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Digby's Hullabaloo Posts
Their corporate benefactors made out like bandits. Everyone else? Not so much.
Gird yourself. Shocking News. The GOP tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves:
The corporate tax cuts that President Donald J. Trump signed into law in 2017 have boosted investment in the U.S. economy and delivered a modest pay bump for workers, according to the most rigorous and detailed study yet of the law’s effects.
Those benefits are less than Republicans promised, though, and they have come at a high cost to the federal budget. The corporate tax cuts came nowhere close to paying for themselves, as conservatives insisted they would. Instead, they are adding more than $100 billion a year to America’s $34 trillion-and-growing national debt, according to the quartet of researchers from Princeton University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University and the Treasury Department.
The researchers found the cuts delivered wage gains that were “an order of magnitude below” what Trump officials predicted: about $750 per worker per year on average over the long run, compared to promises of $4,000 to $9,000 per worker.
If the Democrats could win the trifecta in November, they should be able to let these ridiculous tax cuts expire. (Maybe … there’s always the filibuster.) With the economy roaring and plentiful jobs with people already getting large wage increases it should be a slam dunk but probably won’t be. The stock market is exploding Those people are awash in a tsunami of money. The idea that they aren’t paying their fair share is outrageous.
And the idea that a majority of Americans are so brainwashed that they want to give them even more is profoundly disturbing.
After the Supremes released their decision overturning the Colorado Ballot Case ruling, Trump gave a speech and the cable nets were beside themselves in anticipation. If you have a spare 15 minutes to watch it all, I urge you to do it. I wish everyone would see it because they need to be reminded of what he is.
This wasn’t a rally where you can possibly chalk up his lunacy to the fever of the crowd. This was him speaking extemporaneously before a camera, just riffing on what he cares about.
If you don’t have time (or can’t bring yourself to watch him) here are just a few of the highlights.
He says this will bring out country together. Because the country will only come together if Trump wins everything, That’s how this works.
Aaaaand….
I think that gives you the gist. And I would hope it will be on the evening news and in prime time so that people who are working can see it too. Maybe some will think he’s making a good point and that presidents should be given blanket immunity and its perfectly fine for a presidential candidate to trash judges and prosecutors and call them names in a formal setting like this (or at least not a political rally.) Maybe it’s a mistake to remind people that Donald Trump whines like a 5 year old even when he’s being given a gift by the Supreme Court. It’s possible that most voters really love that in a leader, I don’t know. But they should see it and make up their own minds if they want to sign on for four more years of that insufferable pity-party.
By the way, here’s a quick fact check:
DANA BASH: We have been hearing him first and foremost, talk about the fact that he is obviously very pleased about the Supreme Court decision to keep him on the ballot, or prevent Colorado from taking him off the ballot, and therefore other states as well, because of the actions that he was involved with in and around January 6th.
Then he veered into lots of other areas where we definitely have to fact check.
Daniel, I want to first just say the last thing he was talking about immigration, which of course has nothing to do with the Supreme Court decision today. He said a number of things that I hope that you get into. One of which was 20 million people he believes are in this country.
We don’t have any evidence to back that up.
And going on about the need for the president to use his executive, authorities to, quote unquote, “close the border.”.
There is an antiquated immigration system. Congress, in a bipartisan way in the U.S. Senate, tried to update it at least a little bit, and it was killed because, the president did not want to give Joe Biden that political win.
But let’s start by talking, if you will, Daniel, about, the allegations, with absolutely no evidence that he was making against President Biden, that he is behind all of the prosecutions that we are seeing both on a federal and state level.
There is absolutely no evidence to back that up. In fact, there are, there is a special counsel to to provide not one but two layers of distance between the president and these investigations. And that’s just on a federal level.
DANIEL DALE: That’s correct. So the claim is false even in terms of those federal cases. There’s no evidence that President Biden, you know, ordered or was behind these prosecutions.
But the claim is is is especially nonsensical when it comes to, you know, state and local cases. A civil lawsuit from the New York attorney general, a case is brought in Georgia and New York by local district attorneys.
There is zero evidence whatsoever that President Biden has somehow orchestrated these. So it’s just conjured out of thin air.
I think this, as many Trump speeches are, was kind of a where do you start kind of speech from a fact check perspective. You talked about immigration. He said, you know, I didn’t need to go to Congress. I just, he suggested that he just shut the border with his own executive authority.
