Donald Trump Will Not Stop Lying About The Iraq War

Of all the lies Donald Trump likes to tell while running for president, the one about being an early opponent of the 2003 Iraq War may be his favorite. Despite well-documented evidence that the casino mogul spoke in support of the ill-fated war in the lead-up to the invasion, reporters have repeatedly let the Republican presidential candidate tell a revisionist version of his past stance without pushing back on the claim.

That sequence repeated itself on Wednesday night during NBC’s televised town hall, the first event featuring the two presidential candidates in back-to-back question-and-answer sessions. When it was Trump’s turn, NBC’s Matt Lauer asked the Republican candidate what about his past experiences has prepared him to be the country’s commander in chief.

Trump followed a familiar routine of dodging the question, offering vague assurances of his success, and eventually, outright lying.

“Well, I think the main thing is, I have great judgment. I have good judgment. I know what’s going on. I’ve called so many of the shots. And I happened to hear Hillary Clinton say that I was not against the war in Iraq. I was totally against the war in Iraq ― from ― you can look at Esquire magazine from ‘04, you can look at before that. I was against the war in Iraq because I said it would totally destabilize the Middle East, which it has. It has absolutely been a disastrous war.”

Lauer, who is surely aware of the factual inaccuracy of Trump’s claim, could have pointed out that 2004 was after the invasion, and therefore more of an example of Monday-morning quarterbacking than good judgment. He could have pointed to earlier interviews in which Trump voiced support for the war. Or he could have asked the candidate for another example from before the 2003 start of the war.

Instead, he just moved on to the next question.

Buzzfeed’s Andrew Kaczynski was the first to uncover Trump’s earlier remarks about the war in Iraq. In 2000, Trump called for a “principled and tough” policy toward “outlaw” states like Iraq, Buzzfeed found. In 2002, Howard Stern asked Trump outright if he favored invading Iraq. “Yeah, I guess so,” Trump said at the time. “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”

By 2004 it had become clear that ousting Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein was only the first part of a protracted U.S. military effort there, and Trump was offering a new view on the invasion. In August 2004 he told Esquire’s Cal Fussman:

“Look at the war in Iraq and the mess that we’re in. I would never have handled it that way. Does anybody really believe that Iraq is going to be a wonderful democracy where people are going to run down to the voting box and gently put in their ballot and the winner is happily going to step up to lead the county? C’mon. Two minutes after we leave, there’s going to be a revolution, and the meanest, toughest, smartest, most vicious guy will take over. And he’ll have weapons of mass destruction, which Saddam didn’t have.”

Lauer is not the first reporter to let Trump get away with his revisionist account of his early stance on the Iraq War. Buzzfeed later reported that several major news outlets ― CNN, Fox, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, Bloomberg, the New York Times and the Washington Post ― have, on at least one occasion, offered a platform for Trump to insist he was always against the Iraq War without correcting the candidate.

This is no small oversight. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed to secure the Democratic party’s presidential nomination in 2008, in part, because she voted for the disastrous war that her opponent, Barack Obama, had opposed as a senator.

In this election, voters don’t have the option of electing a candidate who demonstrated better judgment about whether to invade Iraq. But during the town hall on Wednesday, Clinton owned up to her miscalculation on the Iraq War ― and reminded voters of her opponent’s refusal to do so.

“I have taken responsibility for my decision,” Clinton said. “He refuses to take responsibility for his support ― that is a judgment issue.”

(h/t Huffington Post)

Reality

In Sept. 11, 2002 in an interview on the Howard Stern show, Trump was asked if he supported an invasion of Iraq and responded: “Yeah, I guess so,” and “I wish the first time it was done correctly.” The interview was earlier reported by Buzzfeed News, which posted audio of the exchange.

Esquire, the magazine that published a 2004 interview in which Trump opposed the war a year after it began, earlier this month accused the GOP nominee of “lying” about claims he was always against the war.

Donald Trump Refuses to Talk About His Role in the Racist Birther Movement

Years after the issue was debunked, Donald Trump still refuses to back away from the birther conspiracy he helped fuel.

“I don’t talk about it,” Trump told NBC’s Ali Vitali on Monday.

Trump made similar comments to “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert last year.

(h/t Huffington Post)

Reality

First of all, President Obama was born in Hawaii. Shut up.

And second, Donald Trump rose to political fame with the questioning of the legitimacy of America’s first black President, with a clear origin in racial prejudice.

