Former New Jersey Chris Christie (R) told ABC's This Week on Sunday that President Trump is sure to perjure himself if he agrees to speak with Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
Once one of Trump's earliest and most vocal supporters, Christie has since changed his tune, becoming the latest former Trump loyalist to acknowledge the president's apoplectic relationship with the truth.
Christie explained that Trump's "salesman" attitude forces him to say things hyperbolically, which Mueller could easily turn into a perjury charge.
He should never walk into that room with Robert Mueller. Because in the end, one of the things that makes the president who he is, is that he’s a salesman. And salesmen, at times, tend to be hyperbolic. Right, and this president certainly has tended to do that.
Hyperbole may be excusable on the campaign trail, Christie added, but when you're speaking with federal agents, lying is a crime.
Christie seems to be implying that Trump, 71, lacks the capability, or at the very least, the willingness, to distinguish truth from fiction.
That’s okay when you’re on the campaign hustle. That’s okay when you’re working on Congress. It is not okay when you’re sitting talking to federal agents because, you know, 18 USC 1001 is false statements to federal agents. That’s a crime. That can send you to jail.
Doubts surrounding Trump's propensity for "alternative facts" and the coddling he receives from aides certainly aren't limited to Christie. "I don't' know how much TV Trump watches," said Dr. Ronny Jackson, the president's physician and pick to run the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Washington Post contributor Daniel Drezner has kept a running tab on Trump's ongoing falsehoods, noting that Trump will start acting presidential "when his staff stops treating him like a toddler."
And on Tuesday, Greg Sargent of the Washington Post issued a scathing Op-Ed after Trump issued a series of bizarre, fact-free tweets about DACA.
President Trump lies with such frequency, and his ignorance of policy basics is so omnipresent, that it’s often easy to allow the superficial absurdity of his statements to distract us from the actual underlying point he’s making. In some cases, that underlying point is more reprehensible than the surface falsehoods he employed to convey it.
On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted that DACA was dead and it was all the fault of Democrats. Reminder, Trump abruptly ended DACA last fall, and both parties have been scrambling to find a solution to the program. More than 800,000 undocumented immigrants face deportation if DACA's future remains uncertain.
