Lindsey Graham just gave away the game for Donald Trump
Even as Bernie Bros like Chris Hayes have bent over backward to give false credibility to a uniquely non-credible allegation against Joe Biden, in the delusional hope of taking Biden down so Bernie Sanders can somehow become the nominee instead, pro-Trump forces have been largely avoiding the allegation like the plague.
After Hayes falsely characterized the allegation on Wednesday night it forced Joe Biden to go on Morning Joe on Friday to set the record straight. But prior to that, the one time Donald Trump was asked about the allegation against Biden, he insinuated that it was false – and even Fox News had been loathe to touch it.
Now that this nonsense story is out on the open, news outlets are still somewhat hesitant about what to do with it. For instance, Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper didn’t cover it at all, while Chris Hayes did a bizarre segment in which he tried to dishonestly characterize his own prior reporting on the story. When Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News on Friday night, he was asked about it – and he gave away the game.
Not only did Lindsey Graham refuse to play up the allegation against Biden, he went out of his way to defend Biden, saying the two spent decades traveling together and he never once saw anything improper, or heard about anything improper. This is coming from the same Lindsey Graham who likes to promote the most phony and deranged Ukraine-related scandals about Biden that he can think of.
Graham just gave away that Donald Trump and his team don’t really want there to be a lot of focus on the Biden allegation. The reason is fairly obvious. Biden has one overtly non-credible allegation against him, while Trump has dozens of credible allegations against him – and this will merely prompt the media to finally revisit Trump’s long history of sexual assault.
As Trump’s poll numbers continue to get uglier and the election gets closer, they could decide to revisit this. When you’re facing the growing prospect of losing badly, you tend to start throwing everything at the wall – even the things that you suspect will backfire on you. And there’s already talk of Team Trump testing out a TV ad about the Biden scandal, just in case. But for the moment at least, Trump’s own people are afraid of the Biden allegation getting too much attention, and then morphing back into the Trump scandal that it should have been all along.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report