How Right-Wingers Manufacture Scandal

For Trump and his supporters, turning a harmless fact into a cause for rage has never been easier. You just need to know the method.

(Composite / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

DONALD TRUMP AND HIS FOLLOWERS ARE nothing if not imaginative. Within hours of Joe Biden’s announcement that he was not seeking re-election, an X account managed by the former president’s campaign and the Republican National Committee posted a video clip purporting to show Kamala Harris calling for a ban on consuming red meat:

The full and unedited clip, taken at a 2019 town hall event on climate change organized by CNN, actually shows Harris declaring “I love cheeseburgers” before saying she would support changing dietary guidelines to reduce the recommendation for red meat consumption, which people who care about human health believe is a good idea. She explicitly called for using incentives and education to change people’s eating habits, and she did not at any point advocate a ban on brats and burgers.

Never mind. The idea that Kamala Harris is coming after your meat has become a meme. “During her failed 2020 Democratic presidential bid, Vice President Harris said she believed the federal government should play a heavy role in restricting Americans’ red meat consumption to combat climate change,” said the NSSF, the Firearms Industry Trade Association, in an August 20 post. It was titled “What Hunters Need to Know About Vice President Harris’s Red Meat Restriction Ruse.”

Of course, Trump himself has taken up the issue, telling a North Carolina audience in July, “Kamala even wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change. You know what that means? That means no more cows, you know, this is serious. . . . I guess eventually she’s gonna mean no more people. Right? No more people.”

In Trump’s imaginary world, there is a surprisingly small gap between amending the government’s general dietary guidelines—which, again, do not restrict or outlaw anything—and annihilating the species.

Pay attention to the pattern here, which is being endlessly repeated in efforts to slander Harris and running mate Tim Walz: Start with some tiny particular, and then pump it up with brainless bad-faith filler until it becomes a full-blown scandal.

Let’s look at a few more examples to see how it works.

Kamala Harris cannot legally become president!

Tiny particular: Neither of Kamala Harris’s parents was born in this country.

Full-blown scandal: Kamala Harris is ineligible for the presidency because she is not a natural-born citizen.

The pump-up: Harris’s mother was born in India, her father in Jamaica. In August 2020, conservative law professor John Eastman wrote an opinion column for Newsweek in which he argued that Harris might not be considered a “natural-born citizen” under the law because her parents had not yet become naturalized citizens at the time of her birth, which is constitutionally irrelevant. The piece was roundly criticized; Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe called it “garbage” and “racist birtherism redux.” It remains on the magazine’s website with a lengthy editor’s note apologizing for having run it at all.

A few days after Eastman’s column ran, Trump stated at a press conference: “They’re saying that she doesn’t qualify because she wasn’t born in this country.” This was both not true—Harris was born in California—and not something anyone, Eastman included, was saying. But Trump forced Eastman’s argument to fit the concepts he’s most familiar with, and turned it into an accusation that Harris, like Obama before her, was not born in this country.

Walz may be a Chinese operative!

Tiny particular: Tim Walz has been to China a number of times.

Full-blown scandal: He is being groomed as a secret Chinese agent.

The pump-up: In an August 19 appearance on Fox News, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin called Walz “a radical leftist” with a “very strange” affection for China. “[Walz] got married on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square,” stated Johnson, who for six years chaired the Senate Homeland Security Committee. “He’s gone to China. He’s taught in China. He’s got deep connections to China.”

Johnson’s insinuations were taken up by Rep. James Comer, chair of the House Oversight Committee, who deemed it “very possible” that China has been “grooming” Walz for decades. He added darkly that while Hunter Biden’s ties with Communist China were for money, “It looks like Walz’s ties may be for ideology, and this is something we should be concerned about, and we’re trying to gather as much information as we can as quick as we can, to present to the American people.” We can hardly wait.

Harris is lying about her racial identity!

Tiny particular: Kamala Harris is part South Asian.

Full-blown scandal: She’s only pretending to be black.

The pump-up: As previously noted, Harris’s mother is Indian, her father Jamaican. She has always proudly embraced her dual heritage. “She has repeatedly discussed her pride in her Indian and Black roots, including in her autobiography, in interviews and in speeches at Howard University, her alma mater and a historically Black school,” noted the New York Times. But Trump, at a conference of black journalists in late July, hurled the baseless accusation that Harris is not really black but only, in recent years, “happened to turn black, and now she wants to be known as black,” presumably to rake in all the benefits this conveys.

Walz longs to make the U.S. more like Africa!

Tiny particular: Walz is governor of Minnesota, which picked a new state flag that has vague similarities to Somalia’s flag.

Full-blown scandal: He engineered, as the Washington Post described the right-wing allegations of “a woke tribute to the state’s large Somali population,” perhaps signaling Walz’s desire to emulate that nation.

