The Life Cycle of a Sidney Blumenthal Smear

Birth

From “A Short History of the Trump Family,” written by Sidney Blumenthal (yes, that Sidney Blumenthal), published today by the London Review of Books:

In 1969, Fred Trump plotted to run for mayor of New York against John Lindsay, a silk-stocking liberal Republican. The reason was simple: in the wake of a New York State Investigations Commission inquiry that uncovered Fred’s overbilling scams, the Lindsay administration had deprived him of a development deal at Coney Island. He made two test television commercials. One of them, called ‘Dope Man’, featured a drug-addled black youth wandering the streets. ‘With four more years of John Lindsay,’ the narrator intoned, ‘he will be coming to your neighbourhood soon.’ The ad flashed to the anxious faces of two well-dressed white women. ‘Vote for Fred Trump. He’s for us.’ The other commercial, ‘Real New Yorkers’, showed scenes of ‘real’ people from across the city, all of them white. Fred Trump, the narrator said, ‘is a real New Yorker too’. In the end he didn’t run, but his campaign themes were bequeathed to his son.

juvenescence

Vanity Fair: “Sidney Blumenthal Returns to Eviscerate Donald Trump”

Mother Jones Washington bureau chief:

Washington Post fact-checker:

adulthood

Politico:

But the videos were not actually created by Fred Trump’s campaign, because the campaign never existed. Terry Golway, a senior editor at POLITICO who has written extensively about the history of New York City politics, said that he cannot recall Fred Trump ever being mentioned as a potential candidate to run against Lindsay in 1969. . . .

The videos were created and uploaded to Youtube and Vimeo last year by “Historical Paroxysm,” an art project that creates and shares “found footage from alternate realities.” Other videos uploaded by Historical Paroxysm include (fake) saran wrap ads supposedly from 1988 and sex-free pornography supposedly from 1991. Both the saran wrap ads ad the porn videos were created by Laura Moss, a freelance filmmaker.

senescence

A correction (sort of) from the LRB:

A paragraph referring to Fred Trump’s campaign for mayor of New York, although it accurately reflected Trump’s racial attitudes and his hostility towards Mayor John Lindsay, has been removed because the campaign ads referred to appear to be clever fakes.

death

Actually, a smear lives forever on the Internet. That’s the point.