In fact, he tried in 2019 to impose essentially an asylum ban on people crossing between ports of entry, from Mexico. And it was blocked by the courts. It was blocked by the Ninth Circuit. The Supreme Court declined to lift that block.
So the idea that he just did it so Biden can do it is not true.
He talked about a new, supposedly new category of crime called migrant crime. That, this is basically propaganda. There has always been some crime by immigrants. All of the data suggests that immigrants tend to commit crimes at lower rates than native born Americans. And I think, Dana, it’s worth noting that in 2023, preliminary data published by the FBI shows that the US is either at or around the lowest violent crime rate nationally since 1970. So this idea of a crime wave is nonsense.
And then I’ll just add quickly, he went through a bunch of his his old favorites. So I defeated ISIS in four months. In fact, the caliphate, so-called caliphate was liberated about two years into his tenure. He said he passed the largest tax cut in history. In fact, on a percentage basis, it’s nowhere close to the Ronald Reagan tax cut. He said there are people from insane asylums, all over the world coming across the border. He’s provided zero evidence for this, even when I’ve directly asked his campaign.
So false claim after false claim, as per usual.
DANA BASH: Daniel, thank you so much for being here. To to provide that kind of fact checking that only you can appreciate it.
And that is not hyperbole
He lost the DC primary. There were just a couple thousand votes but he just couldn’t stand it. So he had another tantrum.
One of the moldiest political tropes around is the one that says a presidential candidate needs to run to the base during the primaries and then pivot to the center once he or she locks down the nomination. It makes some strategic sense, for sure, and we’ve seen it in action many times although it doesn’t always work. But Donald Trump is not one for standard campaign strategy so despite the fact that he’s the defacto nominee of the Republican Party for president, he’s not making any kind of pivot to the center. If anything he’s embracing the MAGA base ever more tightly, despite the fact that there is a substantial minority of his party that’s rejecting him in these primaries.
Over the weekend Trump bagged some more wins in caucuses in Michigan, Idaho and Missouri, all three of which were the result of amateur hour mistakes by local and party officials that messed up the usual primary system. Even so, from what we can gather there still exists an anti-Trump vote among Republicans and GOP leaning Independents. We’ll see on Super Tuesday if that phenomenon (which I wrote about last week) continues, even as it’s obvious that Trump is the nominee.
Nikki Haley won her first primary on Sunday in the District of Columbia, which Trump claimed he lost on purpose and immediately disparaged as nothing more than a win for “the swamp”, calling her “Birdbrain” and the “Bird” in a series of furious posts on his Truth Social platform. He can’t bear to lose anything, even when it doesn’t matter.
The AP reported on the anti-Trump vote in GOP primaries from their APVotecast surveys over the weekend, noting that while many of those who voted for Haley are Democrats or Independents who didn’t vote for Trump in 2020 “about 1 in 10 early contest voters who said they supported Trump in the 2020 general election said they wouldn’t be doing so this year.” So this group exists and it’s a problem for the Republicans.
As a result, according to a different AP report, many in the Trump camp would like him to make that pivot to the center, the sooner the better. Campaign professionals understand that this Never Trump faction is his Achilles’ heel but his people are committed to “let Trump be Trump” — mostly because they have no choice. People have tried to get Trump to soften his edges in his previous campaigns and he’s simply incapable of doing it.
They’re still trying:
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump ally who sometimes speaks to the former president, compared 2024 to 1980, when Republican Ronald Reagan won a landslide over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, who was saddled with inflation, high unemployment and international conflict. Reagan, dubbed “the happy warrior,” won 44 states and a new Republican Senate with “a positive vision,” Gingrich said, that was about more than Carter’s record.“When you have the kind of numbers Biden has, what people need is about 70% positive, 30% anti-Biden,” Gingrich said,
That’s downright hilarious. A “happy warrior” is the last thing anyone would ever call Donald Trump. A whining warrior, maybe. A vengeful warrior definitely. But he is the unhappiest presidential candidate in history and he never shuts up about it.
Campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told the AP, “their role is to provide the organization ‘to amplify and to force project’ Trump’s message.” And they insist that he is already running his general election campaign against President Joe Biden which means that what he’s saying in his rallies right now is the general election message.
That message is so extreme it’s very hard to believe that the 10 percent of Republicans who say they’re not going to vote for Trump again will come around in the fall. He’s going further than he’s ever gone before and people are going to see all this eventually.
