“So, I just heard that,” the President of the United States said at a White House press conference last Thursday. The conference, like the rest of Trump’s regular press briefings, was ostensibly about the federal government’s slow and lazy response to a pandemic that is still spreading uncontrolled throughout the United States. But because that response can no longer really be said to exist as such, and because he’s never much cared, and mostly because there is a presidential election coming up, President Trump was talking about something he found more interesting instead. In this case, it was a toweringly specious column that ran on Newsweek under the headline “Some Questions for Kamala Harris About Eligibility.” The story sought to undermine the natural-born citizenship of Joe Biden’s new running mate by Raising Some Questions while carefully stopping short of answering them.
As is the case with this greasy genre, this was all barely argued on the merits. Harris, of course, was born in San Diego, and based on the Fourteenth Amendment, that means there’s nothing up for debate. But as is the case with this greasy genre, the idea was never to provide an argument on the merits or properly furnish definitive answers but, rather, to ask them in a coyly, sneering manner. Trump seemed to find all of this interesting in a very specific way. “I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” the President said. “And, by the way, the lawyer that wrote that piece”—John Eastman, the founder of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence—“is a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer.” Trump hastened to add that where Eastman’s charges were concerned, “I have no idea if that’s right.” It quickly became clear that Trump hadn’t so much read the story as Noticed It, first asserting that the story claimed Harris hadn’t been born in the United States, which it didn’t, and then being informed by another reporter that the story actually raised (constitutionally irrelevant) questions about her parents’ legal status. “Yeah,” Trump replied, “I don’t know about it. I just heard about it. I’ll take a look.”
With the exception of Trump’s “I’ll take a look” tic, which in its various syntactic guises always means “I’m going to go watch some more TV now,” all of the above is intentionally hard to know—and this is due far more to deceptive aspirational branding than to overt falsehood. Eastman’s claim is easily dismissed, but it’s unhelpfully surrounded by signifiers that have slipped wildly out of joint. The Claremont Institute has suitably fancified intellectual production values and a serious reputation‚ which helps make it seem as though its chief jurisprudential expert would indeed be a very qualified and very talented lawyer.
But while Claremont “masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right,” Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern writes, “it is really just a racist fever swamp with deep connections to the conspiratorial alt-right” that has lately focused on stamping its imprimatur on whatever incoherent Trumpist revanchism needs a co-sign. And while Newsweek is a name brand that would undoubtedly impress a brain that, like Trump’s, entered energy-saver mode in 1987, it was purchased in 2013 by a shadowy group aligned with a Christian sect called The Community and shed its most qualified staffers in 2018. When company executives and a former chief executive officer pled guilty to federal money-laundering charges in February, the Southern District of New York described its ownership as “a massive fraud scheme through which a group of sophisticated criminals illegally moved tens of millions through our Manhattan marketplace by brazenly overstating the financial health of their companies.” (Newsweek’s opinion editor Joshua Hammer is a former Claremont Institute fellow.)
How the blaringly worthless claim in Eastman’s column came to be discussed at all matters, too, if not quite as much as how it was discussed. The two are related: A reporter at the press conference framed the question of Harris’s citizenship status as centering around “claims circulating on social media.” For a number of immediately obvious reasons, this does not suggest careful empirical review of the historical record—or remotely sufficient merit for such a baldly racist fabrication to be raised in this setting. No matter, though; the query was lofted in the familiar chiding way that the White House press corps uses in its periodic attempts to get Trump on the record disavowing whatever titillating or toxic falsehood he’s taken to claiming. The I Just Heard/They Say formulation is a Trump tic designed to give the impression that he is both a Master Of The News and someone who is constantly being talked about by others. (He goes to it whenever the subject of conversation seems to be slipping too far from him; “He was my friend,” Trump told Fox & Friends on Monday morning in reference to his brother Robert, who died last weekend. “And I guess they say ‘best friend.’ And that’s true.”)
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August 21, 2020 at 05:00PM
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