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Tag: hillary clinton
On Trial For Campaign Crimes, Trump Is Drenched In Tabloid Sewage

On Trial For Campaign Crimes, Trump Is Drenched In Tabloid Sewage

Back in the antediluvian era of American politics, perpetrating dirty tricks was considered proof of bad character and potentially disqualifying for public office, depending on circumstances.

But as with so many other aspects of public life, the rise of former President Donald Trump heralded a steep decline in political ethics and the way that campaigns are run. And now, after nearly a decade of Trump-style politics, the sleazy conduct exposed in sworn testimony at his New York trial is dismissed with a shrug — especially by Republicans who ask nothing better of their leaders.

Leave aside for a moment the dubious practice of paying off women — an adult movie star and a former Playboy model — to ensure their silence about illicit trysts with Melania Trump's husband. (Having promised a spot on his Celebrity Apprentice TV show to porn actress Stormy Daniels, Donald Trump seems to have been paying at both ends.) Evangelical Christians who used to proclaim their indignation about licentious sexuality have discredited themselves thoroughly, which should not surprise anyone who has observed their antics over the past few decades.

What Trump did to silence Daniels and Karen McDougal was unsavory, and his effort to conceal it was probably illegal, but the truly dirty conspiracy involved the smearing of his political opponents.

According to the testimony of David Pecker, his friend and coconspirator who ran the National Enquirer tabloid, Trump and his henchman attorney Michael Cohen promoted the publication of scurrilous lies about his rivals on its front page.

At the same moment that Trump bestowed the nickname "Lyin' Ted" on Ted Cruz, his final opponent for the 2016 Republican nomination, he and his crew were overseeing the publication of outrageous lies about the Texas senator. In spring 2016, the Enquirer featured an absurd story, complete with a doctored photo, claiming that Cruz's father Rafael, an ordained minister, had been consorting with Lee Harvey Oswald just before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

Insane as that accusation was, Trump used it to distract Republican voters from criticism of him by Cruz. On Fox News, he declared that "Cruz's father, you know, was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald's, you know, being shot. ... What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death? Before the shooting? It's horrible." What's horrible, of course, is that Trump knew he was spouting an invented story, because it had been invented to benefit him.

The Enquirer went on to publish more fabricated tales about Cruz, including a claim that he had engaged in at least five extramarital affairs — again, while the tabloid was covering up Trump's actual and lengthy history of adultery.

After Cruz had been dispatched, and then prostrated himself cravenly to endorse Trump, the Enquirer moved on to smearing Hillary Clinton, a hobby pursued by the disgusting Pecker with gusto for years before Trump entered politics.

"The desperate and deteriorating 67-year-old won't make it to the White House — because she'll be dead in six months," the paper blared, insisting that the Democratic nominee suffered from brain cancer, strokes, alcoholism, multiple sclerosis and various forms of mental illness, all somehow concealed from the public and press. None of those mythical ailments actually afflicted the former secretary of state, who is still alive and well — and fighting to defeat Trump.

Much of the fake news published by the tabloid about Clinton was pitched by Steve Bannon, the Trump adviser who swindled thousands of donors to his "Build the Wall" charity — and only evaded prison thanks to a corrupt pardon. Naturally, Bannon is back and, like Trump, has endured no opprobrium for his amply proven crimes. Instead, he is a powerful influence on the far right and in Republican circles.

Back when Trump and his cronies oversaw the publication and broadcasting of all those falsehoods, he said repeatedly that he had nothing to do with the Enquirer and its raging defamations. He seemed to sense there was some shame in that kind of sick deception. But he and his attorneys no longer need to deny any of it, because on the American right, the worst kinds of deceit are accepted and even acclaimed, while their perpetrator is idolized.

And still, they will lecture the rest of us about "morality."

