Tunes, looney

From Donald Trump’s letter to Nancy Pelosi protesting impeachment, a passage that sounds as if the president himself is the writer:

Even worse than offending the Founding Fathers, you are offending Americans of faith by continually saying “I pray for the President,” when you know this statement is not true, unless it is meant in a negative sense. It is a terrible thing you are doing, but you will have to live with it, not I!

I notice here the vague passive-voice accusation “unless it is meant in a negative sense.” Meaning what? That Pelosi prays for the president’s destruction? “But you will have to live with it” has something of the self-righteousness of Lucy van Pelt. And that hypercorrect “not I!” There’s our president on his best grammar (though unable to resist an exclamation point, one of eight in a little over five pages).

At other points, the letter sounds like something from the prosecutor in a totalitarian state’s show trial:

Yet, when the monstrous lie was debunked and this Democrat conspiracy dissolved into dust, you did not apologize. You did not recant. You did not ask to be forgiven. You showed no remorse, no capacity for self-reflection. Instead, you pursued your next libelous and vicious crusade-you engineered an attempt to frame and defame an innocent person.

The president — or whoever wrote this passage — is projecting: that phrase “no capacity for self-reflection,” as any search engine will confirm, has often been applied to Trump himself. Here too there’s a dash of Lucy van Pelt: “You showed no remorse, Charlie Brown, no capacity for self-reflection!”

And oh, that hyphen.

[A tweet from Jonathan Karl, ABC News, identifies Eric Ueland (White House Director of Legislative Affairs), Stephen Miller (yes, that one), and Michael Williams (an aide to Mick Mulvaney) as the letter’s drafters.]