He rambles on for hours at a time, often speaking off the cuff about strange notions like magnets don’t work in water and suggesting that Abraham Lincoln could have negotiated the country out of the civil war if he hadn’t wanted to be famous. He calls the insurrectionists “hostages” and opens his rallies to the recording of the so-called January 6th prison choir. Even weirder, the finales of his prepared speeches are now accompanied by spooky Q-Anon inspired music, which seems to send the crowd into paroxysms of ecstasy.
He vows to enact the greatest deportation program the world has ever known, describing immigrants in the most demeaning terms imaginable saying they are “poisoning the blood of our country.” He calls his political enemies communist, Marxist, vermin who must be “purged” and promises not to allow anyone into the country who doesn’t believe in “our religion.” They are divisive, hateful diatribes that should make any decent person recoil in horror.
But that’s just Trump, right? It’s just a schtick and nobody should take it literally. He’s just playing to the crowd because they love that stuff. But the truth is that his speeches seem to be written by Stephen Miller or are, at least, very Miller-esque in that they are full of plans and policies. It’s not just Trump riffing away to please the crowd.
For instance, this past weekend, he threw a new idea into the mix. He said that he will withdraw all funding from any schools that require vaccines, which would be virtually all of them:
That was on the teleprompter and considering what we know about the planning for a second Trump term with Project 2025 and Agenda 47, I think it would be very foolish not to take such promises seriously. The Republicans have become so nihilistic that they would easily allow polio to once again ravage the children of this country if it would get big cheers at a Trump rally.
Republicans and Independents who’ve been voting for Nikki Haley in these primaries should know that Trump doesn’t want their vote. He made it clear this weekend when he said that MAGA now represents 96 percent of the party and they are getting rid of “the Romneys”
If that’s what the campaign plans to “amplify and project” to their potential voters, good luck to them. He’s openly purging his coalition of anyone who isn’t MAGA and if these surveys are correct, that means he has no intention of doing or saying anything to appeal that 10 percent (or more) who say they won’t vote for him in the fall. Let Trump be Trump, I say. It can only help the Democrats.
Update–
Fergawdsakes:
No Labels is going to go after Biden hard, using Trump talking points
Lieberman will never stop trying to destroy the Democratic party out of pique that they rejected him that one time. Here’s the latest on No Labels’ attempt to help Donald Trump win the election:
With days to go before its previously announced mid-March deadline of finalizing plans for a third party presidential ticket, No Labels still doesn’t have a candidate or a clear plan — even as it looks to take swings at President Joe Biden that its own officials acknowledge are more potent than accurate.
And major potential recruits are still holding out: a person familiar with the conversations told CNN that No Labels officials have talked with advisers to Chris Christie, but that the former New Jersey governor has declined to meet with them himself.
The group’s officials now say that they have no set date and still deliberately have provided no explanation for how they will make a decision. And several prospective candidates and members who have heard the group’s pitch told CNN they have been left skeptical about the mechanics actually translating to a workable campaign.
No Labels officials – who have repeatedly said they don’t want to become a spoiler that would result in Donald Trump going back to the White House – have urged prospective candidates and others to prioritize accusing Biden of having politically toxic positions he does not actually hold. They are hoping to spread those accusations more widely next week, ahead of Biden’s annual State of the Union to Congress.
In a private presentation the group has circulated among members and prospective candidates are two claims that No Labels officials say would be damaging to Biden, even as they acknowledge the claims aren’t true: that he is for “open borders” and that he is captive to a “far left” that “wants to abandon Israel” and is “sympathetic to Hamas.”
Those claims, alongside accusing Biden of overseeing a ballooning national debt, are the best way to appeal to voters, No Labels suggests in slides from their presentation obtained by CNN.
One official who verified that the slides were accurate — after audibly sighing in frustration as each was described — said these claims were meant as “some themes that Biden should be considering before the State of the Union.”
“These are ideas that I would imagine any No Labels unity ticket would be embracing,” the No Labels official added. “We’re putting that out there.”
Another official agreed that these are exactly the issues a unity ticket should run on, arguing that the cumulative effect of Biden’s policies has been effectively open borders, and that even though Biden is adamant about not abandoning Israel, the voters they have polled believe that a large part of a dominant faction of the Democratic base now does support pulling away from Israel.