Reprinted with permission from Creators Syndicate

Joe Conason is founder and editor-in-chief of The National Memo.He is also editor-at-large of Type Investigations, a nonprofit investigative reporting newsroom formerly known as The Investigative Fund, and a senior fellow at Type Media Center. His forthcoming book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism, will be published by St. Martin's Press in July.On


Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump

Media Underscored Clinton's 'Deplorables' -- But Shrug Off Trump's 'Vermin'

Major news outlets devoted dramatically less coverage to former President Donald Trump describing his political enemies as “vermin” earlier this month than they provided then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 “basket of deplorables” remark in the week following those respective comments.

According to a Media Matters review:
  • The Big Three broadcast TV networks provided 18 times more coverage of Clinton’s 2016 “deplorables” comment than Trump’s “vermin” remark on their combined nationally syndicated morning news, evening news, and Sunday morning political talk shows.
  • CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC mentioned Clinton’s “deplorables” comment nearly 9 times more than Trump’s “vermin” comment.
  • Print reports that mentioned Clinton's statement outnumbered those that mentioned Trump’s 29-to-1 across the five highest-circulating U.S. newspapers.

Coverage decisions like these provide insight into which stories the editors, producers, and reporters at major news outlets are prioritizing and shape the political landscape during presidential election cycles.

Experts on authoritarianism warned that Trump’s rhetoric echoed that of fascist dictators like Adolf Hitler after he promised to “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” in a November 11 speech. The former president, who frequently describes his political opponents, including President Joe Biden’s administration, as “communists,” added that those forces want “to destroy America and to destroy the American dream” and that “the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within.”

By contrast, the right weaponized Clinton’s relatively mundane “basket of deplorables” comment. Clinton told attendees at a September 2016 fundraiser that while “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic,” a statement consistent with contemporaneous polling. But she went on to stress that attendees shouldn’t write off all of his backers because they also include “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change,” adding, “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

The right-wing grievance machine seized on Clinton’s comments, with Trump, his political allies, and his media propagandists whipping up a pseudo scandal by claiming that Clinton had attacked all Trump supporters and feigning offense (they’ve repeatedly attempted to run the same playbook and manufacture a “deplorable moment” for Biden). Unfortunately, major national news outlets responded by rewarding the right for its disingenuous act, showering Clinton’s “deplorables” remark with coverage.

By contrast, the same outlets largely ignored Trump’s description of his political enemies as “vermin,” continuing a pattern of relatively muted coverage of Trump’s abhorrent and incoherent commentary. When experts are sounding the alarm about the similarities between a likely U.S. presidential nominee’s rhetoric and that of genocidaires, it warrants much more significant attention from journalists at leading news outlets.

Broadcast news coverage of “deplorables” versus “vermin”

Media Matters reviewed the nationally syndicated broadcast news shows – ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ This Morning, Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press – in the first week after each remark.

We found that those programs aired 54 minutes of coverage of Clinton's “deplorables” comment but just 3 minutes regarding Trump's “vermin” remark.

ABC News aired 20 minutes of “deplorables” coverage across 13 segments and 3 teasers, but devoted only a single minute of coverage to the “vermin” comment, during an interview with the network’s chief Washington correspondent, Jonathan Karl, about his new book.

CBS News provided 13 minutes of “deplorables” coverage across 11 segments and 3 teasers, compared to 1 passing mention of the “vermin” remark on Face the Nation that comprised less than 30 seconds.And NBC News spent 21 minutes of airtime on the “deplorables” comment across 11 segments, compared to 2 minutes on “vermin” — one a passing mention, the other an interview in which Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker read the comment to Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and asked her, “Are you comfortable with this language coming from the GOP front-runner?” (McDaniel declined to comment.)

Cable news coverage of “deplorables” versus “vermin”

Media Matters reviewed mentions of “deplorable” or “deplorables” and of “vermin” on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, in the week following each comment.

We found 1,662 “deplorable” mentions compared to 191 mentions of “vermin” across the three cable networks.
On CNN, there were 553 mentions of “deplorable” compared to 70 for “vermin.”

On Fox News, there were 513 mentions of “deplorable” compared to only 9 of “vermin.”

And on MSNBC, there were 596 mentions of “deplorable” compared to only 112 of “vermin.”

