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Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani yesterday suggested that Hillary Clinton has a secret mental illness. (Spoiler alert: She doesn’t.)
Mind you, this is coming from a guy who forgot last week that 9/11 happened — and he was the mayor of New York during 9/11!
Giuliani is only the latest member of Team Trump to push this particular conspiracy theory this week.
I did a Facebook Live broadcast on this topic today, which you can watch bellow. Or you can just read on — it’s much of the same material.
In addition to Giuliani, we also heard from Trump national spokesperson Katrina Pierson, who is so factually challenged she spawned her own hashtag, #KatrinaPiersonHistory, after claiming that President Obama invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and then that Obama and Hillary were responsible for killing the Khans’ son in Iraq in 2004, while President Bush was still in charge of the Iraq war. After those two SNAFUs, the Trump campaign promised that Katrina would never again make such an egregious mistake. But she did.
Then, finally, there was Trump himself, who yesterday again suggested that Hillary didn’t have the “stamina” to be president, and that she was “sleeping,” and taking weekends off.
Mind you, this is coming from a 70-year-old overweight man who eats junk food, and who at odd times acts like a petulant adolescent, as compared to a 68-year-old woman who as Secretary of State visited 112 countries, logging nearly 1 million miles of travel.
Trump’s implication was two-fold: 1) Hillary is a woman, women are weak, and therefore women can’t be president; and 2) Hillary has a secret illness she hasn’t told anyone about.
As I noted in my Facebook Live broadcast, this is what happens when campaigns start to lose. They got negative, big time. While often the negativity doesn’t kick in until October, it can start early, when the candidate thinks he’s in danger of losing. So, the first thing Trump’s negativity tells us, is that he thinks his campaign is in trouble. And it is. But that doesn’t mean Trump is going to lose. A lot can can between now and November, especially with Trump willing to go this negative.
Which brings me to another point. While we all expected Trump to go super-negative, and bring up all of the debunked “Clinton scandals” of the 1990s. There are all of the fake scandals the Republicans concocted in the 199os to attack Bill Clinton, but also to attack Hillary — the GOP hated that Hillary was smart, more liberal than bill, and more than happy to get involved in policy as First Lady. But what we weren’t expecting were the outright lies — Trump and Giuliani making up a fake illness and ascribing it to Hillary. That’s pretty bad, even for Trump.
The irony of course is that there have been rumors for a while now about whether Trump himself has a psychological illness that predisposes him to massive mood changes, narcissism, and an inability to keep his mouth shut. One psychologist I talked to said “borderline personality disorder” comes to mind. Here’s what the Mayo Clinic describes as the symptoms of borderline personality disorder:
Borderline personality disorder. Impulsive and risky behavior, such as having unsafe sex, gambling or binge eating. Unstable or fragile self-image. Unstable and intense relationships. Up and down moods, often as a reaction to interpersonal stress.
So it’s interesting that just as people became worried about Trump, Trump felt the need to make the same accusations about Hillary. Though Trump has been projecting for a while now. This last week, for example, Trump claimed that Hillary was a racist who didn’t care about black people. Which is interesting, as Hillary has cared about African-Americans for her entire professional career, and has proven it time again again, starting with the time Hillary went undercover in the deep south in the early 1970s to fight school segregation.
On a humid summer day in 1972, Hillary Rodham walked into this town’s new private academy, a couple of cinder-block classrooms erected hurriedly amid fields of farmland, and pretended to be someone else.
Playing down her flat Chicago accent, she told the school’s guidance counselor that her husband had just taken a job in Dothan, that they were a churchgoing family and that they were looking for a school for their son.
The future Mrs. Clinton, then a 24-year-old law student, was working for Marian Wright Edelman, the civil rights activist and prominent advocate for children. Mrs. Edelman had sent her to Alabama to help prove that the Nixon administration was not enforcing the legal ban on granting tax-exempt status to so-called segregation academies, the estimated 200 private academies that sprang up in the South to cater to white families after a 1969 Supreme Court decision forced public schools to integrate.
While Hillary was undercover fighting for African-American schoolchildren, Trump was being sued for racial discrimination.
Trump employees had secretly marked the applications of minorities with codes, such as “No. 9” and “C” for “colored,” according to government interview accounts filed in federal court. The employees allegedly directed blacks and Puerto Ricans away from buildings with mostly white tenants, and steered them toward properties that had many minorities, the government filings alleged.
In October 1973, the Justice Department filed a civil rights case that accused the Trump firm, whose complexes contained 14,000 apartments, of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
My final point is that we shouldn’t think that we’ve won this. We haven’t won this. Hillary is doing very well, and that’s great. But there’s a long time between now and the election, and anything can happen to rock the boat (more Russian-stolen Wikileaks emails come to mind). So be pleased things are going this well, but remain vigilant.
Follow me on Twitter: @aravosis — win a pony! (not really)
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