Sometimes, you get the feeling this president and his White House don't have much respect for the public. Their behavior has been shameless and crass and disgraceful from the actual day one, when then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer put on his clown suit and started ranting about the size of the inauguration crowd. More recently, Sarah Huckabee Sanders had the audacity to suggest Chief of Staff John Kelly's visible reaction to the president trashing our NATO allies at a NATO event was actually his response to a disappointing breakfast spread.

But Tuesday's shameless excuse-making came directly from Donald Trump, American president. While it was just-slightly-less-insulting to the intelligence of anyone forced to listen to it than was Sanders' appalling fuck-you-of-a-statement, the gravity of the issue at hand has to factor into the assessment:

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BREAKING: Pres. Trump says he misspoke during a key moment in his remarks about Russian interference in the 2016 election: "I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t’ ... The sentence should have been: 'I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia’” https://t.co/CEtaU7vcEG pic.twitter.com/qFEB3HG4EY — CNN (@CNN) July 17, 2018

This was the grand plan from the White House after the whole western world rose up in arms against Trump's performance standing next to Russian President Vladimir Putin at a press conference Monday: Uhh...we meant to say wouldn't, not would!

Never mind that Trump spent that entire disgraceful charade siding with Putin at every turn against American officials and American interests. Just open up, take a spoon full of this complete and total bullshit, and swallow it. What an insult, and it only serves to make Trump look even more weak. Having completely submitted to Putin at the press conference, the American president waited until he was thousands of miles away to pretend he's mustered the courage to confront an adversary. What a big, strong president.

Sadly, we can safely expect the various Concerned Republican Senators to pronounce themselves placated by this and sit idly by, having found an excuse to revert to their default setting of profound moral cowardice.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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