In March 2011 when Trump appeared on “The View” and asked the panel, “Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” While on Fox News’s “On the Record,” Trump demanded, “I want to see his birth certificate.” In an interview with NBC’s “Today Show,” he revealed, “I’m starting to think that he was not born here.”

And in the most irony of ironies, Trump has refused to release his own birth certificate and passport information.

2011 Birther Study on Racism

A 2011 study of birthers in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed racial prejudice played a substantial role in those who believed the claims that Obama wasn’t an American.

“The influence of racial prejudice in contemporary U.S. society is typically manifested in subtle, indirect forms of bias. Due to prevailing norms of equality, most Whites attempt to avoid appearing biased in their evaluations of Blacks, in part because of a genuine desire to live up to their egalitarian standards, but also because of concern regarding social censure. As a consequence, Whites’ prejudice is more likely to be expressed in discriminatory responses when these actions can be justified by other factors.”

Trump Fraudulently Photoshops Poll in Tweet

Donald Trump’s campaign can’t seem to get out of its own way on social media.

On Monday morning, Trump began heralding poll results from Iowa and the key swing state of Ohio. He mentioned the results at a rally and tweeted out nifty graphics on his account to share the numbers.

The only problem: he kept crediting an outlet that doesn’t commission such polls: FiveThirtyEight.

Trump credited Nate Silver’s electoral wizardry for showing he had a lead over Clinton of 46 percent to 43 percent in Ohio and a 44 percent to 41 percent lead in Iowa.

Later, his campaign also tweeted out the poll results, again crediting FiveThirtyEight. Those tweets have since been deleted and retweeted — screenshots are below.

FiveThirtyEight didn’t commission the polls, as noted by Nate Silver and the site’s senior political writer and analyst Harry Enten. Both analysts pointed out that Trump was probably citing the results of the most recent Ipsos/Reuters poll of likely voters from those states.

Indeed, a look at FiveThirtyEight’s current forecast shows Clinton with around a 60 percent chance of winning Ohio and Trump with just over a 50 percent chance of winning Iowa.

As for the Ipsos/Reuters poll of likely voters, however — it actually shows Clinton as the favorite to win the election in November.

Later, Trump sent out another tweet, appropriately citing the Ipsos/Reuters poll with attribution to FiveThirtyEight, thought not its forecast that Trump would lose if the election were held today.

In July, the campaign found itself at the center of a much larger uproar when Trump tweeted a Photoshopped image of Hillary Clinton with anti-Semitic overtones. It was later deleted and replaced.

His son-in-law and political adviser, Jared Kushner, responded in the newspaper he owns, the New York Observer. “If my father in law’s fast-moving team was careless in choosing an image to retweet,” he wrote, “well part of the reason it’s so shocking is that it’s the actual candidate communicating with the American public rather than the armies of handlers who poll-test ordinary candidates’ every move.”

We’ll chalk it down as yet another reminder to be skeptical of what you see on the internet. And what you read in the polls — it’s still a long two months until Nov. 8.

(h/t Mashable)

Trump Surrogate Admits Falsifying Military Service and College Degree

A top Donald Trump surrogate admitted to falsifying some of his professional accomplishments after a contentious confrontation with CNN anchor Victor Blackwell.
South Carolina preacher Mark Burns, who regularly introduces Trump at his campaign events, had listed on his church’s website that he had a Bachelor of Science degree and served six years in the Army Reserve.

Burns, however, was never in the Army Reserve. He was in the South Carolina National Guard, from which he was discharged in 2008, CNN found.

As far as a Bachelor’s degree, North Greenville University told CNN he only attended the school for one semester. Burns admitted that he did not finish his degree when CNN asked him about it.

When CNN confronted Burns about the various professional and social exaggerations he had featured on his biography, Burns first said the page had “obviously” been either “manipulated or either hacked or added.”

But the site host, Wix, said there was no evidence of a hack.

“This is not fair at all,” Burns told Blackwell during the interview. “I thought we were doing a profile and all of a sudden you’re here to try to destroy my character.”

“I’m not here to destroy your character,” Blackwell replied.

At one point, Burns told Blackwell he believed the interview was off the record, to which Blackwell responded, “I didn’t agree to that.”

Burns abruptly ended the interview by walking away.

