Donald Trump’s Scandalous Clinton-Scandals Speech
There were plenty of inaccuracies in Trump’s speech (we are not the most taxed nation in the world; Trump was not a brave, lonely voice against the Iraq war), as well as wild misdirection. For example, Trump said that Clinton had accepted fifty-eight thousand dollars in jewelry from the Sultan of Brunei; as with all such official gifts, however, she turned it over to the National Archives. (The Sultan’s wife gave Michelle Obama an even more expensive piece of jewelry, which she, too, handed over.)
.. At the same time, it is true that the Sultan of Brunei gave between a million and five million dollars to what was originally called the William J. Clinton Foundation, and was renamed, after Hillary Clinton resigned from the State Department, in 2013, the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. It is also accurate that Hillary Clinton earned twenty-one million dollars in speaking fees between the time that she left State and when she announced her candidacy for President.
.. One of Trump’s key moves in his speech was to erase all distinctions between the two Clintons and their Foundation.
.. Trump, though, seems to take it for granted that a charity bearing a person’s name is not much more than a self-aggrandizing, financially convenient vanity project.
.. Clinton’s supporters point out that many of the allegations related to her finances would be better described as politically motivated innuendo and insinuation, and that they come from a man facing a fraud trial who has refused to release even his tax returns.
.. Trump calls Clinton a “world-class liar” while slandering whole communities and exhibiting a very tenuous hold on the truth. This is a disorienting campaign, and one of its many dangers is that a disregard for reality can come to seem normal.