05-26-2017, 01:23 PM
(This post was last modified: 05-26-2017, 01:25 PM by Eric the Green.)
PowerPost
Gianforte’s victory after assaulting reporter reflects rising tribalism in American politics
By James Hohmann May 26 at 11:08 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powe...fb981dba2/
Play Video 2:01
Gianforte apologizes for assaulting reporter
Republican businessman Greg Gianforte won Montana's House seat a day after being charged with attacking a Guardian reporter. He gave an apology during his acceptance speech. (AP)
With Breanne Deppisch
THE BIG IDEA: Greg Gianforte admitted to attacking a reporter and apologized during his victory speech last night, as he kept Montana’s sole House seat in Republican hands. Now he and his party’s leaders are trying to move on.
On the eve of the special election, the wealthy technology entrepreneur flipped out when the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs asked him about the CBO’s score of the health care bill. He now faces misdemeanor assault charges for reportedly throwing Jacobs to the ground and breaking his glasses.
“I made a mistake,” the congressman-elect said at his party in Bozeman. “Not in our minds!” yelled a supporter. David Weigel, who was there, reports that some in the crowd laughed.
-- After his comfortable six-point victory, Republican congressional leaders are making clear there will be no meaningful consequences for his behavior. “Elections are about choices and Montanans made their choice,” Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement this morning. "Rep.-elect Gianforte is an outsider with real-world experience creating jobs in Montana. He will bring that experience to Congress, where he will be a valuable voice in the House Republican Conference."
Without being asked, Donald Trump turned to a group of photographers following him in Europe this morning and declared: "Great win in Montana.” Then he walked away without saying anything else. In a robo-call recorded shortly before the election, he called Gianforte “my friend” and “a wonderful guy.” “You'll be very proud of him for years to come,” Trump told voters.
A spokesman for Mike Pence, who traveled to Montana two weeks ago to stump with Gianforte, declined to comment yesterday, and the vice president skipped his only public event of the day so he did not need to weigh in.
A Republican congressman from San Diego, who is under criminal investigation by the Justice Department, said this to an AP reporter:
Follow
Mary Clare Jalonick @MCJalonick
Rep. Duncan Hunter said of MT reporter assault, “It’s not appropriate behavior. Unless the reporter deserved it.”
7:32 AM - 25 May 2017
-- Michelle Fields, the former Breitbart News reporter who Corey Lewandowski grabbed when she tried to ask Trump a question last year, believes some Republicans “have put party over civility.” “From the age of the Gipper to our era of the Groper, the state of our politics has declined drastically,” she writes in an op-ed for the New York Times. “It’s hard to imagine the late, great William F. Buckley cheering on a politician who assaulted a reporter. But Buckley’s nephew, Brent Bozell, did just that on Twitter in the aftermath of the Jacobs’s incident.” Bozell runs the Media Research Center:
Follow
Brent Bozell ✔ @BrentBozell
Jacobs is an obnoxious, dishonest first class jerk. I'm not surprised he got smacked.
6:01 AM - 25 May 2017
“Had Ben been attacked by a Democrat, many on the right who are refusing to believe the assault occurred — or outright praising it — would be hailing him as a victim of liberal rage,” Fields adds. “Had Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, rather than Mr. Trump’s, grabbed my arm, I would not have been abandoned by many of my friends and mentors at Fox News, or my employer, Breitbart News. But I was inconvenient to their political narrative.”
-- The Montana donnybrook quickly became a Rorschach Test that highlighted the divide within the conservative media between the serious and unserious outlets. It also showcased how many prominent figures on the right reflexively rally behind Republican politicians, whether the president or a House candidate, even when they are very clearly in the wrong. This is part of a growing tribalism that contributes to the polarization of our political system.
FoxNews.com published a first-person account yesterday by veteran correspondent Alicia Acuna, who witnessed the incident: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him.”
Very tellingly, upstart conservative outlets that are trying to steal Fox’s market share by getting to the network’s right spent yesterday trying to poke holes in the story.