CNN followed up with the Trump campaign and was provided with a statement from Burns:

“As a young man starting my church in Greenville, South Carolina, I overstated several details of my biography because I was worried I wouldn’t be taken seriously as a new pastor. This was wrong, I wasn’t truthful then and I have to take full responsibility for my actions,” Burns’ statement reads.

Burns said he did not know if he had been vetted by the Trump campaign.

(h/t CNN)

Reality

Donald Trump wants to have “extreme vetting” for immigrants, but he can’t even successfully vet his own team.

Media

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GmDqeZr97w

Trump campaign says it is sad “Crooked” Hillary’s campaign resorted to name calling

Donald Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway laced into David Plouffe on Tuesday, days after the former campaign adviser to Barack Obama called the GOP nominee a “psychopath.”

Responding to that comment and Hillary Clinton’s speech tying Trump to white supremacists and the Ku Klux Klan last week, Conway had three words on Fox News Radio’s “Kilmeade & Friends”: “Shame on them.”

“I mean, the name-calling has reached a fever pitch and it just tells ya, they got nothin’. They got no game,” Conway told host Brian Kilmeade, suggesting that if Clinton “were really strong on the issues” and if Plouffe “was that proud of his boss Barack Obama’s Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act, then he would go out there and he’d talk about that.”

Rather than calling Trump a “psychopath,” a notion against which “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd pushed back Sunday, Conway remarked that Plouffe would have said that Clinton’s opponent “shouldn’t win, because Obamacare’s going so well, everybody’s so happy, United HealthCare and Aetna didn’t just realize billions of dollars in losses and pull out of 40-some exchanges.”

“They can’t. They don’t have the issue set that favors them” and thus they resort to name-calling, Conway said. “And I have to say, look, politics is not a tea party. It’s rough and tumble. We all get that, Brian. But to go out there and do guilt by association and to accuse people of having malice in their heart towards other people with no evidence, and then to do exactly what the American Psychological Association has asked people not to do, which is to, which is to certify somebody as mentally unfit or a psychopath. It’s just beyond the pale, and nobody calls them on it.”

Conway then thanked Kilmeade for calling out the issue, turning her ire to the media’s recent coverage of Trump after he repeatedly proclaimed that Clinton is a “bigot” for her treatment of African-American and Hispanic voters.

“All week long, it’s that Donald Trump referred to Hillary Clinton with one word and everybody, you know, their hair is on fire. Donald Trump is called every name in the book plus, before he gets out of bed in the morning. And yet that’s justifiable, that’s acceptable,” Conway remarked sarcastically. “Brian, look at these articles that are everywhere in the last week or two where mainstream media, so-called reporters, quote unquote, are outwardly saying that Donald Trump pushes their limits of objectivity, that they are challenging each other to cover him more aggressively because they believe he should not be president and commander in chief. Guess what, folks? That’s not their job. Their job is to report the news to you and not decide who should and who should not be president and then try to make that conclusion a reality.”

(h/t Politico)

Reality

If you can’t tell by the title of this article, Conway’s assertion is pretty bold coming from a campaign that was built on insulting and name-calling its way to the top. At Republican debates and during various campaign stops, Trump would roll out clever nicknames for his political rivals. Among them; “Lyin’ Ted” (Ted Cruz), “Little Marco” Marco Rubio), “Crooked Hillary” (Hillary Clinton), and “Goofy Elizabeth Warren.”

Here are a few other examples of Trump hurling insults:

JUNE 16, 2015 – Trump officially threw his clown hat into the circus that would soon be the 2016 race with a jaw-dropping, ad-libbed speech in which he insulted Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” derided foreign countries and lambasted President Obama and other American leaders as “losers.”

JULY 18, 2015 – In one of his cruelest, and strangest attacks, Trump, at a conservative summit in Iowa, ripped John McCain, a former prisoner of war. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said dismissively of McCain, who spent more than five years being tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and suffered permanent injuries as a result. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

AUG. 6, 2015 – Tenacious moderator Megyn Kelly kicked off the event by reminding Trump that he’d called “women you don’t like, ‘fat pigs, ‘dogs, slobs and disgusting animal.’ Trump interjected, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” setting off tensions between he, the conservative news network, and the entire GOP establishment that have yet to fully cool.

