LIKE MOST GRIFTERS, SID’S ALSO SURPRISINGLY GULLIBLE: Sidney Blumenthal taken in by Fred Trump campaign ads that appear to be fake.
A pair of racially charged videos that purport to be campaign ads created for Donald Trump’s father in 1969 appear to be well-produced hoaxes, according to a POLITICO review of YouTube records and those of the group that posted them.
Long-time Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal referenced the videos in a recent essay about Trump published in the London Review of Books:
“In 1969, Fred Trump plotted to run for mayor of New York against John Lindsay, a silk-stocking liberal Republican. The reason was simple: in the wake of a New York State Investigations Commission inquiry that uncovered Fred’s overbilling scams, the Lindsay administration had deprived him of a development deal at Coney Island. He made two test television commercials. One of them, called ‘Dope Man’, featured a drug-addled black youth wandering the streets. ‘With four more years of John Lindsay,’ the narrator intoned, ‘he will be coming to your neighbourhood soon.’ The ad flashed to the anxious faces of two well-dressed white women. ‘Vote for Fred Trump. He’s for us.’ The other commercial, ‘Real New Yorkers’, showed scenes of ‘real’ people from across the city, all of them white. Fred Trump, the narrator said, ‘is a real New Yorker too’. In the end he didn’t run, but his campaign themes were bequeathed to his son.”
But the videos were not actually created by Fred Trump’s campaign, because the campaign never existed. Terry Golway, a senior editor at POLITICO who has written extensively about the history of New York City politics, said that he cannot recall Fred Trump ever being mentioned as a potential candidate to run against Lindsay in 1969.
The London Review of Books has since removed that paragraph from Blumenthal’s essay and issued a correction: “A paragraph referring to Fred Trump’s campaign for mayor of New York, although it accurately reflected Trump’s racial attitudes and his hostility towards Mayor John Lindsay, has been removed because the campaign ads referred to appear to be clever fakes.”
The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, who writes the paper’s “Fact Check” column, also shared the videos on Twitter, before later deleting the tweets.
Draw your own conclusions about self-appointed “fake news” cop Glenn Kessler. . . .