Laura Ingraham aggressively questioned the Fox reporter on her radio show: “You can’t body-slam someone by holding both hands on the neck. That’s impossible…Didn’t he grab him near the neck and throw him down? Just asking.” Acuna held firm: “I saw both his hands go up not around his neck in a strangling type of way, but more just on each side of his neck, just grabbed him. I guess it could have been on his clothes, I don’t know. I can’t say that for sure. But he grabbed him and slammed him down. … He had one hand on each side of his neck.”
“Acuna’s account in her interview with Ingraham was consistent with what she published on FoxNews.com, not to mention Jacobs’s own version of events,” Erik Wemple writes. “Now have a look at the headline on LifeZette, where Ingraham serves as editor in chief: ‘Montana Assault Witness Changes Story, Says No Neck Grab; Reporter says firsthand account misstated key aspect of Gianforte incident.’ BuzzFeed has deemed this story ‘FAKE.’”
But fake stuff gets around, Erik notes: On his radio show yesterday afternoon, Rush Limbaugh falsely told his listeners that the Fox reporter had basically recanted her story. He also called Jacobs “a pajama boy journalist” who was “insolent … disrespectful … whiny and moany.” RealClearPolitics reported wrongly that Acuna was “walking back” her claims. The headline on the Drudge Report was: “Witness Changes Story.”
And while the news division at Fox covered the story seriously and showed integrity, at least one commentator said on the air that the reporter had it coming:
John Whitehouse @existentialfish
Fox contributor: Ben Jacobs "was not doing a fair story" and "got a little bit of Montana justice" pic.twitter.com/LvW79GFMgF via @IceManNYR
2:55 PM - 25 May 2017
… to which Republican focus group guru Frank Luntz replied:
Frank Luntz ✔ @FrankLuntz
If Obama had done the same to a persistent journalist, would it have been accepted as "Chicago justice?" https://twitter.com/existentialfish/stat...4418945024 …
6:09 PM - 25 May 2017
Frank Luntz ✔ @FrankLuntz
If you check the party affiliation of someone who commits assaults before deciding how you feel about it, you're what's wrong with America.
6:18 PM - 25 May 2017
The fever swamps of the internet went even further, though: Mike Cernovich, who has a wide following on the fringes and friends in the White House, raised the bar for required evidence. “Although there is an audio recording of the incident, he said video was needed for the story to be reliable,” Abby Ohlheiser reports. “Gateway Pundit wrote that it was ‘strange’ there was no video.”
It should go without saying that this really does a disservice to the well-intentioned people who look to these sites for honest information. Remember, Gianforte himself has now admitted wrongdoing and apologized.
Play Video 1:36
Montana voters react to GOP candidate’s alleged assault of a reporter
As the polls close for Montana’s special election, voters respond to whether the incident with Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte and a Guardian reporter influenced their vote. (Video: McKenna Ewen,Abbey Nelson/Photo: The Guardian/The Washington Post)
-- Many rank-and-file Republican voters, who follow the cues and signals of their leaders, defended their nominee’s behavior. “I understand the frustration of someone being right in your face,” Luanne Biggs, who voted for Gianforte, told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “I feel like it’s a little set up.”
CNN correspondent Kyung Lah went to a polling place to interview voters and reported that nearly everyone she talked with said they weren’t changing their vote:
Kyung Lah ✔ @KyungLahCNN
MT GOP voter, upon learning we're from @CNN: "You're lucky someone doesn't pop one of you."
9:06 AM - 25 May 2017
Kyung Lah ✔ @KyungLahCNN
MT GOP voter to me just now, knowing I work for @CNN: "That audio made me cheer." She smiled as she walked in to vote for Gianforte.
8:53 AM - 25 May 2017
Recall that many of these sorts of voters began identifying with the term “deplorable” after Clinton described some of Trump’s supporters that way during the 2016 campaign. That is why, even before the polls closed yesterday, many Democratic voters in Montana expressed skepticism that the attack on Jacobs would change the outcome of the race. “Greg thinks he’s Donald Trump,” Brent Morrow, 60, told Weigel. “He thinks he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.”