Print news coverage of “deplorables” versus “vermin”

Media Matters reviewed print news coverage in the top 5 U.S. newspapers by circulation — the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post — in the first week following each remark. We counted both stories that mentioned the comments and those we determined were primarily about those remarks because discussion of them appeared in the story’s headline and/or lead.

We found that the papers ran a total of 29 news articles mentioning Clinton’s “deplorables” remark — 13 of which ran on the front page. Of those, 11 of the articles, including 3 of the front-page articles, mentioned the remark in its headline and/or lead. By contrast, the papers combined for just 1 print news article that mentioned Trump’s “vermin” comment, which ran in the interior of The Washington Post.

The Los Angeles Times ran 3 print news articles mentioning Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, 2 of which ran on its front page. Of the 3, 1 article mentioned the comment in its lead; it ran on the paper’s front page. The paper did not mention Trump’s “vermin” remark in a print news story.

The New York Times ran 7 print news articles mentioning Clinton’s “deplorables” remark, 4 of which ran on its front page. Of the 7, 2 mentioned the remark in its headline or lead. The paper did not mention Trump’s “vermin” remark in a print news story.

The Wall Street Journal ran 8 print news articles mentioning Clinton’s “deplorables” remark, 4 of which ran on its front page. Of the 8, 3 mentioned the remark in their headline or lead, and 1 of those ran on the Journal's front page. The paper did not mention Trump’s “vermin” remark in a print news story.

The Washington Post ran 9 print news articles mentioning Clinton’s “deplorables” remark, 3 of which ran on its front page. Of the 9, 5 mentioned the remark in its headline or lead, and 1 of those ran on the paper’s front page. The Post’s only report mentioning Trump’s “vermin” remark ran on A2 under the headline “Echoing Hitler, Mussolini, Trump calls political foes 'vermin.'”

USA Today ran 2 print news articles that mentioned the “deplorables” remark and none that mentioned the “vermin” comment.

Correction (11/28/23): This piece originally included an incorrect date in the graphs and in the methodology. Additionally one of the bullets in the introduction mischaracterized the print coverage.

Methodology

Media Matters searched transcripts in the SnapStream video database for all original episodes of ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press for either of the terms “Trump” or “former president” within close proximity of any of the terms “Mussolini,” “Hitler,” “vermin,” “root out,” “radical left,” “thug,” “communist,” “Marxist,” “fascist,” “threat,” or “destroy” from November 11, 2023, when Trump made the comments during a Veterans Day address in Claremont, New Hampshire, through November 17, 2023, one week after the initial comment.

We searched transcripts in the Kinetiq video database for all original episodes of ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ This Morning, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press for any of the terms “Hillary,” “Clinton,” or “former secretary of state” within close proximity of any of the terms “deplorable,” “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” “Islamophobic,” or “Trump supporter” from September 9, 2016, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” at a campaign fundraising event, through September 15, 2016, one week after the initial comment.

We timed broadcast segments, which we defined as instances when Trump's 2023 Veterans Day speech in which he likened his political opponents to “vermin” was the stated topic of discussion, when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables” at a campaign fundraising event was the stated topic of discussion, or when we found significant discussion of either of those comments. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed either of the comments with one another.
We also timed broadcast mentions, which we defined as instances when a single speaker in a segment on another topic mentioned Trump's or Clinton's remarks without another speaker in the segment engaging with the comment, and broadcast teasers, which we defined as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about Trump's or Clinton's comments scheduled to air later in the broadcast.

We rounded all times to the nearest minute.

We also searched transcripts in the Kinetiq video database for all original programming on CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC for the term “vermin” from November 11, 2023, through November 17, 2023, and either of the terms “deplorable” or “deplorables” from September 9, 2016, through September 15, 2016. We considered any instance of any of the terms a single mention.

Finally, we searched print articles in the Factiva and Nexis databases from the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post for either of the terms “Trump” or “former president” within roughly the same paragraph (approximately 200 words) as “Mussolini,” “Hitler,” “vermin,” “root out,” “radical left,” “thug,” “communist,” “Marxist,” “fascist,” “threat,” or “destroy” from November 11, 2023, through November 17, 2023.

