Marc Short, the White House’s director of legislative affairs, on Sunday said that if allegations of sexual misconduct against Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore were not “credible,” President Donald Trump would be actively campaigning for him.
“You work for the President. Does the President believe the women or not?” George Stephanopoulos asked Short on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“Obviously, George, if he did not believe that the women’s accusations were credible he would be down campaigning for Roy Moore. He has not done that,” Short replied.
He said Trump “has concerns about the accusations, but he is also concerned that these accusations are 38 years old.”
The earliest accusations of sexual misconduct against Trump himself are barely older than that; one woman told the New York Times in October 2016 that Trump groped her on a flight “more than three decades earlier.”
“I don’t think you have seen him go down there and campaign for him. I don’t think you have seen him issue an endorsement. You have not seen him issue robocalls,” Short said. “You should certainly be able to infer by the fact that he has not gone down to support Roy Moore his discomfort in doing so.”
Ooo. Edging away from Moore, but only enough to test the floorboards.
In other words, Trump believes the allegations against Moore are very credible. Which invites the next question: why aren’t the allegations against Trump equally credible? And why attack Senator Franken for actions magnitudes less severe than Moore’s?
Seems like he really opened a can of worms here. I guess we should expect more LaVar Ball tweets to deflect. Unhappily, LaVar Ball also hasn’t met a camera he didn’t like.
o/t - this made me laugh - and I thought others might enjoy the laugh. An embedded twitter thread riffing on a Trumpian draft of the Gettysburg Address (click to get to the tweet and thread)
I think one of the first bills Judge Moore should file once he takes his Senate seat would be a bill to require all sexual misconduct settlements while in office shall be paid by the accused parties and not the taxpayers!!, along with a public record of these settlements.