-- But at least those people were talking about what happened. The Montana NBC Affiliate reportedly refused to cover the Gianforte story at all on Wednesday night, a shocking blackout. Irate sources inside 30 Rock appear to have called up New York Magazine’s Yashar Ali to complain: “KECI news director Julie Weindel was called by NBC News to see if KECI would cover the story or had any footage of the Gianforte incident that NBC News and its affiliates could use. … She was unyielding in her refusal to share any footage she may have had access to, or run a report on the story. … Weindel said that they weren’t covering the story, though it was running in outlets across the country at the time, explaining, ‘The person that tweeted [Jacobs] and was allegedly body slammed is a reporter for a politically biased publication.’ Weindel then added, ‘You are on your own for this.’ … The station was acquired, last month, by the conservative media conglomerate Sinclair Broadcasting.”
-- Here’s why that’s a big deal: Sinclair Broadcasting just struck a deal with Tribune Media to buy dozens of local TV stations. “Already, Sinclair is the largest owner of local TV stations in the nation. If the $3.9 billion deal gets regulatory approval, Sinclair would have 7 of every 10 Americans in its potential audience,” Margaret Sullivan explained in a column last weekend. “Sinclair would have 215 stations, including ones in big markets such as Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago, instead of the 173 it has now. There’s no reason to think that the FCC’s new chairman, Ajit Pai, will stand in the way. Already, his commission has reinstated a regulatory loophole — closed under his predecessor, Tom Wheeler — that allows a single corporation to own more stations than the current 39 percent nationwide cap…
“When Sinclair bought Washington’s WJLA-TV in 2014, the new owners quickly moved the station to the right … It added conservative commentary pieces from a Sinclair executive, Mark Hyman, and public affairs programming with conservative hosts. (The deal would give Sinclair a second Washington station, WDCW.) And Sinclair regularly sends ‘must-run’ segments to its stations across the country. One example: an opinion piece by a Sinclair executive that echoed President Trump’s slam at the national news media and what he calls the ‘fake news’ they produce…
“During the presidential campaign, Trump’s message came through loud and clear on Sinclair’s stations, many of which are in small or medium-sized markets in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, even bragged, according to Politico, that the campaign cut a deal with the media conglomerate for uninterrupted coverage of some Trump appearances. Is there a link between such content — and the expectation of more — and the loosening of federal rules?”
THE BIGGER PICTURE:
-- “The darker forces that propelled President Trump’s rise are beginning to frame and define the rest of the Republican Party,” Karen Tumulty and Robert Costa explain. “When Gianforte assaulted a reporter … many saw not an isolated outburst by an individual, but the obvious, violent result of Trump’s charge that journalists are ‘the enemy of the people.’ … Trump — and specifically, his character and his conduct — now thoroughly dominate the national political conversation. Traditional policy arguments over whether entitlement programs should be overhauled, or taxes cut, are regularly upstaged by a new burst of pyrotechnics. … Trump’s barrage of news-making and controversy drives the GOP even at its lowest levels, with his raucous populism and blustering behavior reshaping its identity. Candidates often are either adopting aspects of his persona or finding themselves having to fitfully explain why they back him despite them.”
-- Many right-wing intellectuals blame Trump for corrupting the conservative movement so much that Gianforte can get away with hitting a reporter:
Charlie Sykes, a conservative former talk-show host in Wisconsin, told Karen and Bob: “Every time something like Montana happens, Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.”
Michael Gerson, a top speechwriter for George W. Bush, recalls a few of the conspiracy theories that the president has floated in his column for today’s Post: “Who raised the possibility that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Who hinted that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster, or that unnamed liberals might have killed Justice Antonin Scalia? Who not only questioned President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but raised the prospect of the murder of a Hawaiian state official in a coverup? ‘How amazing,’ Trump tweeted in 2013, ‘the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.’ We have a president charged with maintaining public health who asserts that the vaccination schedule is a dangerous scam of greedy doctors. We have a president charged with representing all Americans who has falsely accused thousands of Muslims of celebrating in the streets following the 9/11 attacks. … This is a concrete example of the mainstreaming of destructive craziness.”
“Respectfully, I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,” Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) told Mike DeBonis at the Capitol. “I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license. … There is a total weirdness out there. People feel like, if the president of the United States can say anything to anybody at any time, then I guess I can too. And that is a very dangerous phenomenon.”
