Persona non grata

If Julian Assange was hoping that Donald Trump might display an iota of gratitude or loyalty towards him, given the role that Wikileaks played in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, then those hopes should have died today, after the embattled U.S. President threw the Wikileaks founder under the bus in what's come to be recognizable as Trump's singular style.

As reported by Gizmodo:

Asked about Julian Assange on Tuesday while departing the White House on his way to Mar-a-Lago for Thanksgiving, President Trump feigned ignorance, telling reporters he doesn’t “know much about” the WikiLeaks founder, whose publication of hacked Democratic emails Trump praised repeatedly on the 2016 campaign trial.

“I don’t know anything about him. Really. I don’t know much about him,” Trump said. “I really don’t.”

Trump’s remarks came less than a week after the Justice Department inadvertently made public information about a sealed indictment of Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since July 2012 after the country granted him political asylum.

The president’s attempt to distance himself from the former Wikileaks editor-in-chief is painfully hard to swallow. His praise of WikiLeaks was at one point a staple of his campaign speeches. “Boy, I love reading those WikiLeaks,” Trump lauded, in one instance, days before the November election.

In fairness to Trump, loving what WikiLeaks was doing for his campaign is a far cry from knowing anything about the organization, or about its founders, and Trump is notoriously incurious about everything apart from his own ego and net worth. Still, Trump has also denied knowing anything about his own campaign's chairman, Paul Manafort, and his former chief strategist, Steve Bannon, among others, so one can be forgiven for thinking that Trump is simply trying to put some belated distance between himself and Assange, now that the latter is reported facing imminent indictment by the U.S. Department of Justice.

I have to admit that I experienced a frisson of schadenfreude at this latest development, though. Assange's petty amorality helped make the Trump Presidency possible, and I don't think I'll ever tire of seeing him suffer for that banal bit of evil. To be blanked by Trump in a moment of need, after having helped to elect him, is a poetic kind of justice that I can appreciate. It couldn't be happening to a more deserving man.

Seriously, fuck Julian Assange.