President Trump is mulling a new line of defense against the ongoing impeachment inquiry into his actions with Ukraine: embodying FDR.
During an interview with the Washington Examiner on Thursday, just after the House voted to approve the impeachment inquiry process, Trump said he wanted to convince the American people that he did nothing wrong by performing a play on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chat.” He told the Washington Examiner he believes if he just read the transcript — the White House’s version of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky — in public, people would be on his side.
“This is over a phone call that is a good call,” Trump told the Examiner on Thursday. “At some point, I’m going to sit down, perhaps as a fireside chat on live television, and I will read the transcript of the call, because people have to hear it. When you read it, it’s a straight call.”
Trump also alluded to a fight-back campaign to convince the general public that he’s in the right, which would include t-shirts with the slogan “Read the transcript” emblazoned on them. Trump also maintained his innocence and argued to the Examiner that other past presidents who have faced impeachment were clearly in the wrong.
“Everybody knows I did nothing wrong,” he said. “Bill Clinton did things wrong; Richard Nixon did things wrong. I won’t go back to [Andrew] Johnson because that was a little before my time,” he said. “But they did things wrong. I did nothing wrong.”
