The Daily Show‘s Trevor Noah was shocked by the Trump administration’s apparent new strategy of admitting everything and pretending they have nothing to hide, following an astonishing Thursday press briefing from Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney at which he admitted there was a quid pro quo with Ukraine, that the U.S. withheld aid in exchange for an investigation into Trump’s political rival. The admission has conservative jaws dropping.
Said Mulvaney: “We do that all the time with foreign policy. And I have news for everybody. Get over it. There’s going to be political influence in foreign policy.”
Quipped Noah: “OK, hold up, hold up. Trump has said on multiple occasions ‘no quid pro quo of any kind.’ Now, middle-aged Harry Potter is coming out saying that there was a certain type of quid pro quo and everyone must ‘get over it?’ That’s it, just get over it? Everybody does it? So this is what, locker room corruption, is that what this is?”
“And I’m not gonna lie,” added Noah. “This is a twist I didn’t see coming. It’s like the murder suspect in a Law & Order episode confessing in the middle of the scene, just being like, ‘Yea, I committed the double homicide but the real question here is, ‘are you gonna be a little bitch about it?’ Huh? The person’s dead. Ain’t nothing gonna change.'”
Jimmy Kimmel also offered his take on it.
Said Kimmel: “So all the bad stuff they’ve been saying the president didn’t do, now they’re saying he did it and he does it ‘all the time’? Their defense has gone from ‘If the glove doesn’t fit you must acquit’ to ‘Gimme back my glove!'”
And Anderson Cooper and Jeffrey Toobin were talking about it over on CNN.
Said Toobin: “I mean, this is not just some gotcha thing because we all want to get something on the chief of staff. Here we have congressionally appropriated money. Congress says give this money to the Ukrainians. Taxpayer money. And what the White House has done and what they admitted today was, you only get the money if you help us win the election. Not because you help us [with] national security, international relations. The only thing we want from you is help to defeat Democrats. That is wrong. That’s why this matters.”