Gianforte’s victory after assaulting reporter reflects rising tribalism in American politics
By James Hohmann May 26 at 11:08 AM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powe...fb981dba2/
Play Video 2:01
Gianforte apologizes for assaulting reporter
Republican businessman Greg Gianforte won Montana's House seat a day after being charged with attacking a Guardian reporter. He gave an apology during his acceptance speech. (AP)
With Breanne Deppisch
THE BIG IDEA: Greg Gianforte admitted to attacking a reporter and apologized during his victory speech last night, as he kept Montana’s sole House seat in Republican hands. Now he and his party’s leaders are trying to move on.
On the eve of the special election, the wealthy technology entrepreneur flipped out when the Guardian’s Ben Jacobs asked him about the CBO’s score of the health care bill. He now faces misdemeanor assault charges for reportedly throwing Jacobs to the ground and breaking his glasses.
“I made a mistake,” the congressman-elect said at his party in Bozeman. “Not in our minds!” yelled a supporter. David Weigel, who was there, reports that some in the crowd laughed.
-- After his comfortable six-point victory, Republican congressional leaders are making clear there will be no meaningful consequences for his behavior. “Elections are about choices and Montanans made their choice,” Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement this morning. "Rep.-elect Gianforte is an outsider with real-world experience creating jobs in Montana. He will bring that experience to Congress, where he will be a valuable voice in the House Republican Conference."
Without being asked, Donald Trump turned to a group of photographers following him in Europe this morning and declared: "Great win in Montana.” Then he walked away without saying anything else. In a robo-call recorded shortly before the election, he called Gianforte “my friend” and “a wonderful guy.” “You'll be very proud of him for years to come,” Trump told voters.
A spokesman for Mike Pence, who traveled to Montana two weeks ago to stump with Gianforte, declined to comment yesterday, and the vice president skipped his only public event of the day so he did not need to weigh in.
A Republican congressman from San Diego, who is under criminal investigation by the Justice Department, said this to an AP reporter:
Follow
Mary Clare Jalonick @MCJalonick
Rep. Duncan Hunter said of MT reporter assault, “It’s not appropriate behavior. Unless the reporter deserved it.”
7:32 AM - 25 May 2017
-- Michelle Fields, the former Breitbart News reporter who Corey Lewandowski grabbed when she tried to ask Trump a question last year, believes some Republicans “have put party over civility.” “From the age of the Gipper to our era of the Groper, the state of our politics has declined drastically,” she writes in an op-ed for the New York Times. “It’s hard to imagine the late, great William F. Buckley cheering on a politician who assaulted a reporter. But Buckley’s nephew, Brent Bozell, did just that on Twitter in the aftermath of the Jacobs’s incident.” Bozell runs the Media Research Center:
Follow
Brent Bozell ✔ @BrentBozell
Jacobs is an obnoxious, dishonest first class jerk. I'm not surprised he got smacked.
6:01 AM - 25 May 2017
“Had Ben been attacked by a Democrat, many on the right who are refusing to believe the assault occurred — or outright praising it — would be hailing him as a victim of liberal rage,” Fields adds. “Had Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, rather than Mr. Trump’s, grabbed my arm, I would not have been abandoned by many of my friends and mentors at Fox News, or my employer, Breitbart News. But I was inconvenient to their political narrative.”
-- The Montana donnybrook quickly became a Rorschach Test that highlighted the divide within the conservative media between the serious and unserious outlets. It also showcased how many prominent figures on the right reflexively rally behind Republican politicians, whether the president or a House candidate, even when they are very clearly in the wrong. This is part of a growing tribalism that contributes to the polarization of our political system.
FoxNews.com published a first-person account yesterday by veteran correspondent Alicia Acuna, who witnessed the incident: “Gianforte grabbed Jacobs by the neck with both hands and slammed him into the ground behind him.”
Very tellingly, upstart conservative outlets that are trying to steal Fox’s market share by getting to the network’s right spent yesterday trying to poke holes in the story.
Laura Ingraham aggressively questioned the Fox reporter on her radio show: “You can’t body-slam someone by holding both hands on the neck. That’s impossible…Didn’t he grab him near the neck and throw him down? Just asking.” Acuna held firm: “I saw both his hands go up not around his neck in a strangling type of way, but more just on each side of his neck, just grabbed him. I guess it could have been on his clothes, I don’t know. I can’t say that for sure. But he grabbed him and slammed him down. … He had one hand on each side of his neck.”