The point, the second official explained to CNN, is to capitalize on how they believe voters view Biden and Trump, which is drawn in part on polling No Labels has conducted periodically since last year by presenting these false positions as options.
The plan was for former Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, a Democrat, to write a more polished version of these arguments in an op-ed to publish before Biden’s speech.
Earlier this week, No Labels announced a $750,000 ad campaign urging Congress to back the bipartisan immigration and border bill. Biden went to the border on Thursday to reiterate his support for the bill — and again called on Trump to join him in backing the legislation, instead of convincing Republicans to scuttle for his own political gain.
The funny thing about all this is that No Labels strategy ends up being very much like the ultra-lefties. They are attempting to enable Donald Trump to win because they have a beef with the Democratic Party.
The New Yorker interviews Biden
“Saturday Night Live” made mad fun over the weekend of comments that President Joe Biden is sharp as a tack “behind closed doors.”
The New Yorker this morning offers a peek behind those closed doors. John Harwood tweets that the interview, like his own last fall, “shows talk of his alleged mental decline as utter bullshit.”
Evan Osnos writes:
If you spend time with Biden these days, the biggest surprise is that he betrays no doubts. The world is riven by the question of whether he is up to a second term, but he projects a defiant belief in himself and his ability to persuade Americans to join him. For as long as Biden has been in politics, he has thrived on a mercurial mix of confidence and insecurity. Now, having reached the apex of power, he gives off a conviction that borders on serenity—a bit too much serenity for Democrats who wonder if he can still beat the man with whom his legacy will be forever entwined. Given the doubts, I asked, wasn’t it a risk to say, “I’m the one to do it”? He shook his head and said, “No. I’m the only one who has ever beat him. And I’ll beat him again.” For Biden, the offense of the contested election was clearly personal. Trump had not just tried to steal the Presidency—he had tried to steal it from him. “I’d ask a rhetorical question,” Biden said. “If you thought you were best positioned to beat someone who, if they won, would change the nature of America, what would you do?”
Trump tried to steal the presidency “from him.” That sense, that feeling, is how Republicans have sold imaginary voter fraud over decades to undermine the democratic process. They encourage conservatives to imagine how it would feel to have their vote stolen from them, to imagine it as a grotesque, personal violation like rape or assault. Perhaps Democrats should encourage their Bidenly serene base to conjure the same feelings. What the Trump GOP means to do this fall is exactly the personal violation of which they’ve accused the left for decades. If it motivates the right, could it motivate the left?
The rest of the piece is about Biden’s view of the upcoming election, about Trump’s weaknesses, and about polling on various policy stances and economic measures. And Biden’s age. Give it a rest. And stop giving column inches to David Axelrod.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, of Rhode Island, voiced a position that I encountered among many high-ranking Democrats. “He’s not the only option that we had,” he told me. “But, once he’d made the decision to go, he became the only option that we have.” In the months that remain, Whitehouse said, the best way to beat Trump is a strategy that he called “Biden plus offense.” When people are “frightened or angry, you need to convince them that you, too, are equally concerned and you’re willing to throw punches and pick fights,” he said. “If you’ve got your sleeves rolled up and you’re waist-deep fighting alligators in the swamp, then nobody’s really thinking about your age.”
A Biden campaign staffer, Mike Donilon, opines on Biden’s “freedom agenda”:
It’s easy to miss how unusual a “freedom agenda” is for a Democratic Presidential campaign. Since the nineteen-sixties, Republicans have held fast to the language of freedom—from the backlash against civil rights to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. But Democrats have been trying to convince the public that the Republican Party under Trump has transformed into the “MAGA movement,” an authoritarian crusade bent on dominion. Donilon said, “At its heart, it doesn’t believe in the Constitution, doesn’t believe in law, embraces violence.” He sees an opportunity for Democrats to be “in a place where they usually aren’t.” They can lay claim to the freedom to “choose your own health-care decisions, the freedom to vote, the freedom for your kids to be free of gun violence in school, the freedom for seniors to live in dignity.”
Bruce Reed, a close Biden aides, tells Osnos, “We live in abnormal political times, but the American people are still normal people. Given a choice between normal and crazy, they’re going to choose normal.”
Remind normies just how crazy is crazy. Cut to the chase. Trump and his anti-Constitution, anti-rule-of-law, anti-democracy, royalist cult will sure as hell try to steal your vote this fall to install Trump as a monarch. Let the policy wonks quibble about polls and policies. Remind voters that it’s not just abstract democracy on the line this fall.
