When Meet the Press host Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump if he ever worries about “going to jail” for the crimes he’s been charged with, the former president claimed he is too busy thinking about “making the country great, making America great” to even consider it.
“No, I don’t really. I don’t even think about it,” Trump said in an interview that aired Sunday. “I’m built a little differently I guess, because I have had people come up to me and say, ‘How do you do it, sir? How do you do it?’ I don’t even think about it.”
Trump is currently under indictment by the federal government for alleged election interference and for keeping highly classified documents in his Florida home after he left the White House. He is also under indictment in the state of New York for an alleged hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and in Georgia for alleged attempts to interfere with the state’s 2020 election results.
“These are political, these are banana republic indictments,” Trump told Welker. “These are third-world indictments. The president of the United States sees how we’re doing. We have a movement the likes of which has never happened in this country before.”
At another point in the interview, Trump referred to special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the prosecution in the federal election interference case, as a “deranged lunatic.”
When Welker asked Trump, “Tell me what you see when you look at your mugshot?” the former president said he sees “somebody that loves this country, and me, that loves this country.”
“I see tremendous unfairness,” Trump continued. “I think very few people would have been able to handle what I handled. When I was coming down the escalator with Melania, I was already under investigation, because they saw how well I was doing in the polls. And it just got worse and worse, and we caught them. We said, ‘They were spying on our campaign.’ It turned out to be true. They had the fake dossier. That turned out to be true. It was paid for by the Democratic party. It was all fiction.”
There is, however, zero evidence that there was any “spying” on the Trump campaign. Trump’s own appointed FBI director even disagreed with using the term to describe the court-approved “investigative activity” and “surveillance” that the FBI engaged in regarding Trump’s campaign and its ties to Russia.
But facts have never stopped Trump from whining and playing the victim. “All of these things happened,” he said. “Impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two. I’ve been treated very badly. And, I’ve won every single time. When you say, ‘Do I sleep?’ I sleep, I sleep. Because I truly feel that in the end, we’re going to win. I think we’re going to win an election the likes of which nobody’s ever seen before. I don’t think anything’s going to stop it. Nothing’s going to stop it, because people see what’s happened to our country.”
But, of course, there is something that could stop Trump from running the country. The nation can’t have a president running the government from a jail cell, should he be found guilty and sentenced to incarceration for any of his numerous alleged crimes.