” Jawort said. “That’s always my greatest weapon in the fight against bigotry and ignorance, is knowledge. And that’s why these lectures are important.”
Jawort noted that her lecture was canceled just two months after the Montana state legislature censured Zooey Zephyr, the state’s first and only trans lawmaker. “They’ll [say,] ‘Oh, it’s because of this, because of that,’ but then the bottom line is no, you’re explicitly choosing to silence trans people,” Jawort said.

Governor Greg Gianforte signed the extreme, vaguely worded drag ban just last week. The law bans drag performers, which are defined as “a male or female performer who adopts a flamboyant or parodic feminine persona with glamorous or exaggerated costumes and makeup,” from performing where children are present. It is also the first measure to specifically ban drag story hours in public libraries, meaning it does not only restrict performances that might be more openly sexual.

Jawort is not a drag queen, and the lecture was intended for adults, although children could have attended if they wanted. The library’s decision is a sign that the drag bans are having their intended effect: forcing LGBTQ people out of public view. The law is so confusing, and the punishments are so high, that many people and organizations are trying to avoid the risk.

Montana was the third state to ban drag performances, after Tennessee in March and Florida in May. The Tennessee law was blocked by a judge for violating free speech rights, but Pride groups in Florida are already canceling events in light of the new legislation. A similar bill has passed the Texas legislature, and Governor Greg Abbott is widely expected to sign the measure into law.

This post has been updated.