Trump Goes on Scary Rant After Lawyer's Office Raided

Last night, after the news broke that the FBI raided the office and residence of Donald Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen, Trump, at a meeting with senior military leadership, went on an unprompted, extended rant about the raid, which segued into another authoritatian nightmare jeremiad, in which he advocated investigations of his political rivals, repeatedly called Special Counsel Bob Mueller's investigation a "disgrace," attacked his own Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and segued directly into boasting about America's military might, with a promise to deliver a decision on Syria soon.

It was a chilling diatribe, familiarly pinging many of the worrying authoritarian instincts that have been a feature of Trump's presidency, interspersed with demonstrable lies and unsubstaniable braggadocio, then punctuated with what seems more like a threat to launch a war in retaliation more for legal attempts to hold him accountable than for the chemical attack itself.

All of this was spontaneous preamble before he introduced John Bolton and took some questions from the press.

So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys — a good man. And it's a disgraceful situation. It's a total witch hunt. I've been saying it for a long time. I've wanted to keep it down. We've given, I believe, over a million pages' worth of documents to the Special Counsel.

They continue to just go forward. And here we are talking about Syria and we're talking about a lot of serious things. We're the greatest fighting force ever. And I have this witch hunt constantly going on for over 12 months now — and actually, much more than that. You could say it was right after I won the nomination, it started.

And it's a disgrace. It's, frankly, a real disgrace. It's an attack on our country, in a true sense. It's an attack on what we all stand for.

So when I saw this and when I heard it — I heard it like you did — I said, that is really now on a whole new level of unfairness.

So this has been going on — I saw one of the reporters, who is not necessarily a fan of mine, not necessarily very good to me. He said, in effect, that this is ridiculous; this is now getting ridiculous. They found no collusion whatsoever with Russia. The reason they found it is there was no collusion at all. No collusion. This is the most biased group of people. These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I've ever seen.

Democrats all — or just about all — either Democrats or a couple of Republicans that worked for President Obama, they're not looking at the other side; they're not looking at the Hillary Clinton — the horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed. They're not looking at all of the things that happened that everybody is very angry about, I can tell you, from the Republican side, and I think even the independent side. They only keep looking at us.

So they find no collusion, and then they go from there and they say, "Well, let's keep going." And they raid an office of a personal attorney early in the morning. And I think it's a disgrace.

So we'll be talking about it more. But this is the most conflicted group of people I've ever seen. The Attorney General made a terrible mistake when he did this, and when he recused himself. Or he should have certainly let us know if he was going to recuse himself, and we would have used a — put a different Attorney General in. So he made what I consider to be a very terrible mistake for the country. But you'll figure that out.

All I can say is, after looking for a long period of time — and even before the Special Counsel — because it really started just about from the time I won the nomination. And you look at what took place and what happened, and it's a disgrace. It's a disgrace.

I've been president now for what seems like a lengthy period of time. We've done a fantastic job. We've beaten ISIS. We have just about 100 percent of the caliphate or the land. Our economy is incredible. The stock market dropped a lot today as soon as they heard the noise of this nonsense that's going on. It dropped a lot. It was up — way up, and then it dropped quite a bit at the end. A lot.

But that we have to go through that — we've had that hanging over us now from the very, very beginning. And yet the other side, they don't even bother looking. And the other side is where there are crimes, and those crimes are obvious. Lies, under oath, all over the place. Emails that are knocked out, that are acid-washed and deleted. Nobody has ever seen — 33,000 emails are deleted after getting a subpoena for Congress, and nobody bothers looking at that. And many, many other things.

So I just think it's a disgrace that a thing like this can happen. With all of that being said, we are here to discuss Syria tonight. We're the greatest fighting force anywhere in the world. These gentlemen and ladies are incredible people, incredible talent, and we're making a decision as to what we do with respect to the horrible attack that was made near Damascus. And it will be met, and it will be met forcefully. And when, I will not say, because I don't like talking about the timing.

But we are developing the greatest force that we've ever had. We had $700 billion just approved, which was the reason I went along with that budget because we had to fix our military. General Mattis would tell you that above anybody. We had to fix our military. And right now, we're in a big process of doing that. Seven-hundred billion and then $716 billion next year.

So we're going to make a decision tonight, or very shortly thereafter. And you'll be hearing the decision. But we can't let atrocities like we all witnessed — and you can see that and it's horrible — we can't let that happen. In our world, we can't let that happen, especially when we're able to — because of the power of the United States, because of the power of our country — we're able to stop it.

All of this is very bad.

And the brief Q&A with reporters that followed was bad, too. It was bad because Trump ended it by saying: "We have a lot of options, militarily. And we'll be letting you know pretty soon. Probably after the fact." Which is definitely not how that is supposed to work. And it was bad because members of the press are still asking questions like this:

Q Why don't you just fire Mueller?

Trump: Why don't I just fire Mueller?

Q Yeah, just fire the guy.

Trump: Well, I think it's a disgrace what's going on. We'll see what happens.

And then he launched into another mini-diatribe about what a "disgrace" the "witch hunt" is.

We have well and truly lost any benchmark for what is normal in the 445 days Trump has been in office, but this ain't it. And I am despondent about the number of my fellow countrypeople who have allowed themselves to become inured to this aggressive abnormality, this vile malignancy, and can greet Trump's disgorged authoritarian haranges with nothing but jokes or indifference.

This is worth getting outraged about. This demands our expressed rejection. It is intolerable. Say so, wherever you can.