On his CNN show, Anderson Cooper recently reported on, and mocked, the series of excuses that former President Donald Trump has given in the aftermath of the FBI’s search warranted executed at his Mar-a-Lago residence looking for classified documents. Cooper’s chyrons read “keeping them honest” and “let’s try *this* one.”
Cooper said:
“Good evening and welcome to what might be called the ‘perfect phone call’ stage in the latest scandal involving the former president. You’ll recall, ‘perfect phone call’ was the phrase the former president used to describe the call that got him impeached. The call in which he tried to strong-arm the president of Ukraine into helping him smear Joe Biden. He called it a perfect phone call after his supporters and enablers had made a slew of excuses about the call, none of which really held up.”
He continued:
“So the then-president embraced the call and said it that was perfect. That is where we’ve landed tonight after two business weeks of unprecedented revelations since the FBI agents executed a lawful search warrant at Mar-a-Lago and came away with eleven sets of documents the former president was not entitled to have, including four sets of highly classified material.”
Cooper continued by showing a Newsmax clip of former New York City Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, saying, “The president’s one-time attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has now made the perfect phone call excuse…this perfect phone call excuse has come after an evolution of excuses made by the former president’s supporters for having the files stashed at a country club.”
He also played clips of Donald Trumps’ son Eric Trump and Trump-loving Senators Sen. Rick Scott of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky making additional excuses for Trump’s possibly treasonous actions.
Trump’s excuses famously ranged from “I didn’t do it,” to “I did it but it’s not a crime,” to “the documents were planted,” to “Obama did it to” (he didn’t). Esquire published this excellent timeline for the evolution of the Trump excuses, subtitled There was nothing there! It wasn’t important! It was planted! It was auto-declassified! Obama!