Republicans mean to fuck you over and gut your freedoms. What are you prepared to do about it? At a minimum, get off your ass.
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Don’t hold your breath
One day ahead of Super Tuesday, the speculation is that shortly after this posts we may see the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Donald “91 Counts” Trump’s Colorado ballot access case. Anyone who listened to the oral arguments knows not to hold their breath for the court to agree with the Colorado supremes (and others) that he’s committed crimes (Washington Post):
The high court took the unusual step Sunday of scheduling an opinion announcement for a day when it is not in session. The justices typically issue rulings from the bench, with the author of the majority opinion presenting a summary of the court’s decision. Instead, the court said opinions could be posted on its website Monday at 10 a.m.
Colorado’s top court ordered Trump, the Republican front-runner, off the ballot in December after finding that he engaged in insurrection around the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. The state court put its ruling on hold while litigation continued, and the former president’s name will appear on the state’s primary ballot. (If he was ultimately ruled ineligible, the votes for him would not count.)
Trump appealed as Trump does. But he’s on the Colorado ballot tomorrow. Should he lose his SCOTUS appeal, his votes would not count.
Democrats are always “maximally crimey”
Ian Bassin and Dahlia Lithwick suggest that what the court does not say in its ruling is likely as important as what it does. The court is unlikely to render an opinion on whether Trump engaged in an insurrection, as Colorado found, nor on the presidential immunity appeal still outstanding. That does not mean the justices won’t be speaking volumes. “The real question is whether our media will be savvy enough to hear it,” the pair explain.
Consider how the press reported the Robert Mueller findings on Hillary Clinton’s email server or Special Counsel Robert Hur’s decision not to indict Joe Biden for his handling of classified documents (Slate).:
One might wonder why it is that when it’s Donald Trump openly committing crimes and evading responsibility, the default media narrative is that he didn’t commit crimes, yet when Democrats are found to have committed no crimes, the story becomes that they are still sufficiently crime-adjacent to be maximally crimey, The coverage of the Comey and Hur reports focused orders of magnitude more on their non-conclusion details than the decision not to press charges. Whereas our press largely fell for Attorney General Bill Barr and Donald Trump’s efforts to spin the Mueller report into an “exoneration” at the expense of the damning facts about obstruction of justice that were laid out in its pages.
The press casts doubt on the Democrat, perhaps to elide legal technical jargon that is less digestible, just not when it is the Republican. The simplified storylines became “But Her Emails” and “Biden So Old!”
Maybe this is all unfair. Maybe we can expect better. Maybe if the Supreme Court issues an opinion ruling for Trump on technicalities while still remaining silent on the lower court’s finding that he engaged in insurrection, we’ll see headlines and reporting capturing the dual nature of such a ruling, and the momentous implications of a court that seems to accept that he did what we know he did. But we’re not holding our breath.
Curated for your protection
Bassin, Lithwick and the rest of us saw what Trump did. The House Select Committee investigated Jan. 6 exhaustively and broadcast its findings to the world. “Hundreds of participants have been sentenced for participating in it,” many admitting they attacked the Capitol and police at Trump’s behest. “The only material question for the high court is whether he will be allowed to get away with it.”
Yet the Roberts Court’s conservative majority seems determined not just to let Trump get away with it, but to let themselves get away with not upholding their judicial oaths to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.” MAGA Republicans elsewhere across the U.S. are working to ensure that, when we hold “free and fair” elections, Americans are merely going through the motions. Watch this morning to see if the U.S. Supreme Court has elected to do the same.
In a digital age when our attention is curated for us, don’t hold your breath for the press to make much of it if it does.
UPDATE: Court rules 9-0 that the 14th Amendment’s Section 3 is not self-executing (quick skim and reporting). Congress alone is the primary enforcement mechanism. Trump may stay on the Colorado and other state ballots. Court does not exonerate Trump for insurrection.
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I wanted to share Scott Rosenberg’s analysis of this NY Times Poll that has everyone melting down today:
It’s A Close, Competitive Election – Yes, the NYT released a poll today that has Trump ahead. Some initial thoughts:
Lots of other polls show the race even, competitive – Three national polls released this week (below) have the race even. 538’s Congressional Generic tracker is tied, 44%-44%. A new battleground state poll produced by top Democratic pollsters has Trump and Biden tied at 40%. Another battleground state poll that hasn’t been released yet that I was just briefed on has it 41%-39% Trump, essentially the same results. Senate polling is slightly better for us than for Republicans right now.
