Trump's revealing complaint about his 'stolen' 2 years

The only time Mueller "stole" from Trump was potentially positive media time, and that's the time he values most

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | STR/AFP/Getty Images, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Alex Wong/Getty Images, The7Dew/iStock)

President Trump's signature ballad, "No Collusion No Obstruction (Fake News Witch Hunt)," gained a new verse this weekend. Inspired by a tweet from Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., Trump announced to the world late Saturday that Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation has "stolen two years of my (our) Presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back." His retweet of Falwell's comment, posted the night before, proposed adding two years to his first presidential term "as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup."

Though they prompted some jitters, these tweets strike me as a joke — albeit a very bad one with a subject that should always be off-limits for a sitting president. (Trump is so visibly eager to lay into 2020 Democrats that I doubt his bullying urges would tolerate an election delay.) But even if they shouldn't be taken literally, these comments about "stolen" time are revealing, because the only sort of time the Russia probe has taken from Trump's presidency is press time.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.