Trump Blusters And Stumbles Straight Into Hillary Clinton’s Transparency Trap

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:10 pm

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Here’s why you don’t hire an alleged “pollster” to fix your troubled and inept campaign.

Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, is trying to make an issue out of Hillary Clinton not telling people she was sick for two days. This could be a win for the Trump campaign, if only Donald Trump had a transparency leg to stand on. But he doesn’t. Trump hasn’t even released his tax returns yet.

Conway fell right into the transparency trap that her candidate can’t afford.

Here’s Conway pushing hard in that foolishly confident way that the far right has:

Her tweet is over this, “Why didn’t @HillaryClinton’s campaign come out on Friday and tell people she had pneumonia?”

Fair enough. Good question. If your candidate has any kind of transparency. But when Conway claims that lack of transparency is an “overarching theme”, she has one finger pointed out and four pointing back at her guy.

When Clinton spokesperson Jennifer Palmieri said, “We could have done better yesterday, but it is a fact that public knows more about HRC than any nominee in history”, it pointed out the flaws in the Trump transparency argument, so Conway shifted quickly to neener-neener, yeah no one likes you!

Conway can sneer “defense!” all she wants, but what we have here is a campaign that admits when they were wrong. Conway might want to study that to see what it looks like, because we have not yet received an admission of wrongdoing by Trump, even when he suggested Clinton might be killed.

The problem Conway is having here is Donald Trump is not a serious candidate. Conway is also pushing the “contagious” narrative. She retweeted this:

But the real giveaway is Conway then resorted to tweeting a Benghazi story. When Republicans go to Benghazi, it’s all but sure that defeat is around the corner. They’ve been pushing this for years even though they’ve been found wrong over and over again in their own investigations — and still they sell the shell of their lies to their followers.

Revealed by their Benghazi and email addictions is the fact that Republicans aren’t interested in the truth. They don’t care if we really need to fix something, they are focused on how they can use the appearance of a tragedy to help their political aspirations.

Conway will push transparency because she doesn’t care that reality makes this a joke and actually turns the topic right back to Trump’s tax returns. She’s no doubt confident based on history that she can filibuster over any cable host who dares to ask her about this.

But the truth is, Conway is representing a man who claims he will sue journalists as president and is already suing journalists who covered him in this election cycle — an intimidation tactic meant to quash transparency.

Trump’s former campaign manager was charged with battery for grabbing a reporter who tried to ask Trump a question.

Trump intimidates the press on a regular basis, causing his crowd to seethe in such palpable rage that on at least one occasion, Secret Service felt the need to escort the reporter for protection from Trump’s crowds.

Trump released a weird and troubling letter as “proof” of his health. Trump won’t release his tax returns. Trump won’t tell the public what his actual policies are or how he will pay for them. Trump has even phone operators sign Non-disclosure agreements. This is not a transparent candidate. This is a candidate who is used to bullying people to get what he wants.

Trump’s transparency issues serve to make Clinton look squeaky clean, even when her camp could have done a better job handling the fact of her illness.

Conway is falling right into the trap of making an issue of transparency.

Sarah Jones

Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.

Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.

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