On Friday, The Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi ran one of the oddest pieces of this already-bizarre election cycle. Targeting 2016 Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, she spoke to some of Trump’s donors.
Here’s what she found, in a piece clickbaitingly-titled, “Donald Trump’s Donors Asked Me If I Was Muslim”:
I met the 9/11 truther, the man who believes Trump has great intellect and his bold pronouncements are just showbiz, the concerned gentleman who said I could be murdered tomorrow in a supermarket, the hot tub salesman whose mind-controlled girlfriend was killed by the Illuminati, and the father of the donor who didn’t want to talk, who asked me to recite the Lord’s prayer to prove I’m not a Muslim.
You see? Trump may not be totally insane, but some of his supporters certainly are. Therefore, he’s insane. He may not be a total Islamophobe, but some of his supporters certainly are. Therefore, he’s an Islamophobe.
Of course, Nuzzi believes Trump is all of these things already, writing, “It’s never been a secret that Trump is a racist, a bigot, a xenophobe, an attention whore, and a bad speller.” But she adds:
[T]o say Trump and his supporters are cut from the same cloth would be to miss a more important point. Trump is not paranoid and he is not scared, he is merely stoking the paranoia and fear in others to his own benefit. He is exploiting the paranoia and the fear of the people who send him their money, or attend his rallies, or defend him on Twitter. They are not elites. They don’t have big buildings or golf courses or book contracts or TV deals to lose. And they can inspire sympathy, even when they sound just like Trump, which they often do.
Trump’s not just evil, he’s a manipulator of the stupid evil. And you can tell how bad Trump is by asking the people who give him money.
So, let’s do the same with Barack Obama.
Bill Ayers. In 2013, the former Weathermen Underground domestic terrorist admitted that Obama held a fundraiser in Ayers’ living room. Ayers was responsible for a major bombing campaign from 1970 to 1975, and has said that he would do the same today if given the opportunity. But when Sarah Palin accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” she was widely excoriated.
Louis Farrakhan. In 2008, the wildly anti-Semitic and racist Nation of Islam leader said of Obama, “The Messiah is absolutely speaking.” Speaking to a crowd, he stated, “You are the instruments that God is going to use to bring about universal change, and that is why Barack has captured the youth….Barack Obama to me, is a herald of the Messiah. Barack Obama is like the trumpet that alerts you something new, something better is on the way.”
Jeremiah Wright. The infamous “God damn America” pastor was the inspiration for Obama’s book Audacity of Hope. But when Obama pretended he heard nothing controversial after sitting in Wright’s pews for 20 years, the media played right along.
Felons. Obama got a sweetheart deal on a parcel of land from real estate scam artist Tony Rezko, and Rezko raised money for Obama when he ran for Senate. In fact, Rezko and his friends contributed over $120,000 while Rezko was being targeted by the FBI. Obama also raised money from bank=fraud convict Courtney Dupree; assault convict Willie Shepherd; and $200,000 he had to return from the American relatives of a Mexican businessman on the run from the law.
Palestinian Donors in The Gaza Strip. Obama received almost $30,000 in campaign donations from the Hamas-run Gaza Strip in 2008. The brothers who gave the money, Monir and Hosam Edwan, said that they supported Obama because he would force Israel to surrender to Palestinian terrorism.
Foreign Donors, Including China. According to the Government Accountability Institute, the Obama re-election campaign didn’t stop the influx of foreign money into election coffers. According to the report, from Peter Schweizer, the Obama campaign explicitly refrained from utilizing basic donation security measures that would have precluded such giving.
That’s just a few of the major donors. That rogues gallery is just the tip of the iceberg. These folks make Trump’s supporters look like members of the Salvation Army. And that’s just the people who gave significant money. How many Obama supporters believe that Republicans all hate Obama because they’re racists, that Jews control world economics, or that vaccines cause autism?
And then there are the Clintons.
Clinton Foundation Donors. As has been widely reported, Hillary’s foundation took cash from virtually every corrupt regime on the globe, including Algeria, Kuwait, Qatar, and Oman. Bill was invited by multiple human rights violating regimes to speak for reams of cash. As Schweizer has documented, Hillary and Bill used the Foundation as a cash cow, raking in dough in violation of ethics agreements with the Obama administration.
Felons. Back during the first Clinton administration, Clinton infamously pardoned Marc Rich in the hours before he left office. It was no coincidence that Marc’s wife, Denise, had given $1 million to the Democratic Party and $100,000 to Hillary’s Senate campaign. The Clintons have also used as major fundraisers at least two felons.
China. In the first Clinton go-around, the Clinton administration worked with agents of China to raise cash for Clinton’s re-election. At approximately the same time, the Clinton administration released millions of pages of data on America’s nuclear weapons program. No wonder former Chinese intelligence official General Ji Shengde told illegal fundraiser Johnny Chung, “We like your president. We want to see him re-elected.”
Again, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It doesn’t count Hillary’s support from Hollywood depravities like Lena Dunham (admitted to sexually abusing her sister, falsely accused a man of rape) or Black Lives Matter radicals or the Communist Party.
But we can certainly tar Donald Trump by interviewing some nutty supporters, right?
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.
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