AUG. 7, 2015 – Trump, clearly affected by Kelly’s aggressive questioning of him during the initial GOP debate, was quick to go on the attack against the respected journalist. In an interview the night after the debate, Trump blasted Kelly for bringing up his years of piggish, anti-women remarks, as she questioned him during the Republican debate. He even suggested disgustingly that her ire was a product of menstrual cycle. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her – wherever,” Trump said

NOV. 24, 2015 – Trump mocked reporter’s physical handicap. “Now the poor guy, you ought to see the guy,” Trump said, mimicking New York Times (and former Daily News) reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that limits the movement of the joints and weakens the muscles around them. “‘Uhh, I don’t know what I said. I don’t remember,'” Trump said, gyrating his arms as he mocked Kovaleski’s movements.

AUG 1, 2016 – Trump insults Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son, Army Captain Humayun Khan, died in the line of duty in 2004, after they criticized him during a speech at the Democratic National Convention. Trump bizarrely claimed his real estate empire was a “sacrifice” and questioned why Ghazala Khan stayed silent on stage while her husband spoke. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably – maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said, suggesting that the Khans’ Muslim faith barred the woman from speaking out.

Donald Trump is wrong that ‘inner-city crime is reaching record levels’

As part of Donald Trump’s declared outreach to black voters, the Republican presidential nominee has painted a dire picture of American “inner cities” rife with crime, and stated only he can make them safe.

(h/t Wall Street Journal)

Reality

PolitiFact gave Trump’s claim a “Pants on Fire,” their worst truth rating, and even the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal corrected Trump on his disregard for the facts.

While crime has indeed ticked up recently, according to FBI data it remains near historic lows, even in America’s largest cities like Mr. Trump’s hometown of New York City.

And even if crime isn’t hitting record levels, there is growing evidence that there has been a one-year uptick, at least in certain cities. Trump’s supporters have seized on this as evidence that Trump isn’t totally off base in claiming that crime is on the rise.

Even if the recent one-year spike proves durable, the rates of homicides and violent crime in general have fallen so much in the past 25 years that the recent increases will not push them up to “record” levels at any time in the near future.

 

Trump spreads claim that Clinton’s ‘mentor’ was ‘KKK member’

Donald Trump on Saturday pushed back against Hillary Clinton’s efforts to link him to the Ku Klux Klan.

The Republican nominee retweeted a supporter’s post that the Democratic nominee “said a KKK member was her mentor.” And speaking later in Des Moines, Iowa, he dredged up Clinton’s use of the term “super predators” in the 1990s to argue that he, not Clinton, offered African-Americans the best choice for president.

Trump’s retweet and his latest appeals to black voters capped off a week of increasingly ugly and racially charged accusations between the two leading presidential candidates, during which Trump called Clinton a “bigot” and the Democratic nominee charged that Trump’s campaign was built on “prejudice and paranoia” while also tying him to the KKK.

“@DiamondandSilk: Crooked Hillary getting desperate. On TV bashing Trump. @CNN, she forgot how she said a KKK member was her mentor,” Trump tweeted Saturday.

Lynette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson — better known as Diamond and Silk, two African-American sisters supporting Trump who frequently speak at his rallies — confirmed to CNN that the tweet referred to the late West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, a former KKK member whom Clinton mourned in 2010 as “a true American original, my friend and mentor.”

“Donald J. Trump can’t help who embraces his campaign but Hillary Clinton could’ve helped who she embraced,” the duo said in a statement to CNN.

A Trump spokesman, Jason Miller, declined to comment, and a message left with Clinton’s campaign was not returned.

Trump’s surrogates in recent days have pointed to Clinton’s relationship with Byrd in response to accusations that Trump’s campaign stokes racial tensions.

Thursday night, Trump supporter Scottie Nell Hughes also cited Byrd, telling CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “(Clinton) sat there and praised Sen. Byrd saying that he was her mentor, that he should be respected and he was a leader of the KKK.”

And on Friday, Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany, speaking to CNN’s Jim Sciutto on “The Lead,” said Trump’s campaign was not engaging in Clinton’s “gutter politics.”

“You have heard no language to this level coming out of the Trump campaign,” McEnany said. “They could be digging into her past with Robert Byrd.”

(h/t CNN)

Reality

Yes it is true that Senator Robert Byrd was a mentor to Hillary Clinton when she joined the senate. Yes it is true that Senator Byrd was a member of the KKK, but what Trump is deceitfully neglecting to mention is that Byrd was a member, as in, used to be a member, in his youth decades before meeting Clinton. By the time Hillarly Clinton joined the Senate, Robert Byrd had disavowed the Klan decades ago, explained it was wrong, and had such an exemplary civil rights voting record he was graded at 100% by the NAACP.

