Hillary Hate Fan Fiction Feeds Trump
Donald Trump has hinted he has a lot of dirt on Hillary Clinton. But where is he getting his information from? Some of the best, worst Hillary fan fiction money can buy.
The Daily Beast
May 13, 2016
Hillary Clinton is a murderer and a lesbian and she buys her muumuus on Amazon.com.
Well, she has lesbian associations as well as affairs with men. Thank goodness the appeal of the muumuu crosses the gender divide, because she’s really more of a bisexual.
For proof of this look no further than Chelsea Clinton’s face, a close inspection of which is all you need to know that she’s not Bill Clinton’s daughter, but the product of Hillary’s sexual relationship with Webb Hubbell, her old partner at the Rose Law Firm, whose indelicate features, from certain angles, are nearly identical to hers.
Speaking of old flames, Vincent Foster was Hillary’s soulmate and while she probably didn’t kill him, she definitely moved his body to Fort Marcy Park after he shot himself in the head with a .38 caliber pistol in the White House. Though the Clintons did hire detectives to kill Kathleen Willey’s cat and leave its skull on her porch to intimidate her into silence after Bill, a cocaine fiend who trafficked the stuff into the Mena Airport in Arkansas by the ton, sexually assaulted her. His rehab stints never worked. He relied on cocaine too much for energy to globe trot with pedophiles and impregnate prostitutes in alleyways during his morning jogs.
If it seems like I’m an alternate-universe Clinton expert, you’re right, but I can’t take credit for the things I know—OK, heard.
It’s all from the exhaustive works of longtime acquaintances of Donald Trump who, intentionally or not, have written the foundational texts for the Republican nominee’s case against Hillary Clinton.
Roger Stone and his co-author Robert Morrow, along with Edward Klein, have produced books that amount to a treasure trove of opposition research for Trump. In hundreds and hundreds of pages they have revealed dark, personal secrets and transcripts of private conversations Clinton has had in the intimacy of her own home—with family and friends and even with Steven Spielberg.
Is anything they’ve written factual?
Doesn’t matter, really, when you’ve already accused Ted Cruz’s dad of playing hacky sack with Lee Harvey Oswald and imagined a parade of Muslims celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001.
“He’s going to use it. It’s just a matter of when,” Morrow told me of the book he wrote with Stone. “I hope it’s sooner rather than later.”
Political observers have generally fared poorly over the last year when making predictions about the election, but I’d bet my muumuu that Trump takes the insights he gleans from the curriculum produced by Stone, Morrow and Klein to a cable chyron near you—and sometime before the July conventions. He’s already started. Last week, Trump criticized Clinton for being a “nasty, mean enabler” of her husband’s affairs—a page, literally, out of the doctrine.
“I’m not flattered,” Morrow said of the likelihood that Trump would cite his work. “I’m delighted he is, because it is going to napalm Hillary Clinton. She is going to be burned at the stake in 2016 and everybody should get out their marshmallows and put them on a stick.”
There are dozens of books about the Clintons, including but not limited to: sprawling biographies, shitty self-published e-books, books that cast them favorably, books that tear them down, children’s books and even a cookbook called, The ‘I Greatly Dislike Hillary Clinton’ Cookbook, which includes a recipe for jerk chicken along with dishes named, “Liar, Liar”; “Mouth on Fire Spicy Chili”; “Meatless Meatballs” and “Garbage Bread.”
But the most colorful subgenre of Clinton literature is the conspiracy scrapbook. These books tend to differ from books that merely tear them down (think Christopher Hitchens’ No One Left To Lie To, 1999). The reporting is questionable, the writing is bad and the contempt the author(s) has for the subject overshadows the story they’re trying to tell.
Since 2005, four prominent texts that fall into this category have been published by Stone, Morrow and Klein: The Truth About Hillary (Klein, 2005); Blood Feud: The Clintons v The Obamas (Klein, 2014); Unlikeable: The Problem With Hillary (Klein, 2015) and The Clintons’ War On Women (Stone and Morrow, 2015).
And what an eclectic crew the three authors are.
