Our “Bone Spur” President Trolls a Marine Captain on Memorial Day and Promotes a Vile Conspiracy Theory
We begin with Trump’s Memorial Day weekend twitter storm of insults and conspiracy theories in which the “bone spur” president attacked a Marine Captain on Memorial Day with false charges, made fun of Stacey Abrams weight, called Hillary Clinton a “skank” and repeated his vile innuendo that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough murdered his congressional aide with whom he was having an affair even though Scarborough was in Congress at the time she died and she was in his Florida congressional office. Angelo Carusone, the President of Media Matters For America, joins us to discuss the challenge of responding to the cruel and sick charges Trump throws out without amplifying his conspiracies and contributing to the sliming of reputations of innocent people like the congressional aide whose widower is trying to get Twitter to take down Trump’s attacks on his late wife. And while we have had the Vince Foster conspiracy theory promulgated by right wing media during the Clinton years that the Republicans promoted, and the Seth Rich conspiracy which the Russians and Wikileaks pushed to distract from the GRU’s hacking of the DNC, we’ve never had a president stoop so low as to make personal insults and conspiracy theories a method of political speech and campaign messaging. Furthermore Trump has coalesced around him a movement of conspiracists on the furthest fringes, Q-Anon, which disseminates the contemptible calumny that the Democratic Party harbors a child sex ring, a bizarre belief which appears to be a projection on Trump’s part since his close friend Jeffrey Epstein actually ran a child sex ring and there are reports that Trump may have availed himself of the services Epstein was offering.