When Senator Byrd died in 2010, the NAACP released a statement praising Byrd, saying that he “became a champion for civil rights and liberties” and “came to consistently support the NAACP civil rights agenda”.

These are the facts, I’m sorry. Donald Trump and his surrogates did not tell the entire story.

It also glosses over the fact Donald Trump was endorsed by the actual KKK , he failed to condone former Grand Wizard David Duke’s endorsement, had multiple known white supremacists representing him at the Republican National Convention, and Trump’s own father was caught at a KKK rally.

The New Birthers: Trump Pushes Hillary Clinton Health Conspiracy

From Donald Trump and his top surrogates to the right-wing media and its engine rooms of outrage in the blogosphere, Hillary Clinton’s opponents are ramping up efforts to sow doubt over the candidate’s health.

The campaign — which goes back years — has escalated to shouting over the summer, as Trump spiraled in the polls while mostly failing to connect with voters outside his base demographic. Now, as the race enters a crucial phase, there has been a growing push to fundamentally undermine Clinton’s candidacy.

Much in the way “birthers” (Trump was among the most prominent) sought similar ends by questioning President Barack Obama’s citizenship, the “healthers” are using junk science and conspiracy theories to argue that Clinton is suffering from a series of debilitating brain injuries.

In an interview on “Fox News Sunday” this weekend, former New York City mayor and Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani first accused the mainstream media of hiding evidence, then encouraged doubters to “go online and put down ‘Hillary Clinton illness.'”

There is absolutely no credible evidence to backstop any of these claims, including on the “videos” Giuliani cited. Clinton’s physician — the only person to speak on the record who has actually examined her — has repeatedly affirmed the former secretary of state’s health and fitness for the highest office in the land.

During an appearance Monday night on the Jimmy Kimmel show, Clinton called the GOP claims about her health a “wacky strategy.”

“I don’t know why they are saying this,” she said. “I think on the one hand, it is part of the wacky strategy, just say all these crazy things and maybe you can get some people to believe you.”

But for those who want to believe, the structure of the lie borders on impenetrable — baked into its “medical” assertions is the tightly held belief that the press is in cahoots with Clinton, protecting her political prospects by working overtime to hide her imagined ailment.

(h/t CNN)

Reality

The facts, though, tell a very different story. This is it.

The roots of the health conspiracy theory go back to late 2012

Days before she was first scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill about the Benghazi terror attack in December 2012, Clinton suffered a concussion after becoming dehydrated and fainting. Her appearance, scheduled for December 20, was pushed back as she recovered.

In a bit of dark irony, Clinton’s political opponents then, most notably the Republican former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, suggested that Clinton was faking it — that the secretary of state, as Bolton put it, had come down with a “diplomatic illness” in order to avoid the congressional inquiry.

In the weeks after the injury, Clinton would be hospitalized and prescribed blood thinners to dissolve a blood clot located in a vein behind her right ear. The diagnosis was made during a follow-up exam related to her concussion. The clot did not, per Clinton’s doctors, result in a stroke or any other neurological complications.

On January 23, 2013, a little more than a month after she was first slated to appear before Congress, Clinton testified at length to Senate and House committees about the Benghazi attacks.

Karl Rove helped plant the seeds in 2014

In May 2014, more than a year after Clinton left the State Department, Republican strategist Karl Rove made headlines by suggesting Clinton had suffered brain damage in 2012.

“Thirty days in the hospital? And when she reappears, she’s wearing glasses that are only for people who have traumatic brain injury?” he said, according to a New York Post report. “We need to know what’s up with that.”

Rove would attempt to walk back his comments a day after they were made public, telling Fox News of the brain damage comment that he “never used that phrase.”

He also conceded that Clinton had not, as he first said, spent a month in the hospital. She was there for about three days. Politifact also slapped a “False” tag on Rove’s claim that Clinton’s prismatic glasses indicated her injuries had been worse than initially let on.

The talk would mostly die down over the next year. In July 2015, Clinton’s longtime physician, Dr. Lisa Bardack, delivered her a clean bill of health.