The Times poll has Trump leading among likely voters by 4 points, 48%-44%. This is a gain of 6 points for Trump since the December Times poll. None of these other polls have found a GOP surge of this magnitude or even a GOP lead. So the NYT results are not confirmed in lots of other recent polling which finds the race close and competitive, which is where I think it is now.
Biden 36% Trump 36% – AP/IPSOS
Biden 44% Trump 44% – Economist/YouGov
Biden 43% Trump 44% – Morning Consult (Biden’s gained 4 pts in recent weeks in this poll)
There are problems with the NYT poll – It has Trump winning both Hispanics and women – an impossibility. It’s likely voter electorate is +3 Republican – something we haven’t seen in a general election in actual voting in 20 years, and only once in the last 8 Presidential elections going all the way back to 1992. In the last 4 Presidential elections, Democrats have averaged 51%, Republicans 46%, and we gained ground in the 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 elections. After all these years of strong Democratic vote performance for the electorate to become +3 Republican this year is, um, unlikely. Overestimating their intensity and strength and underestimating ours was a central reason so many saw the red wave that never came in 2022.
The poll has Trump winning all his 2020 voters, and keeping his party unified – something that is not happening either in the actual voting or polling in the early states. It has Dean Phillips at 10% in the Dem primary against Biden. In Michigan this week he got 2.5%, and came in behind Marianne Williamson who dropped out of the race a month ago.
The poll’s initial likely voter sample was 29% Dem, 28% Republican and was “weighted” through a complex formula to become 32% R and 29% D. That’s a shift of 4 percentage points, something that would take an even race and make it +4 R, as this poll finds.
The poll has Biden winning Democrats 90%-7%, Trump winning Republicans 91%-6%, and Biden winning Independents 45%-41%. These results would normally produce a Biden lead but with the aggressive weighting and a very Republican sample, it produces a 4 point Trump lead.
The poll only interviewed 980 people, which is a relatively small sample for such an influential poll. Its margin of error is 3.5% for registered voters and almost 4% for likely voters. The sub-samples have margin of errors in double digits.
I want to thank my friends Tom Bonier and Joe Trippi for their help in putting together this quick analysis.
Now go have a nice evening.
It helped Trump with his ludicrous assertion that Hillary didn’t have “the strength and the stamina” to be president.
Do you think this garbage happens by accident?
As we slog through yet another week of media onslaught saying “Biden’s old, old, old so everybody’s going to vote for Trump!” I thought I’d remind people of 2016, when one of the ongoing narratives was that Hillary Clinton was frail and dying from some unrevealed illness.
I wrote this for Salon back in 2016:
The right-wing smear machine is working at warp speed to convince the nation that Hillary Clinton has brain damage. That is not hyperbole or some kind of a joke. They are literally claiming that she is hiding a physical and mental disability that renders her unfit for office. And they are, as usual, being helped by members of the mainstream media who are simply unable to resist “reporting” such a juicy tale even knowing that it is absurd. And so it becomes part of the narrative, true or not, that will color the rest of the campaign and Clinton’s presidency should she win.
Karl Rove first crudely suggested that Clinton had a serious brain disorder when she fell and suffered a concussion a few years ago which required her to wear her thick prism glasses instead of contacts to correct temporary double vision. Nobody took him seriously at the time, but the rumor has been percolating in the fever swamps and Trump and company were obviously aware of it. Trump himself has been saying from the beginning that Clinton doesn’t have the “strength or the stamina” to be president. He also claims that she can’t campaign more than a couple of days a week and then she has to go hide and recover. (This is one of those lies so blatant that it renders people mute — Clinton is clearly campaigning constantly, indeed she’s out there more than he is.)
This attack was echoed by Matt Drudge as far back as October when he appeared on conspiracy monger Alex Jones’ show and said “she’s old and she’s sick, she is not a viable, vibrant leader for this country.” It’s no surprise then that this latest full blown swiftboat offensive began on Drudge’s web site. It’s one of his specialties.
On Aug. 7 he linked to an obscure right wing website that had posted a picture of Clinton tripping on some porch steps and being steadied by a couple of aides under the title “2016: Hillary Conquers the Stairs.” He neglected to mention that the picture was taken in February.
