I think what happened is you know that white stuff that they happened to find, which happened to be cocaine in the White House, I don’t know, I think something’s going on there, because I watched this State of the Union, and he was all jacked up at the beginning. By the end, he was fading fast. There’s something going on there. I want to debate. And I think debates, with him, at least, should be drug tested. I want a drug test.Pfeiffer writes:
This is pure insanity.But would more coverage of this remark have made any difference? We know the answer, because this has happened before.
... the traditional political media decided to ignore this outlandish accusation from a clearly deranged and dishonest man (and the next potential President of the United States). The press is aware of the interview. Hewitt is not a MAGA content creator who operates in the dark corners of the internet. He is — bizarrely and unfortunately — a member of the Washington establishment in good standing. The reporters who cover Trump listened to the interview and many wrote stories about his comments on Israel and Gaza, but they made an editorial decision to bury Trump’s insane accusations.
... I think the incident reveals how the press’s coverage of Trump ends up advantaging him and making Biden’s road to reelection that much steeper.
As MSNBC's Steve Benen reminded us a few days ago, "In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump suggested that Hillary Clinton might be on performance-enhancing drugs." From NBC's story at the time:
Donald Trump took aim at the war on drugs on Saturday — by challenging Hillary Clinton to take a drug test.This was covered by CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time, CBS, Fortune, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Slate, and even Us Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter. Did reporting on Trump's drug remarks change voters' perceptions of Trump? Obviously not enough to keep him out of the White House. So why does Pfeiffer believe it would have a significant impact now?
"Athletes, they make them take a drug test," Trump said at a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, rally. "We should take a drug test prior to the debate because I don’t know what’s going on with her. But at the beginning of her last debate, she was all pumped up at the beginning. And at the end ... she could barely reach her car."
"I'm willing to do it," he added.
Also, I don't understand why Pfeiffer calls this calculated attack "insane." Trump is trying something that, in his estimation, worked before for him. This might be a misreading of the 2024 electorate, but it's not crazy. (I know that many liberals want to play "I know you are, but what am I?" in response to right-wing misinformation about President Biden's mental state, but most of the preposterous things Trump says can be explained as products of either his ignorance or his assessment that the rubes will respond to preposterous rhetoric.)
And if Trump is insane for saying that Biden might be taking cocaine, then so are many, many right-wing commentators, as Media Matters noted in a compilation of tweets published while the State of the Union address was taking place:
As it became clear that no one would buy this speech as evidence that Biden is too old to be president, you could see the right settle in real time on an alternate, evidence-free narrative: Biden was on drugs.Are all of these people insane? Isn't it more likely that they're doing this cynically, because they assume it works?
Fox anchor Julie Banderas provided a case study in this progression. As Biden prepared to begin his speech at 9:21 p.m., she posted that she was watching the speech “from bed. Didn’t need to a take a Melatonin tonight, this should do it.” By 9:45 p.m., with her preferred narrative dead, she grasped for a new one and alleged that Biden was on cocaine: “I think I just got to the bottom of the untraceable little baggie found at the White House.” ...
* OutKick’s Clay Travis, 9:44 p.m.: “What drugs have they shot him up with tonight? This is not how normal people talk.”
* Right-wing cartoonist Ben Garrison, 9:45 p.m.: “They really jacked up Joe with the drugs tonight- think there's a IV bag under his jacket?”
* TownHall’s Kurt Schlicter, 9:49 p.m.: “Maybe the paramedic who called into @HughHewitt this morning and told me Biden would be on cocaine was right!”
* Podcaster Monica Crowley, 9:53 p.m.: “Biden, pumped full of god-knows-what drugs to make it through this pack of lies, blasts Pharma.”
* Fox contributor Mollie Hemingway, 9:54 p.m.: “Plot twist: It was Joe Biden's cocaine in the White House!”
* RealClearInvestigations’ Mark Hemingway, 9:57 p.m.: “The rushed jittery pace of this speech is the drugs, right?”
* Fox host Greg Gutfeld, 10 p.m.: “Think we found out who that coke belonged to.”
If we have a problem, it's that the mainstream press and the Democratic Party didn't adequately raise an alarm about the use of disinformation by the GOP and its media allies decades ago. These people got away with claiming that Michael Dukakis's wife burned an American flag in 1988. In the 1990s, they got away with accusing Bill Clinton of drug-running and multiple murders. They got away with accusing John Kerry of winning three Purple Hearts during the Vietnam War under false pretenses, and claiming that Barack Obama lied about his birthplace, his religion, his college career, the identity of his father, and so on.
In retrospect, it's clear that the routine weaponization of anti-Democratic disinformation by the GOP and its media allies has done terrible damage to American democracy. We should have begun describing this as a serious problem decades ago. Instead, we've treated the GOP as a responsible governing partner, and treated Fox News as a responsible media outlet that deserves its prominent place on the cable dial and in the White House briefing room.
It might be too late to raise suspicions about Republicans or Fox now. We normalized their dangerous behavior a long time ago.
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