Donald Trump doesn’t like polls that make him look bad and news media hosts who talk about the bad polls. It’s a problem. The U.S. president is willing to try using intimidation to make the problem go away.
“Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough reported bad polling news for Trump and it sounds like Scarborough may have broken something. Shortly after the report, Trump tweeted that “‘Concast’ should open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough.”
Trump’s most recent effort at intimidation is not his first.
Scarborough reported on polls that show Trump is losing to Joe Biden by six points nationally, even in the formerly deep-red state of Texas, where the two are tied, New York Post reported.
Trump wants MSNBC parent Comcast to investigate Scarborough for a cold case involving the accidental death of an intern.
The president appeared to be referring to the case of Lori Klausutis, a 28-year-old intern who was found dead in Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach office in Florida when he was a congressman in 2001, NYP reported.
The death was ruled accidental by the medical examiner’s office, which said that Klausutis had passed out and hit her head on a desk from an undiagnosed heart condition. No evidence has ever been found linking Scarborough to the intern’s death.
It sounds like Trump is sending out a dog whistle for someone to dig up dirt on Scarborough and make the problem go away, aka killing the messenger.
Scarborough called out the president for ignoring his own administration’s guidelines, accused him of lying about the covid-19 death toll and said he still doesn’t have a strategy for managing the crisis, Raw Story reported.
“(He) said the media is overhyping it — it’s a hoax,” Scarborough said. “It is very telling that the president of the United States, as he rushes headlong into reopening as much of the country as he can, going against his own White House guidelines, the guidelines he announced…
“In the past two weeks since Donald Trump said this death toll was going to be 50,000 or 60,000, while he’s been rushing to go past his own guidelines, to ignore his own doctors, that the death toll has spiraled so badly, that now he’s saying, instead of 50,000 or 60,000 dying just two weeks ago, we’re up to possibly 100,000 dying in the United States of America,” Scarborough continued. “We’ll be over 70,000 by tomorrow. Chances are good we’ll be up by 80,000 by the end of the week or the beginning of next week. It could go faster than that. While infections are slowing down in New York City, guess what? They’re going up in other parts of the country.
“So this wishful thinking — and I’m just shocked by the president’s wishful thinking, and I’m very concerned for those people who are ignorant of science and medicine, who are listening to Donald Trump and actually believing him,” Scarborough said. “People are dying. They’re dying because, well, because of these rosy scenarios.”
These are the reasons why polls are all bad news for Trump, Scarborough said. “I know that drives him crazy, makes him do even crazier things. It makes him talk about disinfectants being injected, makes him talk about lights being disinfected, makes him say stupid things about Abraham Lincoln and insult George W. Bush … Trump is down 43 percent to 49 percent to Joe Biden. Look at a Dallas Morning News poll, unbelievable, in Texas, the Dallas Morning News has Donald Trump and Joe Biden tied.”
A new Ipsos/Reuters poll finds that Biden is ahead of Trump by a 39-percent-to-45-percent margin, CNN reported. Biden is ahead by a larger margin than Hillary Clinton was on the eve of the 2016 election. We all know how that worked out for Clinton in 2016. Biden is up in battleground states Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
“You might think that would make people believe that Biden is more likely to win, even if it were far from a certainty,” Harry Enten reported for CNN.
“Yet, the evidence suggests that Trump’s surprising 2016 victory has warped people into believing that Trump has some magic up his sleeve. They don’t believe he will lose.”
Trump resorted to name-calling with Scarborough and tweeted last month that he tuned in to MSNBC is to “confirm that his longtime critic was ‘nuts.'”
“I know him and Crazy Mika well, used them beautifully in the last Election, dumped them nicely, and will state on the record that he is ‘nuts’. Besides, bad ratings! #OPENJOECOLDCASE,” Trump tweeted.
Trump has a history of using his platform to lambaste people who witness his own potential wrongdoing, using Twitter and statements at his political rallies to criticize them in humiliating and sometimes threatening ways, Charlie Savage and Michael D. Shear wrote for the New York Times.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 70: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin goes solo to discuss the COVID-19 crisis. He talks about the failed leadership of Trump, Andrew Cuomo, CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome Adams, and New York Mayor de Blasio.
Trump has also refused to accept responsibility for inciting violence, dismissing critics who say his rhetoric is a potential source of inspiration for some people acting on beliefs of bigotry and hate.
In 2019, ABC News identified at least 36 criminal cases where Trump was invoked in direct connection with violent acts, threats of violence or allegations of assault.
Here’s one example: In June 3, 2016, 54-year-old Henry Slapnik attacked his African-American neighbors with a knife in Cleveland and told police “Donald Trump will fix them because they are scared of Donald Trump,” according to police reports. Slapnik, who is white, pleaded guilty to “ethnic intimidation,” ABC reported.
