When Donald J. Trump accused Psycho Joe!

TUESDAY, MAY 28, 2024

What deep disorder looks like: Personally, we don't think that Donald J. Trump did anything wrong with respect to Stormy Daniels.

With respect to a totally different matter, New York magazine's Margaret Hartmann reminds us of how deeply disordered this disordered man actually is.

There are many such examples, but Hartmann goes back to 2020 to recall a largely forgotten case. Headline included, her account of the remarkable episode starts like this:

The Time Trump Baselessly Accused Joe Scarborough of Murder

[...]

Back in 2020, Trump took some time out of his [Memorial Day] holiday weekend to not-so-subtly suggest that Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough murdered a staffer during his time as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.

"Trump was alluding to the tragic death of Lori Klausutis, who was found dead in Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach, Florida, congressional office in 2001," Hartmann says as she continues. "Trump first insinuated that Scarborough had something to do with it in this 2017 tweet."

There follows one of many social media posts in which Trump kept suggesting, insinuating and essentially claiming that Scarborough—referred to throughout as "Psycho Joe"—had actually murdered Klausutis.

By then, it had long been perfectly clear that no one murdered Klausutis. In the following passage, Hartmann quotes an AP fact-check about the staffer's accidental death, then provides additional background information:

As the AP explained at the time, there was no “unsolved mystery”:

"An autopsy revealed that Klausutis had an undiagnosed heart condition and a coroner concluded she passed out and hit her head as she fell. The coroner said the head injury caused the death, but she wasn’t struck by another person.

"The death occurred a month after Scarborough announced he was leaving office. Scarborough was in Washington when Klausutis died."

Klausutis was 28, happily married, and working as a constituent services coordinator in Scarborough’s office when she died. Local officials said from the start that there was nothing suspicious about her death. But the story still sparked wild rumors and speculation, years before Trump entered politics.

That last point is worth noting:

Donald J. Trump didn't invent the ugly, unsupportable claim that Scarborough was involved in Klausutis' death. But by 2020, he had come to hate his former friend, "so it makes sense that he eventually became the story’s most high-profile promoter," Hartmann sensibly notes.

Hartmann includes Trump's various posts about the need to "open up a long overdue Florida Cold Case against Psycho Joe Scarborough." By any normal standard, a person has to be profoundly disordered to behave as this sitting president did with respect to this long-settled matter.

For ourselves, we've long assumed that Trump is (some version of) severely "mentally ill." For better or worse, the mainstream press corps has agreed that this obvious possibility must never be discussed—not by them, and also not by (carefully selected) medical specialists.

We don't think Trump did anything wrong in paying Daniels the money she sought, thereby stopping her from inserting herself into the 2020 election. Also, he wasn't the person who started the wild speculations about Klausutis' tragic death.

He wasn't the one who started it, but his subsequent conduct was astonishing. In other incidents, he has seemed to be profoundly disordered again and again and again.

One other point may be worth noting.  Hartmann notes a further fact about our nation's political culture as of the year 2001. We continue from the passage already posted: 

Local officials said from the start that there was nothing suspicious about [Klausutis'] death. But the story still sparked wild rumors and speculation, years before Trump entered politics. In 2020, the Washington Post attributed this to the political and media climate at the time of Klausutis’s death:

"But Klausutis’s death occurred while the nation was caught up in speculation about the disappearance of Bureau of Prisons intern Chandra Levy and her ties to Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif). Soon the stories merged in the public’s mind, with some labeling Scarborough the Republican Condit (who was never charged with any crime).

"Posts on such sites as Truthout and the liberal Daily Kos all but accused Scarborough of murder. Filmmaker Michael Moore talked about registering the domain name 'Joe Scarborough KilledHisIntern.com.' Rumors claimed her death had something to do with the 2000 election or 9/11 or that it had prompted Scarborough to resign from Congress two months afterward—although Scarborough had announced his resignation before her death."

Oof! Some elements of our own Blue America initially rose to flog the latest intern death pseudo-scandal. 

Today, we're flogging the "porn star / hush money" scandal. Within our failing political culture, it's very, very, very hard to make matters of substance stick.