Stone, 64, is the white-haired, body-building, fashion-obsessed, sex-club-visiting former aide to Richard Nixon with a portrait of Nixon’s face tattooed between his shoulderblades.
Stone was introduced to Trump in the 1970s by Roy Cohn, Senator Joe McCarthy’s legal counsel, who mentored Trump politically. Stone remained in Trump’s orbit over the decades, advising him informally, before joining his presidential campaign in 2015. He left in August amid staff infighting (he butted heads, in particular, with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski), but he returned to the inner circle when Trump hired Paul Manafort, who’d been his partner at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, a lobbying firm in D.C. that they started in the early 1980s.
For his first (and so far only) book about the Clintons, Stone enlisted Morrow—whose resume has far fewer traditional bulletpoints than his own—for help.
Morrow, 51, is a towering and disheveled presence who dresses like a math teacher who’s fallen on hard times.
He lives in Austin, Texas and serves, much to the ire of the Travis County GOP, as the chairman of the Travis County GOP. He survives on an inheritance, and when he’s not rating anime porn on a scale of 1 to 10 on Twitter, he devotes his every waking moment to uncovering and perpetuating information—most of it highly questionable, to put it politely—about public officials.
He spent much of 2011 campaigning against Rick Perry, who he called “a rampaging bisexual adulterer.” He even ran an ad against him that asked, “HAVE YOU HAD SEX WITH RICK PERRY? ARE YOU A STRIPPER, AN ESCORT, OR JUST A ‘YOUNG HOTTIE’ IMPRESSED BY AN ARROGANT, ENTITLED GOVERNOR OF TEXAS?” He provided a phone number and email address where such people could reach him to get their stories out.
Morrow, interestingly, hates Trump. He’s a Ron Paul devotee who campaigned—and volunteered in Iowa—for Rand Paul before switching over to support Ted Cruz. Now he likes Gary Johnson, the libertarian. But he’s happy to see his work being put to use to destroy Clinton, regardless of how he feels about Trump.
“Here’s the key point,” he said, “Donald Trump didn’t murder 76 innocents at Waco in 1993, and Hillary did.”
He thinks Trump is awful—”a narcissistic, pathological, lying psychopath who says that he wants to torture the enemy and commit war crimes against their families”—but, he reasons, “the future we do not know but the past we know for certain.” And the past, as Morrow understands it, is full of Clinton’s sins.
The parts of The Clintons’ War On Women that are written coherently are hard to put down. Imagine a special edition of the National Enquirer that ran several hundred pages long and focused solely on the Clintons—that’s sort of what it’s like.
Stone and Morrow harp on what they say is Bill’s relentless coke habit, dazzling with tales of him snorting lines as the Attorney General and then in the Governor’s mansion. They wink-wink for a never-ending chapter on his association with Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire pedophile, but they never outright allege Bill engaged in pedophilia himself on any of his “eighteen” trips on Epstein’s private plane, which is “known as the ‘Lolita Express.’” (Trump, too, knows Epstein—he even dined at his house).
Unlike Stone and Morrow, Klein’s…eccentricities…aren’t apparent on the surface. He doesn’t have a Twitter account where he ranks anime “boobies” like Morrow and he’s never posed for a photoshoot dressed up as the Joker from Batman like Stone. Without reading any of his work, you might think Klein is your average veteran reporter. Just a nice 79-year-old guy with a friendly demeanor on the phone, probably somebody’s grandpa.
In conversation, he’s quick to note his long history in the news business writing for and editing reputable publications—not to boast, he says, but just for context. He started out at the New York Daily News, moved onto Newsweek, then The New York Times, and finally The New York Times Magazine, which he edited and, his biography brags, received a Pulitzer during his reign. He’s maintained what he says is not a friendship, but a reporter-source relationship, with Trump for decades. Earlier this month, they had lunch together.
Klein started writing books in the mid-90s and, he told me, began researching Clinton around 2003. Over the last 13 years (and three Clinton books), he said, he’s developed countless sources—some of whom he’s interviewed more than 70 times.
This all sounds great and credible until you read what they allegedly told him.
