Even Rick Santorum, one of President Trump’s most loyal cable news sycophants, couldn’t bring himself to defend the president’s weekend-long tweetstorm on Monday night, wishing the president would send emails to a “therapist” instead of airing his grievances to the public.
In dozens of tweets and retweets, the president took aim at a long list of parties and individuals (dead and alive) that were rankling him. He blasted a deceased war hero and senator. He railed against Fox News anchors who weren’t sufficiently obsequious. He whined about a Saturday Night Live rerun. He demanded that Fox News “bring back” pro-Trump host Jeanine Pirro after she was suspended for Islamophobic remarks.
Noting that one topic conspicuously absent from Trump’s Twitter feed over the weekend was the New Zealand mosque attacks, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper asked Santorum whether a family would “be a little concerned” if their dad or uncle acted in this manner.
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“There’s nothing I’m going to do to defend the president in this type of activity,” a defeated Santorum sighed.
Adding that Trump gets in his own way on things like a good economy, the CNN political commentator lamented that the president “likes to focus on things that aggrieve him” and that it’s “all personal.”
Asked whether this was all a strategy by the president, Santorum said “maybe this is his therapy” while expressing astonishment over the sheer amount of Twitter activity the president engages in.
“This is his time just to sort of let it all out,” he asserted. “And he sees Twitter as his outlet to do that. I wish he wouldn't do it. I wish he would write them and send e-mails to—you know, to a therapist, as opposed to sending tweets to the general public.”
When the conversation shifted to the president’s inability to call out white supremacy, Santorum insisted the president sees “everything through the eyes of him” and is unable to say anything that “reflects badly on people that support him.”
“He's not going to comment on [the mosque attack], because he's—he sees that as somehow, you know, an admission,” Santorum declared. “So he just leaves it alone and he goes out and attacks people who attack him. That's what he does.”
