Donald Trump’s Scalia-Conspiracy Pillow Fight
Scalia’s health problems were manifold—his family members didn’t want an autopsy or feel that one was necessary. (“I knew, and he knew, that he was at a place in life where he could be taken from this world at any time, and that’s what happened last week,” Scalia’s son Eugene told Laura Ingraham on Wednesday. “Our family just has no doubt he died of natural causes.”) But precision, at this political and cultural moment, would have been helpful. Texas, after all, is a state where a good number of people believe that a military-training exercise named Jade Helm is a cover for a plot by the Obama Administration to declare martial law, and where senior elected officials—senators, governors—are willing to humor them.
This is also why Trump is unlikely to pay a political price for his failure to quickly dismiss the conspiracy theories. He is in tune with the feeling among many in the electorate that the official story is almost never the whole story.
.. The Scalia conspiracy theories are crude and fantastic, but one reason they may persist is that the respectable Republicans—Presidential candidates and Senate leaders—echo their bottom line, which is that it would be illegitimate, a seizure of power, almost, for President Obama to name a successor to Scalia. He doesn’t have the right, even though the inauguration of the next President is almost a year away; he would be cheating, ignoring the people. The quiet implication is that Obama, himself, is not legitimate.