To most of us in the reality-based world, calling for Donald Trump to release his tax returns is common sense. So is calling for a closer look into potential ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. After all, we’re not only talking about a president with stratospheric conflicts of interest, but may have also been compromised by a foreign power. But one of Trump’s loudest cheerleaders sees it differently. To hear him talk, anyone who raises those questions might as well be a conspiracy theorist.
Wayne Allyn Root, a longtime Fox News contributor and the Libertarian vice presidential candidate in 2008, was one of the earliest high-profile Republicans to endorse the Donald. His enthusiasm for Trump has remained unchecked since his election and inauguration. Only a week after Trump took office, Root breathlessly proclaimed Trump to be an even greater president than Ronald Reagan–a move that would normally be considered heresy among Republicans. Watch here.
However, in a post on his blog, Root revealed just how deep his loyalty to Trump still runs. He thinks that by calling out Trump for sitting on his tax returns and asking questions about his potential dealings with the Kremlin, Democrats have become “a bunch of birthers.” In other words, he claims that people asking those questions are no different from the bottom-feeders on his side of the aisle–including his hero, Trump–who spent eight years tilting windmills over Barack Obama supposedly being born in Kenya.
As far as Root is concerned, “the looney left” and anyone else who wants to know more about Trump has stooped to asking “bizarre, inconsequential, and just plain stupid” questions. For instance, he thinks anyone who wants Trump to release his tax returns ought to be called a “taxer.”
Root wonders–if we want to see those returns, “isn’t that questioning the background of the president?” After all, by engaging an “insane, over-the-top, liberal attack” on this issue, we’re supposedly proving that the right was justified in questioning whether Obama was born here because he refused to release his birth certificate.
Um, Wayne? The birthers would have had us believe that Ann Dunham hightailed it from the University of Hawaii to Kenya when she was well into her third trimester. No airline worth its salt in the 1960s would allow a woman showing that much to get on a plane. She would have had to take as many as five flights to get from Honolulu to Nairobi–many of them over water. She would have also had to get a yellow fever vaccination, which is not given to pregnant women. And she would have had to hotfoot it back to Honolulu to get the birth registered in time.
I pointed this out in order to illustrate the fanciful scenario you’d have to believe in order to think Obama was born in Kenya. And yet, Root thinks there is a parallel between this and the questions about Trump’s financial dealings–questions that would be answered if he simply released his returns. Apple, meet orange.
In a similar vein, Root claims that those who want answers about Russia’s relationship with the Trump campaign are pushing an “insane Russian conspiracy theory”–and therefore, should be nicknamed “Rushers.” He harrumphed that “there isn’t a shred of evidence” that the Kremlin tried to throw the election.
Really, Wayne? So what do you call the intelligence community’s assessment that Vladimir Putin himself ordered the hack? And what about the “golden showers” dossier? Since Trump took office, investigators have corroborated key portions of that document, and the Senate Intelligence Committee wants to hear from the man who compiled it. Before then, a number of intelligence agencies from around the world suspected that there was a there there, and our own intelligence agencies were concerned enough to warn Israel not to share information with Trump until they were sure he had not been compromised.
And now we know the FBI is investigating possible links between the Trump campaign and Russia. Hmmm–doesn’t sound like any serious person would consider this just an “insane Russian conspiracy theory.”
In Root’s world, asking common-sense questions about our president–some of which we should never have to ask–makes us conspiracy theorists. Well, if that’s the case, then sign me up for the Taxer and Rusher Club.
(featured image courtesy Gage Skidmore, available under a Creative Commons BY-SA license)
