Donald Trump responded to rumors that he’s currently building an “impeachment team” to battle against the Democrat impeachment inquiry.
He destroyed the rumors by declaring “I don’t have teams. Everyone’s talking about teams. I’m the team. I did nothing wrong. It’s been going on from before I was elected.”
Coordinate the message
Trump’s statement comes in the face of criticism from Republicans that Donald Trump has not coordinated and unified his team on their impeachment message.
One Republican senator even asked, “Does he need to be so unhinged? He says the dumbest things […] there needs to be a coordinated response to everything. There needs to be a coordinated effort to just shut up.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), an outspoken supporter of Trump also admonished the White House that “what’s missing here I think is that coordinated effort to put somebody in charge of developing a message and delivering it.”
Donald Trump seems to have chosen himself for the job, and he’s pulled no punches in defending his innocence against Democrat accusations of corruption and abuse of power.
“I did nothing wrong,” he said. “I know that people are still in a basement [at the Capitol], in a secure room in the basement, trying to make us look as bad as possible, but that’s not working too well.”
“I’m the team”
Comments from GOP leaders are undoubtedly prompted by a string of miscommunications and gaffes that have plagued Donald Trump’s administration for the last week.
It started with acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney’s press conference admission that Democrats should “get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy,” which was interpreted as an admission of the quid pro quo accusation that started the entire debacle.
Then Trump himself publically compared the impeachment inquiry to a “lynching”, which raised the hackles of the media and sparked criticism from both sides of the aisle.
Despite his fair share of gaffes, Donald Trump clearly doesn’t want handlers to control his communication with the American people and thus has opted to bypass building a so-called impeachment team.
Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) summed it up by saying, “it could be helpful to have a more professional, coordinated communications effort. However, you have to be very careful to not prohibit Donald Trump from being Donald Trump and that’s the risk you run when you start institutionalizing these things.”