“Acuna’s account in her interview with Ingraham was consistent with what she published on FoxNews.com, not to mention Jacobs’s own version of events,” Erik Wemple writes. “Now have a look at the headline on LifeZette, where Ingraham serves as editor in chief: ‘Montana Assault Witness Changes Story, Says No Neck Grab; Reporter says firsthand account misstated key aspect of Gianforte incident.’ BuzzFeed has deemed this story ‘FAKE.’”
But fake stuff gets around, Erik notes: On his radio show yesterday afternoon, Rush Limbaugh falsely told his listeners that the Fox reporter had basically recanted her story. He also called Jacobs “a pajama boy journalist” who was “insolent … disrespectful … whiny and moany.” RealClearPolitics reported wrongly that Acuna was “walking back” her claims. The headline on the Drudge Report was: “Witness Changes Story.”
And while the news division at Fox covered the story seriously and showed integrity, at least one commentator said on the air that the reporter had it coming:
John Whitehouse @existentialfish
Fox contributor: Ben Jacobs "was not doing a fair story" and "got a little bit of Montana justice" pic.twitter.com/LvW79GFMgF via @IceManNYR
2:55 PM - 25 May 2017
… to which Republican focus group guru Frank Luntz replied:
Frank Luntz ✔ @FrankLuntz
If Obama had done the same to a persistent journalist, would it have been accepted as "Chicago justice?" https://twitter.com/existentialfish/stat...4418945024 …
6:09 PM - 25 May 2017
Frank Luntz ✔ @FrankLuntz
If you check the party affiliation of someone who commits assaults before deciding how you feel about it, you're what's wrong with America.
6:18 PM - 25 May 2017
The fever swamps of the internet went even further, though: Mike Cernovich, who has a wide following on the fringes and friends in the White House, raised the bar for required evidence. “Although there is an audio recording of the incident, he said video was needed for the story to be reliable,” Abby Ohlheiser reports. “Gateway Pundit wrote that it was ‘strange’ there was no video.”
It should go without saying that this really does a disservice to the well-intentioned people who look to these sites for honest information. Remember, Gianforte himself has now admitted wrongdoing and apologized.
Play Video 1:36
Montana voters react to GOP candidate’s alleged assault of a reporter
As the polls close for Montana’s special election, voters respond to whether the incident with Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte and a Guardian reporter influenced their vote. (Video: McKenna Ewen,Abbey Nelson/Photo: The Guardian/The Washington Post)
-- Many rank-and-file Republican voters, who follow the cues and signals of their leaders, defended their nominee’s behavior. “I understand the frustration of someone being right in your face,” Luanne Biggs, who voted for Gianforte, told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle. “I feel like it’s a little set up.”
CNN correspondent Kyung Lah went to a polling place to interview voters and reported that nearly everyone she talked with said they weren’t changing their vote:
Kyung Lah ✔ @KyungLahCNN
MT GOP voter, upon learning we're from @CNN: "You're lucky someone doesn't pop one of you."
9:06 AM - 25 May 2017
Kyung Lah ✔ @KyungLahCNN
MT GOP voter to me just now, knowing I work for @CNN: "That audio made me cheer." She smiled as she walked in to vote for Gianforte.
8:53 AM - 25 May 2017
Recall that many of these sorts of voters began identifying with the term “deplorable” after Clinton described some of Trump’s supporters that way during the 2016 campaign. That is why, even before the polls closed yesterday, many Democratic voters in Montana expressed skepticism that the attack on Jacobs would change the outcome of the race. “Greg thinks he’s Donald Trump,” Brent Morrow, 60, told Weigel. “He thinks he could shoot a guy on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.”
-- But at least those people were talking about what happened. The Montana NBC Affiliate reportedly refused to cover the Gianforte story at all on Wednesday night, a shocking blackout. Irate sources inside 30 Rock appear to have called up New York Magazine’s Yashar Ali to complain: “KECI news director Julie Weindel was called by NBC News to see if KECI would cover the story or had any footage of the Gianforte incident that NBC News and its affiliates could use. … She was unyielding in her refusal to share any footage she may have had access to, or run a report on the story. … Weindel said that they weren’t covering the story, though it was running in outlets across the country at the time, explaining, ‘The person that tweeted [Jacobs] and was allegedly body slammed is a reporter for a politically biased publication.’ Weindel then added, ‘You are on your own for this.’ … The station was acquired, last month, by the conservative media conglomerate Sinclair Broadcasting.”
