How was your weekend? It’s finally summer, good for grilling or hanging out outdoors, and it was also Father’s Day, a fine time to celebrate family and loved ones. Do you know who was not spending the day over a charcoal fire in mesh shorts and an old T-shirt? Donald Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow, who was the latest of the president’s lackeys ushered before the cameras to defend some insane shit that his boss tweeted.
The Washington Post published a story last week revealing that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the election had expanded to directly include the president himself. For people hoping that this investigation might eventually oust Trump just a few months into his presidency, this was very good news. Trump later confirmed the report, tweeting:
This would count as confirmation—that is, anywhere except the world of the Trump administration, wherein an enfeebled, meatloaf-fed old racist’s mid-morning online grievances are alternately treated as gospel and not, where his tweets are simultaneously a direct funnel to his supporters and a little hobby of his that we shouldn’t pay much attention to. We have seen the back-breaking work of upholding these two versions of reality create, for Kellyanne Conway, the phrase “alternative facts,” and for Sean Spicer, a cognitive dissonance so unbearable that he hid in some bushes rather than talk to reporters.
In the case of Sekulow’s Shitty Sunday, though, we got to watch him melt in real-time. First he squared off against the steely objectivity of Face The Nation’s John Dickerson:
Not bad! He’s able to cleanly deliberate the competing arguments here while also dodging a couple of questions. Next up was Chuck Todd on Meet The Press:
Sekulow holds a ferocious stare here, again taking the company line that “Twitter is just Trump doing Trump-y shit.” He debuts the presidential-looking papers prop, and, though he’s getting beaten down, he’s still up for the job.
Even though he was finally on friendlier turf, he engaged in this circuitous pissing match with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, which has been chopped up and passed around repeatedly since then:
Shorter versions of the video have gone viral by people on both sides as evidence of a rhetorical victory, but, realistically, it is evidence almost exclusively of Jay Sekulow’s deteriorating sense of reality. Afterward he presumably went home and stared into the middle distance until a wordless, dreamless sleep seized him, granting the sweet release of unconsciousness.
[via Jezebel]
[Note: Jezebel, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]