DONALD
TRUMP DOESN’T SEEM TO KNOW WHAT YEAR IT IS, WHO HE’S RUNNING AGAINST (HINT: NOT
HILLARY CLINTON)
“We’ve got the emails. We’re getting them
out.”
BY BESS LEVIN
OCTOBER
9, 2020
When the FBI announced in October 2016 that it was reviewing new
emails related to its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a
private server as secretary of state, it gave Donald Trump a
priceless gift. Not because, as it turned out, Clinton had deliberately
mishandled classified information or was about to be charged with a crime, but
because it gave the impression of impropriety, which the reality-TV host rode
all the way to the White House. Unfortunately for Trump, whose polling couldn’t be worse,
we are living in the year 2020 and he is running against Joe Biden, not
Hillary Clinton. These are the sort of simple questions a doctor might ask a
patient to assess whether they’ve suffered a traumatic brain injury, yet,
weirdly, it appears that neither the president nor his employees know the
correct answers.
Speaking to Fox News on Friday, Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo told Dana Perino, “We’ve
got the emails. We’re getting them out. We’re gonna get all this information
out so the American people can see it. You’ll remember there was classified
information on a private server, should have never been there. Hillary Clinton
should never have done that. It was unacceptable behavior. It’s not the kind of
thing that leaders do.... Classified information needs to stay on the right
places. Secretary Clinton, when she was here at the State Department, did not
do that.... We’ll get the information out that needs to get out…as fast as we
can. I certainly think there’ll be more to see before the election.”
The news that the federal government is
working on releasing Clinton’s emails “as fast” as it can, as though there are
no other pressing issues to deal with, comes one day after Trump called in to
Fox Business to rant about the fact
that his former opponent hasn’t been “indicted” (which may have something to do
with the fact that she was cleared of
wrongdoing), saying that he was “not happy” with Pompeo for failing to get her
emails out to the public. (He also complained that his
attorney general hasn’t indicted Biden and Barack Obama, saying
that Bill Barr will go down in history “as a very sad, sad
situation” if he fails to prosecute the president’s enemies.)
In a sign of how utterly bizarre it is that
Trump is screaming about Clinton’s emails and thinks releasing them might help
his reelection chances, even some of the gang at Fox Business have wondered why
he thinks voters care about any of this. “President Trump didn’t follow what
the Wall Street Journal was saying in terms of staying on
policy,” anchor Dagen McDowell said following the
interview with Maria Bartiromo. “I am not sure it helped his
campaign to talk about Hillary Clinton’s emails and going back down that rabbit
hole like it was four years ago.... It was kind of, well, all over the place.
It didn’t really focus on the very issues of what the American people want to
hear. Some of it did, but some of it clearly did not.”
Anyway, it’s not clear what the president
plans to do with his time should he lose in November and actually vacate the
White House, but if he does and those close to him finally get him the help he
needs, the odds are pretty high he’ll still regularly be calling in to Fox in
2024 claiming he’s got classified information about Clinton “that’s going to
shock voters like you wouldn’t believe.” Then he’ll whisper, “I gotta go,
they’re here” while an orderly’s key turns in the lock, adding, “The DOJ
doesn’t want you to know this because it’s part of the deep state, but her husband
had an affair with an intern. It’s all there in the documents.” Then the phone
will drop and we’ll hear him yell ”Stay back! Keep your hands off of me!
Presidential harassment!”
And speaking of Trump’s
mental faculties…
Nancy Pelosi is supporting a bill that
would create a panel to assess if the president is a stark raving lunatic who
should be removed from office:
Pelosi
on Friday backed the creation of a congressionally appointed commission that
would determine whether a president is capable of performing his duties,
insisting that it wasn’t specifically about President Trump while suggesting
that his recent diagnosis was the motivation for it. Pelosi said Trump’s
coronavirus infection has raised questions about presidential succession, which
is governed by the 25th Amendment to the Constitution. Trump spent last weekend
at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, setting off a flurry of
inquiries about whether Vice President [Mike] Pence would
assume authority, even temporarily.
Insisting the bill has nothing to do with the current White
House inhabitant, the Speaker said, “This is not about President Trump. He will
face the judgment of the voters, but he shows the need for us to create a
process for future presidents.“ She added later that, again, while this is
about the office of the presidency in general, it was inspired by the
off-the-rails crazy behavior of one president in particular. “This legislation
applies to future presidents, but we are reminded of the necessity of action by
the health of the current president,” she said.
Trump to undergo a
“medical evaluation” on Tucker Carlson’s show
The Trump administration has received a lot of
flack for refusing to divulge crucial details regarding
the president’s health, including when he last tested negative for COVID-19 and
whether he is currently testing positive. So tonight, to prove to the world
he’s an open book, Trump will submit to a live medical exam by a real doctor
for all the world to see—and by live medical exam by a real doctor we mean a pretaped telehealth session with
a guy employed by Fox News:
The
physician conducting the exam is Dr. Marc Siegel, a Fox
contributor who suggested in 2016, without evidence and without conducting
a personal exam, that Hillary Clinton might be suffering from lingering effects
of a concussion that could compromise her fitness to serve. Dr. Siegel, an
associate professor of medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, “will conduct a
medical evaluation and interview during the program,” Fox said in a statement.
“It is virtual,” Dr. Siegel told Fox Business Network on Friday. “But
I’ve been doing tele-visits for months and I’m getting quite good at them.”
The
network did not say how Dr. Siegel would be able to accurately assess the
president’s condition without employing the sorts of procedures used at
in-person exams, or if he intended to discuss the kind of sensitive information
that typically passes confidentially between doctor and patient. A spokesman
for NYU Langone said that Dr. Siegel’s comments “do not reflect the opinion of”
the hospital and that “in his role as senior medical correspondent for Fox
News, Dr. Siegel expresses his own personal opinions.”
We’ll have to wait for the fake exam to actually air, but the
odds are high to extremely high that those opinions that NYU wants to distance
itself from are that the president has an IQ of 280, could run a marathon in
under two hours, and “fucks like a man half his age.” Those results will
probably then be put on White House letterhead, and when the press corps asks
how we can trust that Trump is in good health when he hits the campaign trail
again, Kayleigh McEnany will sneer, “I have a copy of Dr.
Siegel’s letter right here if you’d like to see it.”
