Trump's scandalous Clintons-scandals speech
By Amy Davidson , JUNE 22, 2016
At the Trump SoHo Hotel, on Wednesday, Donald Trump offered what is likely to be the central argument of his general-election campaign against Hillary Clinton: “They totally own her, and that will never, ever change, including if she ever became President, God help us.” The identity of the Clinton owners — the “they” in Trump’s charge — is at once multifarious and vague. It includes, to mention a few of the entities that Trump brought up in his speech, “big donors,” “Wall Street banks,” “oppressive regimes,” lobbyists, special interests, a foreign telecom company, the Sultan of Brunei, the King of Saudi Arabia, “her financial backers in Communist China,” and other, unspecified foreign powers who, he is certain, have hacked her private e-mail server, which he figures she set up in order to hide her “corrupt dealings” while she was Secretary of State. “So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be President of the United States,” Trump said. “We can’t hand over our government to someone whose deepest, darkest secrets may be in the hands of our enemies. Can’t do it.” Instead, Trump recommends handing it over to Trump, someone whose deepest, darkest impulses aren’t secrets at all.
Trump has been promising a speech focussed on Clinton scandals for a while; he had originally planned to deliver it last Monday, but he put it off because of the Orlando shooting. (He used the time, instead, to call for the second-class treatment of Muslim Americans and, once again, for a ban on non-citizen Muslims entering the United States.) On Wednesday, he read it before a small audience of family members, invited supporters, and reporters, from a teleprompter, which may account for the notable absence of the epithet Crooked Hillary, which he throws about at will at his rallies. The speech was not as wild as he’d hinted that it might be, which, by Trump standards, mainly means that he didn’t bring up sexual allegations and anecdotes involving Bill Clinton, or baseless accusations about the death of Vince Foster ... What Trump attempted to do was to connect the complicated question of the Clintons’ money with the painful one of ordinary Americans’ financial security ...
... 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. Trump described them as “secret speeches” ...
... There are reasons to be concerned about even the appearance of conflicts of interest; we have not had a situation like the Clintons’ before. That does not mean that anything about their financial arrangements is corrupt, but for voters they may be legitimately confusing. And Trump makes it all sound so simple.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/donald-trumps-scandalous-clintons-scandals-speech
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