Bracing for a Democratic assault, Trump deploys the micro-hoax
President Donald Trump on Friday at the airport in Morristown, N.J. Credit: AFP via Getty Images/Jim Watson
President Donald Trump has been building up his political defenses with a weapon that can best be called the micro-hoax.
Looking to offset a virtual Democratic National Convention that starts Monday, the GOP president last week fed the canard that Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), born in Oakland, somehow does not meet the legal qualifications to run for vice president. But he said, "I have no idea if that's right."
This micro-hoax comes in the form of "some people say." It doesn't have the preparation, counterfeit documentation or planning of a full-blown, original hoax. Rather, it's based on an outlier's legal opinion and echoes Trump's "birther" smears against former President Barack Obama and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
This is part of an almost-daily pattern.
There's no vaccine yet for the coronavirus, but when there is, Trump likely will take credit. In the meantime, the president pushes hydroxychloroquine despite prevailing medical warnings, as if the drug's approval for this new emergency use — recently withdrawn by the Food and Drug Administration — has been suppressed somehow by evil forces. Science is a growth area these days for use of the micro-hoax.
With death tolls rising, Trump draws from thin air his quick estimates of the "millions" of lives he saved with his administration's delayed and scattered efforts to help.
Polling shows his approval ratings among suburban women have slipped. So he contrives a fake story that Democratic rival Joe Biden would "obliterate" the suburbs by restoring narrow anti-discrimination rules enacted by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Obama.
Every micro-hoax missile is a defensive act. Trump naturally saw former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe as a threat. So allies on Capitol Hill demeaned the investigation, calling it a deep-state plot which culminated in Trump's crude but creative claim that Obama and Biden "spied" on his campaign.
Never much of a left-winger, Biden was viewed early on by the GOP as a political threat to Trump's reelection bid. So the president had his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani dig up anyone in Ukraine who could make Biden's son Hunter's evident fat patronage job with the gas firm Burisma smell like an earthshaking criminal plot.
Trump is drawing Democrats' fire for resisting extra funding to help the Postal Service deliver mail-in votes during the pandemic. The president already laid a foundation for his false position — that voting by mail is inherently fraudulent. This echoes his counterfeit assertion that widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote in 2016.
The president's claims that Biden is feeble and controllable are a slightly adapted rerun of the propaganda four years ago that Hillary Clinton had a severe secret illness.
Abraham Lincoln said you can fool some of the people all of the time. That still rings true, but in the present day, it seems a president has to do the fooling in many little doses, rather than all at once.
Dan Janison is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
