Last night, Rachel Maddow talked about how Donald Trump has regularly promoted Wayne Allyn Root, the far-right conspiracy theorist, self-help guru and Trump wannabe.
The GOP presidential candidate has never shied away from embracing extremists, so it was no surprise when he picked Root to introduce him at a Las Vegas rally last year.
Trump, as Maddow noted, was particularly enthralled by Root’s bizarre claim that Obama never attended Columbia University and simultaneously was radicalized to become an anti-American “Manchurian candidate” by his left-wing professors while attending Columbia University.
Trump even called on hackers to expose Obama’s “college records”:
Attention all hackers: You are hacking everything else so please hack Obama’s college records (destroyed?) and check “place of birth”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 6, 2014
One of Root’s most ridiculous conspiracy theories, one touted by Trump and mocked by President Obama in a recent speech, was that the president was purposefully letting people infected with Ebola flood into the U.S. in 2014 as part of his dream of “taking down this country.”
“We’ve got to remove him from office and fast,” Root said, “before he kills all of us”:
“In addition to the ‘Power of Relentless,’ in addition to claiming President Obama didn’t really go to Columbia, he also said during the Ebola crisis that if President Obama wasn’t somehow forcibly removed from office, we would all die from Ebola,” Maddow said. “All of us.”
Much like Root, she continued, Trump has his own record of making “ludicrous” and “preposterous” statements, so many that it is difficult to hold him to account “just because of the sheer number of things he has said that fit that bill.”
“When you’re that ridiculous that frequently, do people stop being shocked? Do we get inured? Does nothing seem too shocking? Does nothing seem too idiotic or dangerous or blatantly racist anymore?” she asked.
The best way to ridicule Trump’s beliefs, she concluded, is restating his own words and “letting people laugh at them.”