“(Clinton) had follow-up testing in 2013, which revealed complete resolution of the effects of the concussion as well as total dissolution of the thrombosis,” Bardack wrote. “Mrs. Clinton also tested negative for all clotting disorders.”

The alleged ‘seizures’

The rumors have traveled with remarkable speed through the pipeline connecting small conservative and right-wing blogs to larger outlets like Breitbart, Infowars and Fox News.

First, there was the muffin shop.

During a June photo op in Washington, Clinton turned back reporters’ questions with what AP correspondent Lisa Lerer in a first person account titled “Video proves Clinton suffering seizures? Not so, I was there,” described as “an exaggerated motion, shaking her head vigorously for a few seconds.”

“After the exchange,” Lerer wrote, “(Clinton) took a few more photos, exited the shop and greeted supporters waiting outside.”

End of story? Not quite.

More than a month later, pro-Trump blogger Jim Hoft picked up the video and, on his Gateway Pundit site, ran a headline blaring, “Wow! Did Hillary Clinton Just Suffer a Seizure on Camera?” She had not, of course, as had been clear to everyone present. But the video soon went viral. Less than a week later, after Clinton delivered her convention address, he was back at it, publishing a GIF of the nominee’s amused face (there were a lot of balloons falling) under a similar title: “Wow! Media Missed This=> Did Hillary Suffer Another Seizure After Her DNC Speech?”

In the coming days and weeks, conservative media and the Trump campaign itself began to pick up the thread. Fox News host Sean Hannity, an unabashed supporter of the GOP nominee, dove in with particular gusto, gathering panels of “experts” to examine video clips of Clinton coughing and, again, batting her head at the D.C. muffin shop.
None of the physicians convened by Hannity had examined Clinton and at least one, Fox News medical correspondent Dr. David Samadi, is a urologist. When an actual neurologist, Dr. Fiona Gupta, joined the group, she mostly dismissed Hannity’s questions, saying, “It’s just so hard to speculate based on snippets (of video).”

When he pressed on (“It almost seems seizure-esque to me”), another Fox News contributor, Dr. Marc Siegel, an internist, pushed back.

“Well I’m not a neurologist,” Siegel said, “and I don’t think that necessarily looks like a seizure.”

The ‘fall’

At around the same time Hannity was hosting his panels, a blog called the American Mirror and the Drudge Report gave a boost to a photograph that had been floating around for months. Taken back in February, the image shows Clinton being helped up a flight of stairs outside a halfway house in in North Charleston, South Carolina.

“The questionable health condition of Hillary Clinton should be a major issue of the 2016 campaign,” the American Mirror post begins. “The latest evidence comes in the form of Clinton being helped up a set of stairs by multiple individuals outside what appears to be a home.”

But the Getty Images photo caption — filed months earlier — tells a very different story.

It reads: “Democratic Presidential candidate, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slips as she walks up the stairs into the non-profit SC Strong, a 2 year residential facility that helps former felons, substance abusers, and homeless move into self-sufficiency.

The “syringe” and fake medical records

As the conspiracy theories took flight, boosted by Trump’s repeated assertions that Clinton is too chronically tired or weak to handle the White House workload, “questions” from right-wing bloggers and gadflies about Clinton’s security detail began to focus in on a single piece of equipment carried by one agent.

On Twitter and on assorted blogs, conspiracy theorists began to focus on images they believed to show, as one headline put it, “Hillary’s Handler Carrying Auto-Injector Syringe For Anti-Seizure Drug Diazepam.”

But again, this was simply not the case. Hannity broadcast the story to his millions of viewers, citing the Gateway Pundit and its sources, with no evidence of his own.

Indeed, the Secret Service has weighed in repeatedly when asked. On Monday morning, spokeswoman Nicole Mainor dismissed the report in an email to CNN.

“The item in the Detail Leader’s hand is a flashlight,” she said.

The rumors took a more serious turn around this time, when a since-deleted Twitter account called @HillsMedRecords shared what purported to be leaked medical record showing Clinton having been diagnosed with early-onset dementia. Snopes.com, a fact-checking website, quickly snuffed them out and Clinton’s doctor — whose letterhead was used in the images featuring the fake reports — put out a statement explaining that the documents are “false, were not written by me and are not based on any medical facts.”

The Trump-Breitbart connection

Breitbart News has been a house organ for Trump since the early days of his run, but the union became more formal last week when the media company’s executive chairman, Steve Bannon, was hired as campaign CEO.

