Glenn Youngkin couldn’t allow himself to admit in a CNN interview that Donald Trump wants to use the military to go after political rivals.
Our governor has obviously deluded himself into thinking that Trump will give him a job if he wins, which, neither is going to happen, but even so, that’s why he can’t concede the obvious, that the presidential candidate that he is backing wants to turn the United States into a literal military dictatorship.
“I don’t think that he’s referring to elected people in America,” Youngkin insisted, low-key, in a back-and-forth with CNN’s Jake Tapper, who had the governor on to present his side of the dispute with the Department of Justice over his administration’s efforts to remove voters from the state’s rolls.
ICYMI: Virginia: Justice Department sues Youngkin administration over voter purge
Youngkin did OK talking around that one, before prostituting himself on the latest fascist rant from Trump, which emanated from a rally and a follow-up Fox News interview in which the ex-president talked about “the enemy from within,” “the scum that we have to deal with that hate our country,” “sick people, radical left lunatics” who “should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard or, if really necessary, by the military.”
“Is that something that you support?” Tapper asked Youngkin, who tried to wiggle out, claiming that “it’s my belief that what former President Trump is talking about are the people that are coming over the border, that in fact are committing crimes, that are bringing drugs, that are trafficking humans, and that are turning every state into a border state.”
Tapper’s response: huh, what?
“He was talking about ‘sick people, radical left lunatics who should be handled by the National Guard or the military,’” Tapper said. “And then later on in that same speech, he said that one of the lunatics he addressed was Congressman Adam Schiff. That’s who he was talking about using the National Guard and military against. ‘Radical left lunatics, enemy from within, people like Adam Schiff.’”
“Again, Jake, I don’t think that …”
“I’m just reading you his quote,” Tapper said.
“But I do think that you are misinterpreting and misrepresenting his thoughts,” Youngkin said. “I do believe, again, it’s all around the fact that we have had an unprecedented number of illegal immigrants come over the border in an unconstrained, unrestrained fashion.”
“I’m literally reading his quotes,” Tapper said. “I’m literally reading his quotes to you, and I played them earlier so you could hear that they were not made up by me. He’s literally talking about, quote, ‘radical left lunatics,’ and then one of those ‘lunatics’ he mentioned was Congressman Adam Schiff.”
“I don’t believe that’s what he’s saying,” Youngkin said.
“I played the quote, and I read it to you,” Tapper said. “You can wish that he weren’t saying that, but that’s what he said.”
“Jake, all the time, people are taking little snippets of content and turning it into a big narrative,” Youngkin said.
“I just want to note, I was just reading his quotes,” Tapper said. “And he was not talking about dangerous migrants in those quotes. Later, there were other quotes about those migrants, and he was saying that children shouldn’t even be sending their kids to school with the kids of migrants. But you don’t want to accept those quotes.”
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Chris Graham
