President Donald Trump’s annual speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday was momentarily interrupted by an enthusiastic audience chanting, “Lock her up!” in response to the president’s comments regarding Hillary Clinton and Russia.
CPAC’s jeering and cheering audience
Attendees at the event just outside Washington, D.C. were provoked when Trump jokingly reiterated comments he made on the 2016 campaign trail asking Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails. Trump lamented that he couldn’t tell a joke or speak sarcastically without upsetting Democrats and the mainstream media.
“I’ve learned — because with the fake news, if you tell a joke, if you’re sarcastic, if you’re having fun with the audience,” Trump said, “If you say something like ‘Russia, please if you can, get us Hillary Clinton’s emails, please, Russia, please, please get us the emails.”
Trump goads the crowd into booing “the fake news,” then suggests he was just being sarcastic when he called for Russian hackers to go after Hillary Clinton’s emails during a 2016 news conference.
The crowd responds with “lock her up!” chants pic.twitter.com/kuCu61UgMr
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 2, 2019
The crowd erupted, and the sympathetic cheers from the conservative audience were eventually replaced with chants of “Lock her up!”, an unofficial campaign slogan that Trump supporters adopted in 2016 to demand justice for Clinton’s email scandal.
The uppity FBI
The FBI announced in July of that year that the former secretary of state would not face criminal charges for the unauthorized use of a personal email server, even though Clinton’s staff intentionally erased some 30,000 messages before investigators could review them. Referencing those mysterious emails in a July 27, 2016 news conference, Trump facetiously called on Russia for help.
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press,” Trump said at the time.
With the election up for grabs, the media went into overdrive suggesting that Trump was honestly conspiring with Russia to hack the Clinton campaign’s computers. One widely reported scoop strongly intimated that Russian hackers actually responded to Trump’s press conference by infiltrating Clinton’s personal office and campaign with phishing emails, although reporters had to admit that “the exact timing of both of those efforts is unclear.”
Even the FBI used Trump’s jocular comments as a pretense to open an investigation into the president’s ties to Russia. “Mr. Trump had caught the attention of F.B.I. counterintelligence agents when he called on Russia during a campaign news conference in July 2016 to hack into the emails of his opponent, Hillary Clinton,” a January New York Times report noted.
In an April 2018 20/20 interview with ABC Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos, former FBI Director James Comey — whom Trump fired for incompetence — was asked about the president’s message to Moscow. “You could argue it’s an indication that they don’t have a secret channel with the Russians, or you could argue it means they’re in bed with the Russians and there must be connections that we can find,” Comey said. “And so it was obviously of interest to us, but we already had the investigation underway.”
Like much of his senior staff and the mainstream media, Comey never considered that Trump was speaking tongue-in-cheek when he asked Moscow to unearth Clinton’s deleted email trove. What was obvious to anyone with a sense of humor at the time — that Trump was making light of Clinton’s email problems — went completely over the heads of the straight-laced FBI director and his allies in the liberal media.
They can dish it out, but they can’t take it
Fortunately, Trump took the FBI’s plot to use his campaign rhetoric against him in stride, and he is comfortable enough to poke fun at the controversy two years later during his CPAC speech. His audience responded in kind with the “Lock her up” chant, another artifact of the 2016 Trump campaign that Democrats took far too seriously.
“‘Lock her up’ is the chant of a banana republic,” humorless Washington Post contributor Jennifer Rubin complained during the presidential race.
And yet, Democrats love to poke fun at the commander-in-chief, often taking their acts too far in the process. The helium-voiced Michelle Wolf’s disgraceful White House Correspondents dinner routine comes to mind.
But when it comes to Trump’s own attempts at humor, the late Rodney Dangerfield’s favorite line serves as a fitting source of inspiration: “I don’t get no respect!”
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