If Donald Trump was a Marvel character, his name might be something like “DeceptiCon.” That is, the never-before-seen frequency and magnitude of Trump’s lies combine to create a Cloak of Confusion, a black hole-like force from which the truth seemingly cannot escape. Defying the laws of physics and logic, he was after all a Schrödinger’s Candidate, often for and against the same thing at the same time. And now as the Heisenberg Uncertainty President, it is virtually impossible to ever simultaneously know what Trump would believe, say, and do on any issue. Most insidious of all, DeceptiCon has produced learned helplessness in almost all who observe him, especially among members of the media. Slowly but surely, the search for objective truth is abandoned as Trump’s unceasing torrent of frauds, falsehoods, and fictions is gradually accepted as routine, normal, and even entertaining.
This process was essentially complete well before Election Day in November 2016. On August 18, 2016, Trump relaunched his campaign under the guidance of Kellyanne Conway and Steve Bannon. In what was billed as a major address in Charlotte, North Carolina, Republican nominee Trump pledged:
“One thing I can promise you is this: I will always tell you the truth.”
Of course, his meta vow wasn’t true. Not even close. A quick check of Politifact on August 19, 2016 revealed that Donald Trump always told the truth only about 30 percent of time. Of 223 statements evaluated by Politifact, a staggering 157 of them (70 percent), were rated as "Mostly False,” "False,” or "Pants on Fire." Almost two years later, that ratio (377 of 553 statements, or 68 percent) still holds. Robert Mann’s 2016 conclusion that Donald Trump lied far and away more than other major party candidate in recent history has only been confirmed since. As the New York Times documented in December 2017, “In his first 10 months, Trump told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire presidency.” All told, the Washington Post Factchecker reported on May 1, “President Trump has made 3,001 false or misleading claims so far.”
Nevertheless, this man became president of the United States. He holds the office still. Back on September 5, 2016—just days after it was revealed that Trump had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to halt an investigation into Trump University there—Paul Waldman presciently summed up the dynamic that would make Trump’s path to the Oval Office possible:
It’s not that there isn’t plenty of negative coverage of Trump, because of course there is, but it’s focused mostly on the crazy things he says on any given day…
That’s important, because we may have reached a point where the frames around the candidates are locked in: Trump is supposedly the crazy/bigoted one, and Clinton is supposedly the corrupt one. Once we decide that those are the appropriate lenses through which the two candidates are to be viewed, it shapes the decisions the media make every day about which stories are important to pursue.
Not just which stories are important to pursue, but how. As a look back at the coverage of the Clinton Foundation shows, that dangerous dynamic is still at work. But with the latest revelations from the Michael Cohen/Stormy Daniels sagas, hopefully not for much longer.
As FactCheck.org explained in December 2017, the Clinton Foundation remains one of the largest and most efficient public charities in the United States. Having wrapped up a $250 million endowment campaign in 2015, the Foundation nevertheless raised $62.9 million in 2016. As for its philanthropic credentials:
In August, Charity Navigator gave the Clinton Foundation a rating of four out of four stars. Guidestar says the foundation participates at its platinum level for transparency. And the Better Business Bureau concluded that the foundation met all 20 of its standards for charity accountability. It also enjoys an “A” rating from CharityWatch, a project of the American Institute of Philanthropy. (Early in the last presidential campaign, we debunked Republican claims that only a fraction of donations to the Clinton Foundation go to charitable works. The figure is closer to 88 percent, according to one independent philanthropy watchdog.) Forbes listed the Clinton Foundation as the 36th largest U.S. charity in 2016.
But during the presidential campaign, Republicans successfully turned the Foundation into an albatross around Hillary Clinton’s neck. Her tenure as secretary of state, they charged, was plagued by conflicts of interest, pay-to-play gambits, and even the so-called Uranium One deal that supposedly put American national security at risk all while somehow lining the Clintons’ pockets. That this wasn’t the case, as a review of the Clinton Foundation’s tax returns, its donor lists, and the 38 years of tax returns the Clintons had made publicly available showed, didn’t interfere with the narrative perfected by Team Trump and generally adopted by the U.S. media. As Paul Krugman lamented at the time, “Hillary Clinton Gets Gored.”
Consider, for example, the damning investigative piece published by the Associated Press on August 23, 2016. In “Many donors to Clinton Foundation met with her at State,” the AP detailed what appeared to be a pay-to-play scheme of vast proportions. If donors wanted access to the secretary to get a hearing, AP suggested, they had to pay up to the Clinton Foundation:
More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It’s an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.
At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.
It would indeed have been “an extraordinary proportion” if had been true. But it wasn’t true.
Matthew Yglesias set the record straight (“The AP’s big exposé on Hillary meeting with Clinton Foundation donors is a mess”) in Vox. How could Hillary Clinton have only met with 154 people? Well, “to generate the 154 figure, the AP excluded from the denominator all employees of any government, whether US or foreign,” Yglesias pointed out, adding, “Then when designing social media collateral, it just left out that part, because the truth is less striking and shareable.” It’s not just that the authors ignored “well over 1,000 official meetings with foreign leaders and an unknown number of meetings with domestic US officials,” but they suggested something untoward was afoot when Clinton met with the likes of Nobel Prize winner Muhammed Yunus. A giant in the international development and philanthropy, Yunus also was awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Gold Medal. In 2008 he was No. 2 on Foreign Policy’s list of the "top 100 global thinkers.” He’s received the World Food Prize, the International Simon Bolivar Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord. Precisely, that is, the kind of person the Secretary of State should be meeting with. So, too, with other heads of other global charities and organizations. As Yglesias rightly concluded in a second piece that same day, AP’s reporting “thus far has not, in fact, managed to unearth any misconduct.”
