On Tuesday, President Donald Trump used his Twitter platform to promote a baseless claim, targeted at MSNBC host and frequent Trump critic Joe Scarborough.
The claim? That Scarborough, while a Florida congressman in 2001, was involved in the death of staff member Lori Klausutis.
Speaking on Boston Public Radio Wednesday, CNN’s John King explained why he thinks Trump's tweet had far more to do with the upcoming election than any legitimate concerns about Scarborough.
"I assume most people listening, whether they’re Democrats or Republicans, would like their president spending almost all of his time right now on a global crisis that has killed 80,000 Americans and is projected to kill 150,000 by the first of August,” King said. "Instead, he retweets conspiracy theories, he retweets things that are simply not true — they’re not even conspiracy theories, they’re just dead flat wrong."
King said while he isn’t a psychologist or psychiatrist, he does suspect Trump is looking to divert attention away from his administration's failures in containing the spread of COVID-19.
"He’s worried about his reelection, and he’s trying to stoke his base,” he said. "The president would prefer that we talk about anything but [his coronavirus failures], and so he does this. He does this to get attention, and he does this to change the subject.”