The beginning of Unlikeable, his most recent book, for instance, is an elaborate scene that Klein says happened “one evening” while she and Bill “were having drinks with friends” and Bill suggested she contact Steven Spielberg for advice about how to be more likable.
Klein reproduces an entire conversation’s worth of dialogue between the Clintons, in which Hillary is quoted as saying, “I get $250,000 for a speech, and these Hollywood jackasses are going to tell me how to do it!”
Later in the book, Klein writes that “in the presence of several friends” Hillary told Bill, “I don’t want to be a pantsuit-wearing globetrotter.”
In Blood Feud, Klein wrote that Hillary said, verbatim, in a private conversation, “Now we are going to be together on the campaign trail, and it’s going to be complicated. Plus, there is the dynamic that when I run for president I’m going to be the boss, and I’m not sure Bill will be able to handle that. He says he’ll be my adviser and loving husband, but I’m afraid that if I’m elected, he’ll think he’s president again and I’m first lady. If he starts that shit, I’ll have his ass thrown out of the White House.”
Unless Klein wired his sources and his sources were Bill and Hillary Clinton, none of this is likely to be even kind of true. It’s possible Klein is a fabulist, or it’s possible he has terrible sources. It’s also possible that he’s a looney toon and the multiple sources he’s interviewed upwards of 70 times each are all in his head.
Who’s to say? If I were Ed Klein I might say I know that last thing for a fact.
I asked Klein about his reporting process.
“People ask me, why do they talk to you?” he said, “People like to talk about their connection to people in power. They—it’s something that gives them a sense of their own importance and a lot of them talk to me because they feel that they’re basically letting the world know, or through me, letting me know, that they are connected to people at the highest levels of power.”
He added that, though it’s not always apparent, sometimes people leak information because they’re jealous of the person in power, even if they admire and serve them professionally.
“I’ve protected them all these years,” he said of his sources. He views critical appraisals of his work—his reviews are almost universally condemnatory—as nothing more than the Clinton Slime Room, as Maureen Dowd coined it, hard at work. He does not believe critics are reviewing his books with their own critical thoughts, but with talking points distributed by Clinton and her associates.
Clinton conspiracies are, of course, as old as the Clintons’ political careers themselves.
In 1995, the White House counsel’s office produced a 332-page internal memo, called “The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce.” Revealed by The Wall Street Journal in 1997 and made public by the Clinton Library in 2014 (though now inexplicably removed from the website), it detailed how Clinton conspiracies made their way from “well funded right wing think tanks” and conservative “newsletters and newspapers” to the internet, then to the British tabloids, who’ll print just about anything, then to the New York tabloids, and ultimately to the “the mainstream media.”
“After the mainstream right-of-center American media covers the story,” the memo read, “Congressional committees will look into the story. After Congress looks into the story, the story now has the legitimacy to be covered by the remainder of the American mainstream press as a ‘real’ story.”
Nowadays, the process is simpler: Trump says something and it’s immediately a legitimate story, because the de facto Republican nominee and leader of one of the country’s two major political parties saying something crazy is news.
I’ve written extensively about the possibility that Trump is a conspiracy theorist, and I maintain that’s likely. But likely, too, is the possibility that Trump is merely savvy.
It was just as voters were taking to the polls in Indiana—which had been perceived, a few days before the primary, as a competitive state for Ted Cruz—that Trump went on Fox News to ask why nobody was paying attention to a National Enquirer story alleging Cruz’s dad had been with Lee Harvey Oswald just before the JFK assassination.
And just like that, the narrative in the media changed from, Can Cruz Win Indiana? to Donald Trump Connects Cruz’s Dad to JFK Assassination.
Who knows if Trump believed any of it, and who cares? It worked. Cruz dropped out of the race a few hours later, making Trump, effectively, the Republican nominee.
For the general, Trump has more than just one tabloid story to knockout his opponent. He’s got an entire library’s worth of poorly-written ammo.
And his three horsemen are more than willing to assist.
“Donald does not ask me for my opinions on politics,” Klein told me. “He thinks he’s doing me a big favor by letting me hang out with him, and he is, in a way…It’s all about Donald. It’s not about me.”
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