The next salvo came from Trump’s friends at the National Enquirer which published a screaming headline “Hillary Clinton’s Secret Health Crisis.” And according to Ben Collins at the Daily Beast, “by the middle of the day the No. 2 trending Google search about Hillary Clinton was: “Is Hillary having health problems?”
That night Trump surrogate Sean Hannity devoted his show to fanning the rumors, even bringing in the Fox Medical A-Team who appear regularly on the network to diagnose her from afar and demand to see a complete neurological workup and all of Clinton’s medical records. He continued the rumor mongering throughout the week.
By this time the fall was old news. Now she was said to be having seizures and speaking oddly and having weird expressions on her face and exhibiting muddled thinking. When a protester tried to rush the stage at one of her rallies and a secret service agent stepped to the podium and said they had things under control, people said he had a diazepam pen in his hand at the ready, apparently in case she had a seizure right there on the spot. (It’s all rubbish, of course.)
Meanwhile, the “Alt-right” has gone completely over the edge with this craziness. Collins writes that the conspiracy site Info Wars has turned over its entire site to these rumors:
Hillary Clinton supposedly has Parkinson’s disease, syphilis, brain damage, a brain tumor, autism, a degenerative disease that is giving her seizures and/or strokes, and a blood clot, according to InfoWars writer Paul Joseph Watson. Oh, and he says she has a drug problem. All of these diagnoses — save for Parkinson’s, which commanded a separate full-length article—came in a single one of Watson’s YouTube videos released on Thursday. It now has over 1.6 million views at press time.
And yes the mainstream media has joined in the fun. On MSNBC, Chris Matthews has devoted several segments to the issue, apparently convinced that where Republicans blow smoke there must be fire saying, “what are the Republicans up to on this health issue? Why are they on to this? What do they know? Is there something we don’t know in the health records? Something that could change this election around?”
Newspapers are running stories pointing out that she uses a stool on stage when someone else is giving a speech as evidence that she’s too weak to stand. Web sites are posting picture arrays of Clinton using a pillow behind her back as if that’s a sign that she “needs propping up.” Dr Drew Pinsky of Celebrity Rehab weighed in saying that he’s concerned that Clinton isn’t getting the proper medical care for “her condition.” (Even Newt Gingrich called that “junk medicine.“) And fake medical records appeared out of nowhere and started making the rounds prompting Clinton’s physician to reiterate her earlier declaration that Clinton was a healthy woman capable of handling the duties of president.
Last night Trump surrogate Katrina Pierson took it to a new level by offering up a full diagnosis on MSNBC, saying there are “reports of observations of Hillary Clinton’s behavior and mannerisms,” that Clinton suffers from “dysphasia” — a neurological condition that limits a person’s ability to communicate or understand speech. I’m going to take a guess that Pierson didn’t come up with those talking points herself.
This confluence of activity didn’t happen by chance. It was planned and executed from InfoWars to Youtube to Drudge to Hannity to The Daily Mail to MSNBC and finally the NBC Nightly News and The New York Times. And regardless of what the fact checks say, a whole lot of people in this country now believe that Hillary Clinton, a woman of great intelligence and impressive endurance, is a brain-damaged invalid.
And then there was this, just a few months later:
After 24 hours of fulminating over Friday night’s commentary from Hillary Clinton about “baskets of deplorables” and Donald Trump’s stated willingness to start a war if someone flips an American the bird, everyone seemed more than ready for a day of national unity to commemorate 9/11. Then Clinton had a fainting spell and all hell broke loose.
The press went into full-blown breaking-news mode and when tape emerged of Clinton wobbling and appearing to faint as she got into her car, the cable networks and journalists on social media went with wall to wall with breathless medical speculation. They showed the video in slow motion over and over again like it was an outtake from the Zapruder film scene in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (“back and to the left, back and to the left.”)
She emerged from her daughter’s home smiling and waving a few hours later (prompting hilarious right-wing conspiracy theories that it must have been a body double.) But when her doctor released a statement saying she had been diagnosed with pneumonia on Friday, the press became hysterical.
At that moment media outlets could have chosen to analyze Clinton’s pressing on with the campaign in spite of having pneumonia as an indication of her grit and dedication to the campaign. And in fairness some did. For instance, contrary to the widely assumed rumor that she’d been taking it easy all month, Jeff Zeleny of CNN said that he’d covered five presidential campaign and never seen a more brutal schedule than Clinton’s.
