Illustration for article titled Trump Apparently Tries to Summon Ghost of Dead Sex Pest Roger Ailes Through Twitter

Photo: Mandel Ngan (Getty Images)

President Donald Trump wants to know where former Fox News co-founder and frequently accused sexual harasser Roger Ailes might be hiding during these difficult times. The answer, of course, is that Ailes died in 2017. But that didn’t stop Trump from apparently trying to summon the Fox News icon’s ghost through the magic of Twitter on Tuesday night.

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Trump spent much of Tuesday evening tweeting in his typically unhinged style, ranting about everything from his anger at China to his hatred of fair housing legislation. The president also continued his frequent use of a racial slur to refer to Senator Elizabeth Warren. But it was a tweet about Donna Brazille that prompted Trump to invoke the name of Roger Ailes, the longtime Fox News head who was accused of sexual harassment by dozens of women and stepped down from the conservative cable network in the summer of 2016.

“She gets fired by @CNN for giving Crooked Hillary the debate questions, and gets hired by @FoxNews,” Trump tweeted about Brazille. “Where are you Roger Ailes?”

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Where is Roger Ailes? The 77-year-old was a hemophiliac who fell down and hit his head at his Florida home on May 10, 2017. Ailes died about a week later, leaving plenty of sexual harassment lawsuits in his wake. Some of the women who accused Ailes of sexual harassment described the Fox News leader as a “predator” who engaged in “psychological torture.”

After a bit of Twitter mockery on Tuesday, Trump sent out a follow-up tweet insisting that he knew Ailes was dead, something that’s not entirely clear, given Trump’s long history of being confused about the most basic things.

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“I know better than anyone that my friend Roger Ailes died 3 years ago, just look at what happened to @FoxNews. We all miss Roger!!!” Trump tweeted after getting roasted online.

Trump is seemingly angry that Fox News is no longer quite as friendly to him as it once was during the 2016 presidential election, despite almost always broadcasting propaganda hailing the Trump regime. Trump has even called Fox News polls “fake” because they show him trailing Joe Biden in key battleground states like Florida and Georgia. Biden is polling positively with 49% of registered voters in Florida, compared with Trump’s 40%. And Biden has 47% of registered voters in Georgia compared with Trump’s 45%, according to Fox News.

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Fox News chairman Roger Ailes walks with his wife Elizabeth Tilson as they leave the News Corp building, July 19, 2016 in New York City. caption

Fox News chairman Roger Ailes walks with his wife Elizabeth Tilson as they leave the News Corp building, July 19, 2016 in New York City. caption
Photo: Drew Angerer (Getty Images)

Previously, Trump has shown signs of mental decline that sometimes afflicts the elderly. Trump turned 74 years old last month, but it’s not just his age that has people worried about his ability to carry out his duties as the most powerful persona in the world. He’s a narcissistic madman with no regard for anything but his own political interests, and he’s never willing to admit to a mistake.

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Trump doesn’t know what covid-19 stands for (it’s coronavirus 2019, the year it was discovered), he allegedly thought Finland was part of Russia, and he seems to think the answer to the coronavirus pandemic is to do less testing.

“I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down please,” Trump told a rally of supporters in Tulsa, Oklahoma on June 21.

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Trump has also had difficulty pronouncing words, including “pivotal,” “champions,” and “lawmakers,” among literally hundreds of others. With every mispronunciation, Trump tries to pretend like it didn’t happen. The president even has a long history of simply making up his own new words and rather than correcting himself, tries to pretend like he intended to say it that way.

Earlier this week, in yet another sign that he may be struggling cognitively, Trump misidentified a sculpture in the Oval Office as depicting former President Teddy Roosevelt. Ironically, Trump was talking about the sculpture in relation to the current movement to take down racist and outdate statues, which the president insists are necessary for people to learn history. But the sculpture in Trump’s office—the same one that’s been sitting next to his desk for over three years—doesn’t depict Teddy Roosevelt at all. It’s an anonymous cowboy from the 1890s.

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Of course, President Trump’s 77-year-old Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden has shown his own difficulty with pronunciation and signs of cognitive decline at times during the past year. But all things being equal, it’s a pretty clear choice in 2020: You can pick the confused old man who’s a white supremacist and has killed tens of thousands of Americans through a criminally negligent public health response to the coronavirus pandemic. Or you can pick the confused old man who’s not any of that.

Let’s hope America makes the right choice in November. If they don’t, Trump could very well be holding a séance for his dead buddy Ailes in the Lincoln Bedroom.

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