How Long Can Donald Trump's Art of Deflection Work?
"I think he is going off information he's seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential," Sanders insisted. "The American people have a right to know if this took place."
Yes, what about the American people's right to know? This is "whataboutism" stretched to its limits. The American people have a right to know not only whether Trump's phones were tapped, if they were, but also why Trump thinks they were tapped.
Yet he provided no evidence to back up the charge.
When Raddatz pressed the point, Sanders said, "His tweet speaks for itself."
Ah, that's more of a burden than a tweet can bear.
"He's talking about, could this have happened?" she said.
No, he wasn't. He was insisting that it did happen. "Terrible!" said Trump's early Saturday morning tweet. "Just found out that Obama had my 'wires tapped' in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!"
Trump made the charge by tweet and then left his spokespeople to fend for themselves. That left a major challenge, even for a master of deflection like top Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" Monday morning.
"We have this double standard for anonymous sources," said Conway. "The media loves to use anonymous sources for anything and everything that could possibly be derogatory, negative for this president and his administration. And yet they refuse to give any credibility to such sources when it may be something positive or exculpatory."
Ah, yes, that's the old whataboutist technique of saying, "Why do you only report the bad news? What about all the good things that our president has done?"
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