Mick Mulvaney Tries to Explain His ‘Trump Will Concede Gracefully’ Op-Ed: He ‘Has the Ability’ to Be Presidential
Of all the op-eds written in the Trump era, one of the most stunning in hindsight was Mick Mulvaney’s piece in the Wall Street Journal in November titled “If He Loses, Trump Will Concede Gracefully.”
Mulvaney tried to say that it was just the media being very, very unfair to the president when they asked if he would participate in a peaceful transition of power. He presented, at face value, that Trump would surely understand the seriousness of the moment and would not engage in “showmanship.”
“I have every expectation that Mr. Trump will be, act and speak like a great president should—win or lose,” Mulvaney said.
Not. Even. Close.
Even before the violent storming of the Capitol building by Trump supporters incited by the president, Trump repeatedly refused to concede and pushed all sorts of baseless claims about the election results for weeks, and got people riled up with nonsense about Mike Pence (and video evidence has shown the vice president was clearly a target of the mob).
So on Fox News Sunday, Mulvaney tried to explain that op-ed by saying, “I really did believe that at the time. The stories are told back that up were true. I’ve seen the president be presidential before and I know that he has the ability to do it. He did it every single day. I don’t know what’s different.”
Later on in the segment, Chris Wallace circled back to the op-ed with a pretty stunning question: “How could someone who worked with the president so closely for three years be so wrong about who Donald Trump was?”
Mulvaney again said it’s just that “something is different now.”
He even shared a story he’s never told before about Trump, and to be clear, the following anecdote involving allegations of witness tampering was something Mulvaney tried to highlight as a positive for the president:
“During the impeachment, the president tweeted something during the testimony and there was concern that it might rise to the level of tampering with witnesses. I know a little bit about the law, I practiced law a long time ago, it wasn’t that. But I was worried about the political impact of that, so I went to the president privately and said, ‘Mr. President, this is going to be a political problem, we need to fix this.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Okay,’ brought the lawyers down, talked to them, picked up the phone, called Kevin Mccarthy, brought Ivanka in, talked to them, talked to some of his friends in New York. Got a bunch of different opinions and then fixed it, reversed course, and did the right thing.”
You can watch above, via Fox News Sunday.
