When Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo asked Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) about the just-announced presidential debate last month, she prefaced the question oddly.

“So, let me get you to put your doctor’s hat on for a second, given the [GOP] Doctors Caucus that you are leading,” Bartiromo began. She eventually asked Murphy, “How do these debates play out from your perspective?”

What did being a doctor have to do with handicapping the debate? Bartiromo didn’t invoke the candidates’ ages or such issues.

Murphy quickly took the cue, though, launching into a baseless suggestion that Biden might take something to enhance his performance. He said Biden “must have been jacked up” during his State of the Union address in March — that “they gave him something.” Murphy gave no evidence but said he could provide proof for his claim to Bartiromo “offline.”

A little more than 40 days later, such evidence still hasn’t seen the light of day. But Donald Trump — with assistance from media allies like Bartiromo and Congressional allies who now include, remarkably, two more medical doctors — continues to float the theory in an effort to pre-spin Thursday’s debate should it not go so well for him.

The episode has all the Trump hallmarks. No evidence has been provided beyond the speculative and highly circumstantial, and early efforts to float the theory were largely shrugged off. But through force of repetition and a willingness to push pretty much anything for the cause without regard for actual evidence, the theory has been thrust into the mainstream for large swaths of the GOP base to embrace.

While some conspiracy theorists pitched the notion that Biden’s State of the Union performance was enhanced as being self-evident, it was weeks before this idea emerged beyond whispers and the occasional offhand comment.

Fox News host Jesse Watters remarked after Biden’s energetic March 7 address, “I’m not a doctor, but they’re giving him something.” He added that “something has been added to the mix” and that Biden should “pee in a cup.”

Nearly a month later, Trump suggested that Biden had taken the cocaine that was found in his White House once last year, calling him “higher than a kite” and pushing for a pre-debate drug test. Trump said Biden “was all jacked up.”

But it wasn’t for another month still — after the first debate was announced May 15 — that the theory really began to take hold, starting with Murphy’s interview. Trump began citing it repeatedly, culminating with his comment Saturday about Biden getting “a shot in the ass” shortly before the debate. “I say he will come out all jacked up, right?” Trump added at a rally in Philadelphia.

“Jacked up” has become the shorthand for this theory. But Fox hosts and GOP lawmakers have cast it in various ways — demonstrating their apparent unease with going too hard on the baseless claim that Biden has used or will use drugs.

In addition to Murphy’s borrowing the phrase, Fox News host Sean Hannity has uttered “jacked up” more than a dozen times this month. Hannity will often suggest that perhaps Biden was or will be highly caffeinated — he repeatedly invokes the energy drink Red Bull — while inviting viewers to entertain alternate theories. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) last week connected the dots for them, calling Biden “propped up by drugs.”

Bartiromo, who has an especially conspiratorial track record, has been the most out front in promoting this accusation. After professing great interest in Murphy’s still-unsubstantiated claims — “That’s really compelling,” she told him last month — on Sunday she welcomed another GOP Doctors Caucus member, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.), on her show for a more extended discussion. Jackson even walked through the various drugs Biden could be taking — experts say none actually fit the bill — and called it “a national security issue.”

(It’s worth noting in light of that latter comment that Jackson was White House physician under Trump and Barack Obama. An inspector general’s report earlier this year pointed to “systemic problems” with how prescription drugs have been dispensed in the White House Medical Unit — with many such issues tracing to Jackson. He has denied any wrongdoing, saying his decisions were approved by lawyers.)

Bartiromo on Tuesday played a clip of Jackson’s comments for Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), with Burlison positing that advisers would “jack [Biden] up on Mountain Dew or whatever it is.”

After Murphy and Jackson, ophthalmologist Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R-Iowa) on Monday made it three GOP Doctors Caucus members — about one-sixth of the caucus — to push this theory. She said colleagues had pointed to the possibility of Biden being on Ritalin or steroids and told Fox Business that “we anticipate that for this first debate, he will be on something, and the response of the press has been to cover it up.”

That’s certainly one way to look at it. Another is that responsible journalists don’t just accuse people of drug use based upon suspicion, and there’s still no actual evidence — despite the promises of Miller-Meeks’s GOP Doctors Caucus colleague six weeks ago.

Just as there’s still no evidence four years after Trump made the same claim against Biden in 2020. Just as there’s still no evidence eight years after he said much the same thing about Hillary Clinton.

Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/06/26/how-trumps-baseless-claim-that-biden-is-jacked-up-drugs-spread/