Nada. I know--weird, right? The guy who alleged that Barack Obama wasn't born in the US, that Senator Ted Cruz's father was plotting with Lee Harvey Oswald, that there were five million illegal votes that skewed the popular vote total (somehow, mostly in California, a state where Hillary Clinton was already assured a win), and other peculiar not-proven shit, seems to have pulled this wiretapping thing out of his behind, and yet, for the sake of the credibility of the office, Spicer has to go out there and make the allegation seem not implausible--or even totally true. (Depending on Trump's mood, I guess.)
So, this leaves the beleaguered Press Sec. stating on Tuesday that he was "extremely confident" that evidence would prove the allegation true and disputing whether Trump even meant "wiretapping" of his "phones" since he used "quotation marks" and might have meant some other kind of surveillance. (Although as the above screencap from Trump's Twitter rant shows, he did mean phones, and did not always use quotation marks.)
Which brings us up to today, when, after comments from US AG Jeff Sessions that he didn't give Trump any reason to consider this story, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan saw no evidence to back the wiretap claims, Senate intelligence also rejected the claim but a wee bit before Spicer was about to do a briefing regarding the budget plan.
A scramble seems to have ensued to find stories to bolster the Trump claim, again, to make it seem plausible, and not like the POTUS simply makes things up, particularly not criminal allegations against a former President. So he read stories from the press to complain that they did not cover stories that might support Trump's claims, and which kind of did not help and sort of made it plausible that if any wiretap did exist, it was probably because legitimate illicit stuff was happening. It was a bit weird, and also right from Melissa McCarthy's SNL impersonation ("Those were your words!")
It gave me a bad feeling for Spicer for a moment, like it might have been better for his credibility if the press conference was cancelled altogether, or if he even resigned because defending this is an awful lot to ask. But somehow, claiming the determinations of both Houses of Congress as "not findings" (yeah, says I, because nothing was "found") snapped me out of it.
I began to think this had nothing to do with wiretapping claims, because by golly, even if Trump did not mean them "literally", we were taking them "seriously". And attention is attention. In the meantime, we were introduced to Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, who explained how cutting programs that fed kids and old people were really doing us all a kindness, if you could even call reducing the funding of something "a cut" at all, at all. And none of the assembled, gob-smacked journos even thought to ask about whether the Administration hired some kind of Hungarian Nazi either.
I truly detest these Trumpist people. I truly do.
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