It has also been among the most consistent and highly trafficked peddlers of the conspiracy theories surrounding Clinton’s health. When she was slightly late returning to a debate stage in December — there had been a hold up entering the bathroom — Breitbart published a story weeks later citing “a law enforcement source with inside connections” who said Clinton “was missing from the stage due to health issues stemming from a previous brain injury.”

Trump himself has begun to allude more and more baldly to these suggestions, most notably in a pair of speeches last week when he questioned Clinton’s “mental and physical” stamina. On Friday, he tweeted: “#WheresHillary? Sleeping!!!!!”

All this as Drudge doubled down by bannering its site with an absurd Heat Street post, titled, “MUST SEE: Photos of Hillary Clinton Propped Up on Pillows.” The images, with arrows superimposed to point out the pillows, show Clinton — fully alert, engaged, sometimes addressing large audiences — in the presence of small pillows that she sometimes placed behind her back when she was seated.

By the end of last week, at least one prominent Republican Trump supporter had heard about enough. After “Fox and Friends” played a clip of Dr. Drew Pinsky, of “Celebrity Rehab” semi-fame and HLN host, discussing his “grave concern” for Clinton, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich lost his patience.

“With all due respect to television doctors, when you have a doctor who has never seen the patient begin to give you a complicated, fancy-sounding analysis based on what?” Gingrich said.

“I mean, I would be very cautious and I would recommend to doctors for professional reasons to be very cautious deciding you’re going to start analyzing people.”

Reality

The sad truth is that Trump and his campaign continues to promote baseless conspiracy theories even in the face of overwhelming evidence. From a rigged election, to a link between vaccines and autism, to climate change denial, there seems to be no conspiracy theory they won’t try to push on voters who may not be informed of the facts or may be intentionally adverse to accepting new information that does not conform to their preconceived beliefs.

New Trump Campaign Manager No Longer Wants Him to Release His Tax Returns

Donald Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said that she does not want the Republican presidential nominee to release his tax returns until an audit by the Internal Revenue Service is completed, abandoning a position that she took five months ago, when she didn’t work for the campaign and urged Trump to “be transparent” and release the filings.

“I’ve learned since being on the inside that this audit is a serious matter and that he has said that when the audit is complete, he will release his tax returns,” Conway said during an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that aired Sunday morning. “I also know as a pollster that what concerns people most about quote ‘taxes’ is their own tax liability, and so we appreciate people being able to see Hillary Clinton’s plan and Donald Trump’s plan and figure out who will really get the middle-class tax relief.”

According to Trump’s attorneys, his tax returns filed since 2009 are under audit but those from 2002 to 2008 are no longer under audit. Conway said Sunday in an interview on CNN that she does not want Trump to release those returns, either.

On ABC, Conway also took a swipe at Clinton over transparency: “I’m glad that he’s transparent about a number of things, and we’re certainly running against the least accountable, least transparent, I think, joyless candidate in presidential political history.”

Trump is the first major presidential nominee from either party since 1976 to not release tax returns. Last summer, Clinton released returns from 2007 to 2014, and her campaign shared her 2015 return this month, as well as 10 years of returns from her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia. Trump’s running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, has said that he plans to release his tax returns, with a spokesman telling CNN that this would happen before the election.

In April, Conway appeared on CNN and defended a short-lived alliance between Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) to stop Trump, a strategy that she considered “fair game.”

“Of course it’s fair game,” Conway said. “Oh, absolutely. It’s completely transparent. Donald Trump’s tax returns aren’t, and I would like to see those be transparent.”

During the Sunday interview on CNN, Conway said she didn’t understand why Trump’s tax returns have become such a big issue.

“This entire tax return debate is somewhat confounding to me, in the following sense: I don’t think that it creates one job, gets one more individual who does not have health insurance covered by health insurance, particularly under the disaster that has been Obamacare with these private insurers pulling out our exchanges now and reporting billions of dollars of losses,” Conway said. “If we want transparency, if we want specifics, the most relevant thing that people can look at is what is his plan for their tax bill.”

(h/t The Washington Post)

Reality

Trump had a contradictory position 4 years ago when he demanded Mitt Romney to release his tax returns.

As for the “audit” excuse, the fact remains that this rationale has never made any sense: an IRS audit doesn’t preclude someone from sharing their returns.

