Did it happen? My best guess, applying the Occam’s Razor principle, is yes, but that Trump was so busy misbehaving in so many other ghastly ways that the episode didn’t particularly stand out. “When that kid was 10,” Walker said shortly before he died in 2015 (again, per Kranish and Fisher), “even then he was a little shit.”
Trump’s lawyer John F. Lauro, not the brightest bulb in the box, drew much ridicule this past weekend when he said on the Sunday news shows that when Trump told Vice President Mike Pence to toss out legitimate electoral ballots and substitute Trump electors, “he asked him in an aspirational way,” and that likewise when Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” that, too, “was an aspirational ask.” Lauro was trying, ham-handedly, to appeal to TV viewers’ sense that normal people don’t talk like that. And it’s true, they don’t. But not even Trump’s allies would suggest Trump is a normal person.
In effect, Lauro was saying that assertions that would be judged criminal coming from anyone else were just colorful hyperbole when they came out of Trump’s mouth. That’s ridiculous on its face. But it isn’t so different from what some of Trump’s critics seem to believe. David Von Drehle, writing in The Washington Post last week, conceded that the new indictment described “offenses that Trump commits routinely in the course of being his awful self, a walking almanac of vile character, shamelessly on florid display.” Yet Von Drehle expressed “serious doubts” that a jury could be persuaded that “aggravated Trumpiness is a felony.” How the familiarity of Trump’s well-documented misbehavior absolves it Von Drehle didn’t explain.