The AP conclusions were baseless, but that didn’t stop them from traveling around the world before the truth could get its pants on. “It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins,” candidate Donald Trump said that week, “It is now abundantly clear that the Clintons set up a business to profit from public office.” As Fox News reported, Mike Pence declared that “the American people are sick and tired of pay to play.” Two months later on October 16th, Pence was still peddling the should-have-been debunked talking point:
"We know that more than half of Hillary Clinton's meetings while she was secretary of state were given to major contributors to the Clinton Foundation."
By the next day, Breitbart began keeping a list of those who, like Donald Trump himself, called for a special prosecutor to be named. The article opened by proclaiming:
As each day passes more embarrassing information emerges about the likely illegal pay-to-play tactics of the Bill and Hillary Clinton Foundation, its donors, and its relationship to Hillary when she was Obama’s Secretary of State.
Now, that’s precisely what you’d expect from the right-wing vomitorium recently shepherded by Trump hatchet man Steve Bannon. But it isn’t far from what Chris Cillizza, former Washington Post and current CNN conventional wisdom regurgitator, had to say the same day AP broke the non-story. In “Now Hillary has a big Clinton Foundation problem, too,” Cillizza did the GOP’s job for it:
Hillary Clinton has never been great at understanding that, in politics, perception almost always equals reality. Witness this story that just broke from the Associated Press…
So, er, okay.
Let's stipulate two things here before I go any further:
1. Correlation is not causation.
2. Quid pro quos are very, very, very hard to prove.
But, COME ON, MAN. It is literally impossible to look at those two paragraphs [from the AP] and not raise your eyebrows. Half of all of the nongovernmental people Clinton either met with or spoke to on the phone during her four years at the State Department were donors to the Clinton Foundation! HALF…
To be clear: I have no evidence -- none -- that Clinton broke any law or did anything intentionally shady. But, man oh man, does this latest news about the Clinton Foundation cloud her campaign's attempts to paint the charity group and her State Department as totally separate and unconnected entities.
If you are Donald Trump -- or any Republican -- trying to sell the idea that the Clintons are and always have operated on a "pay to play" model, you just got a gift more amazing than you could have ever hoped to get.
Who cares if it isn’t true?
(In Chris Cillizza’s defense, this kind of “journalism” is all in a day’s work for the Republican Party’s unofficial stenographer. On September 11, 2016, Cillizza penned a column titled, “Hillary Clinton’s health just became a real issue in the presidential campaign.” Only five days earlier he asked readers, “Can we just stop talking about Hillary Clinton’s health now?”)
As you’ll recall, the AP imbroglio was only one of many downright false or wildly misleading stories which helped cement in voters’ minds the idea that Bill and Hillary Clinton were running a pay-to-play scam, one in which they peddled influence to enrich themselves from a charity that also somehow managed to spend almost all its money on actual program. Politifact, among others, destroyed the myth propagated by Reince Priebus that “the fact is, if they’ve got about 80 percent overhead and 20 percent of the money's actually getting into the place that it should, then it seems like the only work that the Clinton Foundation is doing is lining the pockets of Bill and Hillary Clinton.”
Then there was the radioactive Uranium One fiction perpetrated by Donald Trump and his minions that “the Bill & Hillary deal that allowed big Uranium to go to Russia.” You don’t have to take my word that there’s nothing to the Uranium One “story” or even that of Politifact, FactCheck.org or the Washington Post Factchecker. Just ask Shep Smith of Fox News, who set the record straight last November:
The accusation is predicated on the charge that Secretary Clinton approved the sale. She did not. A committee of nine evaluated the sale, the president approved the sale, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and others had to offer permits, and none of the uranium was exported for use by the U.S. to Russia.
Frank Giustra, the founder of the uranium company in Canada, had been a major donor to the Clinton Foundation. But Giustra, Smith noted, “says he sold his stake in the company back in 2007,” three years before the uranium/Russia deal and “a year and a half before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state.”
Then as now, there was no “there” there when it came to Hillary Clinton and Russia. But Donald Trump and Russia is another matter entirely. All along #TrumpRussia has been five potential scandals:
- Russian interference in the 2016 election
- Collusion by the Trump campaign with Putin’s 2016 efforts
- Policy changes relating to Ukraine, sanctions, NATO and more
- Conflicts of interest involving Trump and Russian business interests
- Obstructions of justice on any or all the above
Only now with the revelations surrounding “fixer” Michael Cohen has pay-to-play joined that list of Trump administration scandals. After all, the investigation into Cohen’s business dealings didn’t just lead Rudy Giuliani to expose Donald Trump’s lie about having known nothing about the $130,000 payment in hush money made on the eve of Election Day to silence adult actress Stormy Daniels (a.k.a. Stephanie Clifford). The growing revelations that Cohen’s Delaware front company Essential Consultants brought in millions of dollars from AT&T, Novartis, Korea Aerospace Industries, and, most importantly, Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg raised questions about whether Cohen and his famous client have been selling access to the president of the United States. Last week’s question about how the pay-off to Ms. Clifford was funded has been replaced with a new and potentially much more dangerous one for Donald Trump: Where did all those millions of dollars go, and what did they buy?
Hopefully, we’ll have some answers to these questions soon. If so, they will have come two years too late. But the revelations we await could still make for a great ending to that Marvel movie. DeceptiCon’s Cloak of Confusion may have proven too much for Hillary Clinton, but ultimately not for Stormy Daniels.