Donald Trump, the chief propagator of false “birther” claims first against then-President Barack Obama and later against Sen. Ted Cruz, has a new target: Nikki Haley.
As Haley surges in New Hampshire polling, Trump posted an article on his Truth Social account from a right-wing outlet that claimed Haley, his GOP rival, is ineligible to be president because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born.
Haley was born in South Carolina and has lived in the U.S. her entire life. Her parents were immigrants, who became citizens after her birth in 1972.
“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe wrote in an email. “I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of color — and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”
As much as it irritates the contrarian in me, I do have to chalk this up to an honest criticism of capitalism in general. Since news corps have to pander to both advertisers and broad swaths of the public, who are often on the squeamish side when it comes to facts they themselves find unpleasant, big news corps are extremely limited in how they can present things.
Generally viewer-funded news gets around this, in the US that’s things like PBS, NPR, Democracy Now and nowadays, Patreon supported content creators. Not that this system is without flaws or anything, but it’s significantly better in general.
But look at it this way: They’re selling a product, in an environment swarming with competition, and their costs are very high. So they’re going to lean into the biggest markets they can. The kind that eat too much McDonalds and watch reality tv and don’t vote. Naturally, those folks don’t like their analysis to be too hard-hitting, otherwise it’d be routinely, roundaboutly implying they’re fat, stupid and lazy. Saying that to your customers is rather counterproductive, no matter how true it is.
I’d be reluctant to speak so openly about it myself, except there’s not really many of them on here. They’re mostly all on facebook, twitter and reddit still. Y’know, the lazy options.