We also searched print articles from the same newspapers for any of the terms “Hillary,” “Clinton,” or “former secretary of state” within roughly the same paragraph (approximately 200 words) as “deplorable,” “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” “xenophobic,” “Islamophobic,” or “Trump supporter” from September 9, 2016, through September 15, 2016.

We considered a print article to be about either of the comments if they were mentioned in the headline or lead paragraphs. We included all news articles in the A section of the paper. We did not include editorials, op-eds, or letters to the editor.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.

Pro-Trump Influencer Gets Seven Months In Election Tampering Scheme

Pro-Trump Influencer Gets Seven Months In Election Tampering Scheme

Pro-Trump influencer Douglass Mackey is now headed to federal prison to serve a seven-month sentence after being convicted by a federal jury in March. Prosecutors asked for Mackey, who was arrested in 2021, to serve between six months and a year behind bars.

Mackey, a West Palm Beach, Florida resident who went by the name "Ricky Vaughn," was found guilty on one count of conspiracy against rights for trying to defraud Hillary Clinton supporters in the 2016 election. According to the New York Times, Judge Ann M. Donnelly, of the Eastern District of New York, said while sentencing Mackey that he was "one of the leading members" of the conspiracy to prevent Clinton supporters from voting, adding that it was "nothing short of an assault on our democracy."

The conspiracy in question stemmed from a series of posts, meant to look like they were from the former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, encouraging Black and Latino supporters to vote by text message or through social media, knowing that those votes would not actually be counted. One of those posts showed a Black woman holding a sign, and another post was in Spanish, and included the Clinton campaign logo with fine print attached that read "Hillary for President."

At the time of the conspiracy, Mackey's "Ricky Vaughn" Twitter account had approximately 58,000 followers, and was labeled by the M.I.T. Media Lab in February of 2016 as the 107th most powerful influencer of the then-upcoming presidential election. While Mackey's attorney argued during the trial that his client's actions accounted to just a few clicks on a computer, prosecutors countered that Mackey's "true power was his ability to spread messages to convert his clicks into tens of thousands more."

Notably, former President Donald Trump is also facing the same charge of of conspiracy against rights that Mackey was just sentenced under. Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted Trump on that charge, among several others, in his August indictment pertaining to Trump's role in the January 6 insurrection. Trump is scheduled to stand trial on those charges on March 4, 2024, just before the pivotal Super Tuesday primaries.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump In 2016: Electing Indicted President Would Create Crippling 'Crisis'

Trump In 2016: Electing Indicted President Would Create Crippling 'Crisis'

Former President Donald Trump hopes to reclaim the White House in 2024 while facing dozens of criminal indictments. But shortly before the 2016 presidential election, Trump declared that candidates under those circumstances should be disqualified from serving as commander-in-chief.

On Monday, CNN's KFile dug up several instances in which Trump insisted that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton should be barred from seeking the presidency due to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's contemporaneous probe into her controversial use of a personal email server during her tenure as United States secretary of state.

For example, Trump proclaimed at a November 3rd, 2016 event in Concord, North Carolina that if Clinton "were to win, it would create an unprecedented constitutional crisis that would cripple the operations of our government."

Clinton, Trump continued, "is likely to be under investigation for many years, and also it will probably end up – in my opinion – in a criminal trial. I mean, you take a look. Who knows? But it certainly looks that way."

Two days later at a November 5th, 2016 rally in Reno, Nevada, Trump said that "we could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial" and that "It would grind government to a halt."

Several hours later in Denver, Colorado, Trump called Clinton — whom the FBI eventually exonerated — "the prime suspect in a far-reaching criminal investigation" which would make it "virtually impossible for her to govern."

CNN noted that "Trump, the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, will not be disqualified from the presidency even if convicted, and he told Politico in June that he won't leave the presidential race if he is convicted of the charges."

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.