Most people don’t need a law degree to know that it’s a gross abuse of power for the president of the United States to get on the phone with the leader of another country and ask the guy to investigate a political rival, and to imply that if the probe doesn’t happen, military aid will be withheld. (According to the whistle-blower complaint, White House lawyers knew this too, which is why they allegedly “directed” officials to “remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which such transcripts are typically stored” and load the transcript “into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature.”) Then you have legal scholar Donald Trump. For the past week, he’s insisted that his conversation with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was “perfectly fine and respectful.” And on Friday, in the midst of yet another full-fledged meltdown, he claimed that asking a foreign power to dig up dirt on a political rival such that it could affect the presidential election is perfectly legal, too.

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Ranting that journalist Peter Baker of “the Failing New York Times” shouldn’t be allowed to write about him because he “wrote a book about Obama,” Trump shrieked: “I had a simple and very nice call with with the new President of Ukraine, it could not have been better or more honorable, and the Fake News Media and Democrats, working as a team, have fraudulently made it look bad. It wasn’t bad, it was very legal and very good. A continuing Witch Hunt!”

It was not his only pearl of wisdom of the morning. Others included:

A call for Rep. Adam Schiff to resign:

All-caps quoting himself:

A deranged fever dream:

More Schiff:

The “logic” that if you can’t ask a foreign leader to meddle in a U.S. election, you should just call it a day:

And a self-own to end all self-owns:

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