-- Here’s why that’s a big deal: Sinclair Broadcasting just struck a deal with Tribune Media to buy dozens of local TV stations. “Already, Sinclair is the largest owner of local TV stations in the nation. If the $3.9 billion deal gets regulatory approval, Sinclair would have 7 of every 10 Americans in its potential audience,” Margaret Sullivan explained in a column last weekend. “Sinclair would have 215 stations, including ones in big markets such as Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago, instead of the 173 it has now. There’s no reason to think that the FCC’s new chairman, Ajit Pai, will stand in the way. Already, his commission has reinstated a regulatory loophole — closed under his predecessor, Tom Wheeler — that allows a single corporation to own more stations than the current 39 percent nationwide cap…
“When Sinclair bought Washington’s WJLA-TV in 2014, the new owners quickly moved the station to the right … It added conservative commentary pieces from a Sinclair executive, Mark Hyman, and public affairs programming with conservative hosts. (The deal would give Sinclair a second Washington station, WDCW.) And Sinclair regularly sends ‘must-run’ segments to its stations across the country. One example: an opinion piece by a Sinclair executive that echoed President Trump’s slam at the national news media and what he calls the ‘fake news’ they produce…
“During the presidential campaign, Trump’s message came through loud and clear on Sinclair’s stations, many of which are in small or medium-sized markets in battleground states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, even bragged, according to Politico, that the campaign cut a deal with the media conglomerate for uninterrupted coverage of some Trump appearances. Is there a link between such content — and the expectation of more — and the loosening of federal rules?”
THE BIGGER PICTURE:
-- “The darker forces that propelled President Trump’s rise are beginning to frame and define the rest of the Republican Party,” Karen Tumulty and Robert Costa explain. “When Gianforte assaulted a reporter … many saw not an isolated outburst by an individual, but the obvious, violent result of Trump’s charge that journalists are ‘the enemy of the people.’ … Trump — and specifically, his character and his conduct — now thoroughly dominate the national political conversation. Traditional policy arguments over whether entitlement programs should be overhauled, or taxes cut, are regularly upstaged by a new burst of pyrotechnics. … Trump’s barrage of news-making and controversy drives the GOP even at its lowest levels, with his raucous populism and blustering behavior reshaping its identity. Candidates often are either adopting aspects of his persona or finding themselves having to fitfully explain why they back him despite them.”
-- Many right-wing intellectuals blame Trump for corrupting the conservative movement so much that Gianforte can get away with hitting a reporter:
Charlie Sykes, a conservative former talk-show host in Wisconsin, told Karen and Bob: “Every time something like Montana happens, Republicans adjust their standards and put an emphasis on team loyalty. They normalize and accept previously unacceptable behavior.”
Michael Gerson, a top speechwriter for George W. Bush, recalls a few of the conspiracy theories that the president has floated in his column for today’s Post: “Who raised the possibility that Ted Cruz’s father might have been involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy? Who hinted that Hillary Clinton might have been involved in the death of Vince Foster, or that unnamed liberals might have killed Justice Antonin Scalia? Who not only questioned President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, but raised the prospect of the murder of a Hawaiian state official in a coverup? ‘How amazing,’ Trump tweeted in 2013, ‘the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s ‘birth certificate’ died in plane crash today. All others lived.’ We have a president charged with maintaining public health who asserts that the vaccination schedule is a dangerous scam of greedy doctors. We have a president charged with representing all Americans who has falsely accused thousands of Muslims of celebrating in the streets following the 9/11 attacks. … This is a concrete example of the mainstreaming of destructive craziness.”
“Respectfully, I’d submit that the president has unearthed some demons,” Rep. Mark Sanford (R-S.C.) told Mike DeBonis at the Capitol. “I’ve talked to a number of people about it back home. They say, ‘Well, look, if the president can say whatever, why can’t I say whatever?’ He’s given them license. … There is a total weirdness out there. People feel like, if the president of the United States can say anything to anybody at any time, then I guess I can too. And that is a very dangerous phenomenon.”