Since Watergate, every presidential candidate, Democrat or Republican, has released his or her tax returns. It’s not required by law, but there’s a tradition of disclosure that Americans have come to count on during the presidential vetting process: candidates for the nation’s highest office are expected to release information related to their personal health and their tax filings.

Indeed even Richard Nixon, during his presidency, released his tax materials in the midst of an IRS audit. Trump could, if he wanted to, release these returns whenever he feels like it. For reasons he won’t explain, the GOP candidate just doesn’t want to.

It’s as if the campaign has decided to wave a big, unmistakable sign that reads, “We have something to hide.”

Media

ABC This Morning – 8/21/2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EH3zk0NShI

CNN – 8/21/2016

New Trump Campaign Manager Says He ‘Doesn’t Hurl Personal Insults’, Then He Proved Her Wrong

Donald Trump’s new campaign manager says the Republican presidential nominee doesn’t hurl personal insults.

In an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Kellyanne Conway was asked about past statements she made criticizing Trump’s tone and attacks on his rivals.

“I don’t like when people hurl personal insults, that will never change,” Conway said. “I’m the mother of four small children. That would be a terrible example for me to feel otherwise.”But when pressed by host George Stephanopoulos on whether Trump would change his approach, Conway defended his tone.

“He doesn’t hurl personal insults,” she said.

“He just this week — look what he talked about. He’s bringing the case right to communities of color in Michigan, and he’s speaking to all Americans when he does that. What he’s doing is he’s challenging the Democratic Party. He’s challenging President Obama and Hillary Clinton’s legacy.”

Conway took over as Trump’s new campaign manager last week. She had chastised Trump in February, though, for “hurling personal insults” and using “vulgar” language.

“Do I want somebody who hurls personal insults or who goes and talks about philosophical differences?” Conway asked on CNN at the time.

(h/t The Hill)

Reality

Within a few hours after making this statement, Donald Trump sent tweets personally insulting MSNBC hosts Donny Deutsch and then attacked and threatened fellow MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.

Here are a few other examples of Trump hurling insults:

JUNE 16, 2015 – Trump officially threw his clown hat into the circus that would soon be the 2016 race with a jaw-dropping, ad-libbed speech in which he insulted Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” derided foreign countries and lambasted President Obama and other American leaders as “losers.”

JULY 18, 2015 – In one of his cruelest, and strangest attacks, Trump, at a conservative summit in Iowa, ripped John McCain, a former prisoner of war. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump said dismissively of McCain, who spent more than five years being tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam and suffered permanent injuries as a result. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

AUG. 6, 2015 – Tenacious moderator Megyn Kelly kicked off the event by reminding Trump that he’d called “women you don’t like, ‘fat pigs, ‘dogs, slobs and disgusting animal.’ Trump interjected, “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” setting off tensions between he, the conservative news network, and the entire GOP establishment that have yet to fully cool.

AUG. 7, 2015 – Trump, clearly affected by Kelly’s aggressive questioning of him during the initial GOP debate, was quick to go on the attack against the respected journalist. In an interview the night after the debate, Trump blasted Kelly for bringing up his years of piggish, anti-women remarks, as she questioned him during the Republican debate. He even suggested disgustingly that her ire was a product of menstrual cycle. “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her – wherever,” Trump said

NOV. 24, 2015 – Trump mocked reporter’s physical handicap. “Now the poor guy, you ought to see the guy,” Trump said, mimicking New York Times (and former Daily News) reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from arthrogryposis, a congenital condition that limits the movement of the joints and weakens the muscles around them. “‘Uhh, I don’t know what I said. I don’t remember,'” Trump said, gyrating his arms as he mocked Kovaleski’s movements.

2015 – 2016 – At Republican debates and during various campaign stops, Trump began rolling out clever nicknames for his political rivals. And like his candidacy, they all stuck. Among them? “Lyin’ Ted” (Ted Cruz), “Little Marco” Marco Rubio), “Crooked Hillary” (Hillary Clinton) and “Goofy Elizabeth Warren.”

AUG 1, 2016 – Trump insults Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son, Army Captain Humayun Khan, died in the line of duty in 2004, after they criticized him during a speech at the Democratic National Convention. Trump bizarrely claimed his real estate empire was a “sacrifice” and questioned why Ghazala Khan stayed silent on stage while her husband spoke. “If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably – maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me,” Trump said, suggesting that the Khans’ Muslim faith barred the woman from speaking out.

Media

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