There is no letter!
Last night Donald Trump announced on live national television that Joe Biden recently wrote him a letter of apology over the way the coronavirus crisis has been handled. Because Trump was talking to a pair of Fox News nitwits, they didn’t bother to challenge him on this seemingly blatant lie.
Fortunately, Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler has confirmed what we pretty much instinctively already knew: there is no such letter. Donald Trump is making it up. That’s right, the sitting President of the United States just falsely claimed that his current general election opponent has sent him a written letter of apology. In any other time, this would be a major scandal. But because the bar is set so low for Trump and he has so many other scandals going on, there probably won’t even be a widespread call for Trump to turn over this supposed letter or admit he’s lying.
But there should be. This week we saw multiple major media outlets make the ludicrous assertion that Joe Biden should turn over the entire contents of his Senate archive at the University of Delaware in the name of “transparency,” simply because a false allegation was made against him, even though there is zero expectation that the archive will contain anything relevant to the false allegation. It’s a fishing expedition and nothing more. The media is hoping to poke around in Biden’s archives, find some random thing that it can mischaracterize into a scandal, and drum it up for ratings.
Since Donald Trump can’t produce this supposed letter that he claims he received, we think he should have to turn over the full contents of his archives, along with his bank account, tax returns, and personal vault for good measure, or else he’s not being transparent, is he. If we’re going to invent ludicrous standards of transparency, we should at least apply them to the candidate who’s lying about everything and whose entire life has been one big long scandal.
