'How low can you go?': Conservative wallops Trump for running the 'sleaziest' campaign in modern American history

On Saturday, writing for The Washington Post, conservative columnist Max Boot examined how Republicans have devolved into the "party of pseudo-scandals" — and how President Donald Trump and his allies have enthusiastically taken the party to new lows.

"The Republican Party, in cahoots with media partners such as Fox 'News' and Rush Limbaugh, has manufactured one pseudo-scandal after another: Vince Foster’s suicide, Whitewater, Mena airport, John Kerry’s Swift Boat service, Barack Obama’s birth certificate, the Clinton Foundation and Hillary Clinton’s emails, among others," wrote Boot.

The culmination of this effort, wrote Boot, is the chaos surrounding Ukraine and Hunter Biden — which the campaign has flooded the airwaves with as the cornerstone of its closing argument for Trump's re-election.

"Trump got himself impeached by trying to blackmail Ukrainian officials into accusing Biden and his son Hunter of wrongdoing," wrote Boot. "That didn’t stop Trump’s attorney, Rudolph W. Giuliani, from working with shady Ukrainian contacts — including a lawmaker described as a Russian agent by Trump’s own Treasury Department — to produce dirt on Biden. Until recently, this had resulted in a few audiotapes of interest only to One America News Network."

"Then Giuliani turned over to the New York Post the supposed contents of a laptop supposedly belonging to Hunter," wrote Boot. "The alleged emails have never been authenticated, and the New York Times revealed that the New York Post’s own journalists had so little faith in the story that the lead reporter refused to put his name on an article he had written. The Washington Post reported that Trump’s own national security adviser told him that 'any information Giuliani brought back from Ukraine should be considered contaminated by Russia,” and more than 50 former intelligence officers warned that the emails have 'all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.'"

"As if that weren’t bad enough, right-wing rumormongers have been spreading even more vile accusations against Hunter Biden that are straight out of QAnon," added Boot. "Donald Trump Jr. claimed to Fox News, with no evidence, that Hunter is linked to 'human trafficking and prostitution rings.' How low can you go?"

"The scandal is not anything that Joe Biden did. It is that Trump is running what may be the sleaziest presidential campaign since the notorious election of 1800 — or possibly ever," concluded Boot. "Trump’s wild charges make Gingrich’s no-holds-barred crusade against Wright seem responsible and restrained by comparison. At the rate they are going, I am afraid to find out what Republicans will be accusing their opponents of in 2024."

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