"The boogeyman plunging him and the family of his late wife into the very worst of memory holes is a conspiracy-theory-loving, twitchy-fingered and often shameless tweeter who also happens to be the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump."

Writes Kara Swisher in "Twitter Must Cleanse the Trump Stain/The president is spreading a vile conspiracy theory on the platform. Maybe Twitter should finally hold him to its rules" (NYT).

The "conspiracy theory" in question is that Joe Scarborough had something to do with the death of a woman long ago. The woman's husband wants some Trump tweets deleted. There's also the idea — pushed by Mika Brzezinski (Scarborough's wife) — that Twitter should throw Trump off the site entirely.

But what exactly did Trump tweet? The woman's husband is quoted saying that Trump "allud[ed] to the repeatedly debunked falsehood that my wife was murdered by her boss, former U.S. Rep. Joe Scarborough." Alluded! We need the text of the tweet, but, incredibly, it's not in this long column.

I had to look it up. I found: "A blow to her head? Body found under his desk? Left Congress suddenly? Big topic of discussion in Florida...and, he’s a Nut Job (with bad ratings). Keep digging, use forensic geniuses!"

One reason not to quote the tweet is that it's just asking questions, and we'd have to spend time going into a subject we don't know. The woman's husband implies that the questions have all been asked and answered, but all he says is that there is one "falsehood" — that Joe Scarborough murdered the woman (Lori Klausutis). But Trump didn't tweet that statement. Does the debunking of the idea that Joe Scarborough murdered the woman make the things Trump actually did tweet into the sort of statement Twitter should take down?

First, Trump just asked questions, but even if we reject that loophole — I'm only asking! — it is true, I take it, that the woman suffered a blow to her head, that her body was found under his desk, that he left Congress suddenly, that it's a big topic of discussion in Florida, and that "Morning Joe" has bad ratings. And it's nothing but inane opinion to call Joe Scarborough "a Nut Job." Trump is called things like that constantly on Twitter, so there's no way there's a Twitter policy against calling famous people mentally ill.

And Kara Swisher is calling Trump a "boogeyman." According to the OED:

boogieman n. (now often in form boogeyman) originally and chiefly U.S. an imaginary evil spirit or being, esp. as invoked to frighten children... (also figurative) an object of fear or hostility.

1880 J. P. Skelly Boogie Man (sheet music) 5 Look-out for the Boogie man.
1939 C. Odets Rocket to Moon 381 You frightened me! Frenchy: I'm a boogey man.
1989 C. Boylan Concerning Virgins (1990) 65 Her eyes bulged at me as if I was a boogie man....

Is "boogeyman" the right term for what Trump is or what Kara Swisher means to say he is? I think it's a word to use when you mean to make fun of the person who's afraid of the one you're calling the "boogeyman." But Swisher meant to stir up empathy for the dead woman's husband. She meant to say that Trump shouldn't be casting aspersions on Joe Scarborough because we should protect the people who loved the woman who died. That directs us away from thinking about whether we ought to want to protect Joe Scarborough. That's a more difficult question... especially in this era of sifting through old stories about violence against women.

Should we bring on the "forensic geniuses" and point them at that ancient dirtpile or not? The easiest answer is that the family of the dead woman says to let her rest in peace.



ADDED: From a 2005 Vanity Fair article about the filmmaker Michael Moore:

After an intern died in the office of the rightwing congressman Joe Scarborough (now a right-wing pundit and perpetual Moore attacker on his MSNBC talk show), the filmmaker registered the domain name JoeScarboroughKilledHisIntern.com.

Didn't the famously empathic Michael Moore care about the family of Lori Klausutis? Answer: No, but it wasn't a failure of empathy because Joe Scarborough was right wing at the time.

ALSO: The WaPo article on the subject — "Florida family grieves as Trump spreads debunked conspiracy theory to attack MSNBC host" — quotes the Trump tweet I quoted, above, plus another Trump tweet:

So a young marathon runner just happened to faint in his office, hit her head on his desk, & die? I would think there is a lot more to this story than that? An affair? What about the so-called investigator?

Again, we see a series of questions — or questions plus a declarative statement with an inappropriate question mark: "I would think there is a lot more to this story than that?"

Let's see if the WaPo article gets into the substance of the debunking:

The police said they found no signs of foul play. The medical examiner concluded her lonely death was an accident. She had fainted, the result of a heart condition, and hit her head on a desk, he said.

This made me think of the allegations against Woody Allen. He cites the authorities who decided he didn't do what he was accused of, but he can't make the suspicions go away, and mainstream media often treats his accusers like brave truth-tellers.

Back to this WaPo article:

Scarborough... was 900 miles away in Washington on the day Klausutis died....

Klausutis had spent two years as a constituent services coordinator in Scarborough’s Fort Walton Beach annex. She was not a college intern, as some have claimed. She was not pregnant, either, as some have asserted. And she was not, as Trump claimed Sunday and others have before him, a marathon runner....

She told two people [on the day she died] that she didn’t feel well. Her husband was out of town on business, and she’d planned to go to a girls’ night out, but she canceled. A second employee in the office was on vacation, so Klausutis was working alone....

Klausutis’s job was helping people in Scarborough’s district who needed assistance navigating bureaucracy. The couple who showed up Friday wanted a work permit. They found Klausutis lying near a desk and called 911. They told the local paper they saw no sign of an attack and assumed she had had a seizure and collapsed.

Police reported no signs of a robbery or a violent attack. When the medical examiner was slow to announce a cause of death, speculation began to swirl... Finally, on Aug. 6, Assistant Medical Examiner Michael Berkland announced his findings. Klausutis, he wrote, “died as a result of an acute subdural hematoma which occurred as a result of a closed head trauma sustained in a simple fall.”

The position of the body and her hands showed she had made no effort to break her fall, he wrote, and the nature of her brain injury wasn’t consistent with an attacker hitting her. Her heart had a “floppy mitral valve,” suggesting she suffered from an abnormal heart rhythm that led to a fainting spell. It also explained why she had felt ill, he said....

But Klausutis’s death occurred while the nation was caught up in speculation about the disappearance of Bureau of Prisons intern Chandra Levy and her ties to Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif). Soon the stories merged in the public’s mind, with some labeling Scarborough the Republican Condit (who was never charged with any crime).

Posts on such sites as Truthout and the liberal Daily Kos all but accused Scarborough of murder. Filmmaker Michael Moore talked about registering the domain name “JoeScarboroughKilledHisIntern.com.” Rumors claimed her death had something to do with the 2000 election or 9/11 or that it had prompted Scarborough to resign from Congress two months afterward — although Scarborough had announced his resignation before her death. He married his second wife, a Jeb Bush fundraiser named Susan Waren, shortly after his September resignation took effect....