Or the media organizations could have taken Clinton’s doctor at her word that she is being treated and will recover nicely. Instead, they settled on their tedious narrative of righteous indignation about Clinton’s supposed pathological secretiveness in failing to inform them of her diagnosis the minute she received it. It’s all about them.
New @CNN: Hillary Clinton’s stumble highlights campaign transparency problems https://t.co/X4liGwmHBl pic.twitter.com/EVy48jfM6h
— Dylan Byers (@DylanByers) Sept. 11, 2016
They also know very well that this febrile coverage plays into an ongoing theme of the presidential campaign: Donald Trump’s claim that Hillary Clinton doesn’t have “the strength or the stamina” to be president. On one level, it’s a simple sexist charge against a woman candidate from a man who believes that all of life is a game of primitive dominance. But it’s more than that. Trump made the same charge against Jeb Bush during the primaries; in that case it was the taunt of a schoolyard bully.
And there has been yet another layer to Trump’s “strength and stamina” charge in recent weeks, leveled first by surrogates like Alex Jones, Breitbart News and Matt Drudge and taken up recently by the campaign itself, which has implied that Clinton was suffering from brain damage and possibly Parkinson’s disease. I wrote about this elaborate conspiracy theory a couple of weeks ago.
Despite the fact that this is a right-wing smear, “the health issue” has worked its way into the mainstream press, leading to coverage of a couple of coughing fits as if they were obvious signs that she’s on death’s door and current events as if they show something is seriously wrong. (How pneumonia relates to brain damage has yet to be explained.)
But the truth is that coughs and throat problems are probably the most common problem a politician has. And when one personally hugs, shakes hands and gets breathed on by thousands of people in a week, getting pneumonia isn’t really all that surprising either. It’s obvious that if the Drudge smear wasn’t in full bloom, this story would have been covered differently. Instead, unable to resist the lure of the sexy tabloid lede, Politico just let it all hang out: Clinton scare shakes up the race Physical weakness caught on camera turns health conspiracy into a legitimate campaign concern.
The fact is that politicians get sick. Indeed, presidents get sick. George W. Bush fainted in the White House just sitting on a couch eating pretzels. His father famously caught the flu while traveling, grew faint and vomited on the prime minister of Japan‘s lap.
President Ronald Reagan was shot and had cancerous polyps removed from his colon while in office. Lyndon Johnson had gall bladder surgery while holding the top office in the land and proudly showed his scar to the press corps. President Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack and emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction. There’s no need to reiterate all of President Franklin Roosevelt’s health problems, but it’s pretty clear that the right wing and the press today would find him unfit for office.
And the list of macho men who have fainted in public is a lot longer than you might think. This is just a sample:
General Petraeus faints at congressional hearing.
Major General James Martin fainting at a press conference in February.
Attorney General Michael Mukasy fainting in the middle of a speech in 2008.
GE CEO Jim Campbell collapsing at a Joe Biden speech in 2010.
Silvio Berlosconi, Italy’s prime minister at the time, collapsing in 2006.
Bill Daley passing out at his commerce secretary appointment ceremony in 1996.
A 23-year-old soccer player collapsing during a live interview.
A soldier fainting, waiting for dignitaries to arrive.
To put it simply, if you discard the inane right-wing conspiracy theories about Clinton’s alleged brain damage and Parkinson’s disease, you’ll realize that ailments like coughing, fainting, pneumonia, flu, etc., are common among politicians and other leaders because they’re common among humans.
Despite some truly ridiculous speculation from members of the press, this is unlikely to be more than a slight blip on the campaign. It’s pneumonia not a brain tumor and she will recover. But it’s almost sure that the drumbeat for her to release her full medical records for the press to paw through for juicy tidbits is going to become louder and she’ll undoubtedly end up complying. Medical privacy is not allowed for presidential candidates.
Well, unless they are named Donald Trump. While everyone is breathlessly speculating about what Clinton is hiding in her records, you’d think the press would be equally curious about why a 70-year-old billionaire’s doctor is a cartoon character who wrote the most ridiculous letter attesting to a presidential candidate’s fitness in American history. Does he not have a real doctor? Will the hysteria this past weekend force the media to ask that question at long last? It’s actually much more suspicious than Clinton’s mundane fainting spell and bout with pneumonia.