When presented evidence he has done anything illegal, immoral, or embarrassing, Donald Trump has always used one of two responses. The first is turnabout, insisting his opponent is actually guilty of the thing Trump did (no puppet, you’re the puppet). The second is inversion, claiming reality is actually the complete opposite (nobody’s been tougher on Russia than me).
Last week, Liz Cheney revealed in her new book that Kevin McCarthy decided to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago a few weeks after the insurrection, when the party had shunned its former leader, because he was told Trump was so upset about losing that he wasn’t eating as much as normal.
Trump responded on social media at 12:56 a.m. Sunday, as one does. He decided to go with inversion: “I was not depressed, I WAS ANGRY, and it was not that I was not eating, it was that I was eating too much.”
Perhaps Trump considered turnabout and decided that it wouldn’t work to claim Liz Cheney was actually eating too little. (Trump’s favorite mode of attacking female critics is to say they’re eating too much; calling a woman too skinny probably wouldn’t compute in his mind as a plausible insult).
Trump famously views himself as an Adonis, frequently mocking the bodies of other politicians with smaller waistlines. He is, indeed, loath to concede error of any kind. Yet here he is confessing to gluttony. Trump’s own picture of his post-insurrection exile is a man swallowing his feelings about a failed coup attempt in a never-ending procession of steaks and burgers.