The pump-up: A contest was held in 2023 to pick a new Minnesota flag after concerns were expressed over the former state flag, which showed a Native American riding a horse in the background as a farmer tilled his field. (“It was designed very deliberately to depict White farmers displacing Native Americans,” said the Democratic state lawmaker who proposed picking something new.) But Walz had nothing to do with selecting the winner from among the thousands of entries. And no matter how thought-provoking Elon Musk finds the comparison, there is actually nothing to suggest a link between the flag picked in Minnesota and the Somali flag, beyond both having a star and using the color blue:

The new Minnesota state flag.

The flag of the nation of Somalia.

This still was enough to drive some people over the edge. Groused one commentator, “He turned his home state into Somalia and now he wants to do the same to our country.”

Harris is lying about her work history—and everything else!

Tiny particular: Kamala Harris once worked at a McDonald’s when she was a college student and has said so repeatedly, including in a new campaign ad.

Full-blown scandal: She’s lying about this, in an effort to steal Golden Arches valor.

The pump-up: A team of Washington Free Beacon reporters looking into whether Harris worked briefly at a McDonald’s more than four decades ago could not confirm that she had. Moreover, the reporters found that she did not list her stint at Mickey D’s when she applied for a job as a law clerk with the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1987. The right-wing biosphere exploded with speculation that she never actually worked at McDonald’s, along with a fake news story that she worked there and was fired for stealing. Trump waded in the muck on Saturday with a social media post exclaiming, “Comrade Kamala Harris lied about working at McDonalds. SHE NEVER WORKED THERE. . . . She lies about everything!”

Harris has said that she worked at a McDonald’s in Alamada in the summer of 1983 between her freshman and sophomore years at Howard University, to earn extra money. There is no reason not to believe her that anyone has shown. She mentioned her employment there in 2019 during a visit with workers at a McDonald’s in Las Vegas who were marching in favor of a $15 per hour minimum wage. The whole affair is apparently just the mother of all nothingburgers.

‘Tampon Tim’ is coming after your children!

Tiny particular: In January, Minnesota joined about half of the states in the nation in making menstrual products more accessible in public schools.

Full-blown scandal: Tim Walz is so woke he’s ordered that tampons be placed in fourth-grade boys’ bathrooms.

The pump-up: A bill to require free menstrual products in public schools for students in grades four and up, spearheaded by female students including Elif Ozturk (who told lawmakers “We cannot learn while we are leaking”), was signed into law by Walz in May 2023. There was no mandate that these go into boys’ bathrooms and no examples of this happening that the New York Times was able to find. Nevertheless, “Tampon Tim” was born. “He’s sick,” hissed Fox News host Jesse Watters. “Walz forced schools to stock tampons in boys’ bathrooms. Tampons in fourth grade boys’ bathrooms. What a freak. What do boys need tampons for? This guy is not Minnesota nice. He’s Minnesota nuts.” And you, Jesse?

The Dems are lying about their crowd sizes!

Tiny particular: Someone noticed that the fuselage of the plane that brought Harris and Waltz to Detroit on August 7 did not seem to reflect images of the thousands of people gathered there to meet them.

Full-blown scandal: The crowd was a fabrication created by artificial intelligence.

The pump-up: The crowd in Detroit, estimated at 15,000 people, was captured in innumerable photographs and experienced by them all. But, as an analysis in the French newspaper Le Monde explained, “As the aircraft’s fuselage is cylindrical, it only reflects a crushed, barely perceptible reflection.” It was “an optical effect that Donald Trump misinterpreted as a magic trick performed by artificial intelligence.” Did he ever. This is Trump’s August 11 post about the matter on Truth Social:

Asked by a reporter about this claim, which had been proven false, Trump replied, “Well I can’t say what was there, who was there. I can only tell you about ours—we have the biggest crowds ever in the history of politics.” Sure you do.

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EACH OF THESE EXAMPLES ILLUSTRATES the same dynamic: Take the smallest thing, blow it way out of proportion, and while people respond to the manufactured scandal, find the next thing to blow up. It works well for Trump’s fan base, which is used to being asked to believe crazy things. (It’s quite similar to what Trump and supporters hope to do in the aftermath of an election he loses—find lots of little election-related hiccups and concocted complaints that can serve as a pretext to declare the election illegitimate.)

That said, not every slander conjured up in the fevered brains of Trump and his supporters fits this tiny-particular-to-full-blown-scandal model. Some lies seem to have been conjured up completely out of whole cloth.

Take, for instance, the insane belief that Walz once had to have his stomach pumped after drinking horse semen on a bet. This fake story is a riff on a gross right-wing trolling campaign originally spun up to counter a popular, crassly satirical meme that JD Vance had once had intimate relations with a couch. Or the doctored photo of Harris standing side-by-side with sexual predator and Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein, in which Epstein’s face was pasted over that of her husband, Doug Emhoff. These weren’t responses to anything that happened in the real world; they were purely the product of imagination—which is to say fabrication.

But this is how far the door has opened. This is how easy it is when you don’t have to have any regard for whether or not what you are saying is true. Just make shit up. Turn nothing into something. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this.