By Hal Brown, MSW
This is about Fred Lucas, who calls himself a veteran White House correspondent. He is the author of “Abuse of Power: Inside the Three-Year Campaign to Impeach Donald Trump” ( published by Bombardier Books, a subsidiary of Post Press which focuses on conservative politics and military books, in 2020. The works are distributed by Simon and Schuster). Note on Amazon the books people who bought his books also bought. Among them are books by Devin Nunes, Matt Gaetz, and Donald Trump, Jr.
Here are the people pictured on the cover. They are heroes to us, demons to him.
Correction: For some reason I originally had his last name as Tucker in the title. A commenter noted it may have been a Freudian slip as Tucker Carlson just interviewed Trump.
So who the hell is Fred Lucas who wrote “Another Coup? Parallel of Democrats' 25th Amendment Obsession and Impeachment” in the website Townhall?” (right)
Media Bias Factcheck describes Townhall as far right and notes the following:
A questionable source exhibits one or more of the following: extreme bias, consistent promotion of propaganda/conspiracies, poor or no sourcing to credible information, a complete lack of transparency and/or is fake news.
Who is this Fred Lucas? I never heard of him. Who is this writer who attacked the movement of mental health professionals in which I have been an active participant here on Daily Kos since before Trump was elected? I was also one of the first psychotherapists to join John Gartner’s Duty to Warn group.
The article came to my attention because I have Google News searches for John Gartner and Bandy Lee who are the two most prominent mental health professionals warning about Trump and Trumpism.
Lucas begins his article with an outright lie:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is applying a new pretext to reach a pre-desired outcome of using the 25th Amendment to oust President Donald Trump from office in nearly the same fashion House Democrats did with the last impeachment.
The proposed legislation would not apply to Trump. It would apply to future presidents. Of course, politically if it goes anywhere prior to the election it would focus some attention on whether the criteria being discussed would not apply to Trump’s behavior if it was already the law of the land. Lucas doesn’t say that. What he does say is:
So, this is essentially political theater. It is, nevertheless, similar to the impeachment drama that played out a year ago, which is an attempt to do political damage.
This is like comparing apples and aardvarks. Trump was impeached and could have been removed from office by the Senate. If this Pelosi legislation by some miracle was passed while Trump was still in office it would not apply to him.
He then gets around to John Gartner and Bandy Lee:
USA Today published a column by psychologist John Gartner in May 2017 asserting of the president, “you have no choice but to conclude that he is psychotic.”
The “Duty to Warn” movement launched a cottage industry of sorts. Psychiatry professor Dr. Bandy X. Lee, who edited the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” even provided a Capitol Hill briefing for anti-Trumpers in Congress.
Note: Like Lucas could ever dream to have an article published in USA Today like Gartner did or edit an instant best seller like The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump where the demand was so great a second edition was published. HB
Here’s his conclusion, which he apparently wrote with a straight face:
Then and now, the 25th Amendment chatter is more about promoting a narrative in the media than about actually pushing such legislation through. Why bring this up weeks before an election? It makes about as much sense as a politicized impeachment less than a year before an election.
Well, duh! Of course the so-called 25th Amendment legislation is about promotion of a media narrative before the election. Like, dude, the Republicans would never stoop so low would they? They would never engage in playing political theater? All President Trump ever does is engage in theater.
I do agree that there is a need for legislation which would be more precise than the vague 25th Amendment. This is not my point. What I wondered was is who is this Fred Lucas? He’s not well known enough to merit a Wikipedia page like both John Gartner and Bandy Lee so I just had to look elsewhere. (Update: He does have a bio on a website called Everpedia.)
It was easy enough to determine who he is by looking at merely at the titles of the two recent articles he published on the Townhall website and following a few links.
From what I can tell he’s published right wing opinion articles on Townhall since 2011. The recent articles and others are here.
Lucas also writes for a website called The Daily Signal which Media Bias FactCheck rates as having an extreme right wing bias.
These media sources are moderately to strongly biased toward conservative causes through story selection and/or political affiliation. They may utilize strong loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes), publish misleading reports and omit reporting of information that may damage conservative causes. Some sources in this category may be untrustworthy.
He published a similar though expanded article about Nancy Pelosi’s proposed 25th Amendment legislation on that website here with a decidedly unflattering photo:
So there you have it. I follow these fringe Trump sycophants when they attack my compatriots among those mental health professionals warning about Trump’s ever growing dangerous psychopathology so you don’t have to.