President Donald Trump’s continued obsession with slandering MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has now drawn strong condemnation from conservative website the Washington Examiner.
In several attacks against Scarborough, Trump has been calling for a renewed investigation of the death of Lori Klausutis, a staffer who passed out and died after hitting her head on a desk while working in Scarborough’s Florida office back in 2001 when he served as a congressman.
Trump has been accusing Scarborough of murdering the woman and suggested he may have done it to cover up an affair. And he is doing this in retaliation against Scarborough for criticizing him.
But these attacks against Scarborough appear to be backfiring against Trump as he desperately struggles in the polls against former Vice President Joe Biden.
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As more and more Republicans are throwing their support behind Biden, Trump appears to be losing the support of the Examiner, a right-wing rag that often defends him.
The publication addressed Trump’s attacks against Scarborough by pointing out that the medical examiner ruled that Klausutis died after passing out due to a heart problem and hitting her head as a result of the fall.
Scarborough was also nowhere near Florida at the time as he was busy casting votes in Congress in Washington DC that day and the next. It should also be noted that there’s no evidence that the two were ever involved in an inappropriate relationship and Scarborough had already announced his retirement from Congress prior to Klausutis’ death.
Over the years, however, the death has been a source of attack against Scarborough. And now Trump is doing the same.
“It is deeply unfortunate that certain loathsome individuals chose to amplify, repeat, or otherwise resurrect this tall tale, either as part of a bad-faith, cheap-shot ad hominem argument against Scarborough,” the Examiner wrote. “But it is far, far more unfortunate that the latest person to trumpet and repeat this vile slander is the president supposedly leading this nation through a time of crisis.”
Indeed, Trump seems to be using this attack as a distraction from his reckless response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has now killed 100,000 Americans.
It’s also hypocritical because Trump is constantly whining about libel laws, yet is engaging in libel against Scarborough, thus opening himself up to lawsuits.
But Trump’s obsession with the conspiracy theory has forced the Examiner to reevaluate Trump’s fitness for the office.
“Whatever his issues with Scarborough, President Trump’s crazed Twitter rant on this subject was vile and unworthy of his office,” the publication said. “Some will undoubtedly shrug it off as Trump being Trump, but one could hardly be blamed for reading it and doubting his fitness to lead.”
The Examiner concluded by calling for Trump to apologize to Scarborough, which won’t happen, and warned him that it will hurt his re-election chances.
To say Trump owes Scarborough an apology is to put it mildly. But in the end, Scarborough won’t be the one hurt by this. Against a weak opponent, Trump somehow managed in 2016 to win despite carrying on with sad, deluded conspiracy theories about Sen. Ted Cruz’s father being involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Against a less reviled opponent, he may not be so lucky in 2020.
And observers might even someday look back at this incident as the instant when things began to unravel.”
Trump’s baseless accusation, and his subsequent repetition of it, could be the scandal that finally brings him down. After all, the reason why his approval rating among Republicans is near 100 percent is because only his supporters are left in the party. The real Republicans are supporting Biden and those who planned to not vote may just change their mind in response to Trump’s latest outrageous behavior.
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