Jeffrey Lord got his start in GOP politics in Pennsylvania, doing respectable things and working for respectable politicians. He worked in the Ronald Reagan White House and then served in the George H. W. Bush Administration, working for Jack Kemp, the highly respected Congressional leader and secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
Lord wrote a book about how extreme politics had gutted the judicial nominations of Robert Bork, a prospective Supreme Court justice, and had nearly done so with a Pennsylvania judge.
He became a contributing writer for the American Spectator and his work appeared in op-ed columns for magazines and newspapers.
Lord was not the kind of person who you would have expected to be sucked into the filthy sewer netherworld of the dystopian politics of Donald Trump.
No.
Lord willingly jumped into the muck and probably knowingly in 2015 by becoming one of the first people to endorse Trump as a president.
He then became Trump’s voice on CNN.
Lord called Donald Trump “the Martin Luther King of health care,” a quote that only served to demonstrate that Lord was in serious need of mental health care himself.
And speaking of needing mental health counseling, Trump juxtaposed photos of his wife during the 2016 presidential campaign with an unflattering photo of the wife of Ted Cruz, who was also seeking the GOP nomination.
The Washington Post called it “a sexist photographic juxtaposition of Heidi Cruz and Melania Trump — a presentation designed to mock the appearance of Cruz’s wife.”
In doing so, Trump had accomplished what was once considered unfathomable: He made Ted Cruz sympathetic.
Lord then defended Trump in the indefensible by saying Trump was defending himself, which he clearly wasn’t.
Conservative commentator S.E. Cupp accused Trump of “dog-whistle politics” to win the vote of racist conservatives. Van Jones, the liberal contributor on the program, turned to Lord, who was supporting Trump and said his candidate was “playing funny with the Klan” – by refusing to criticize it.
Lord then said that decades earlier Democrats had supported the Ku Klux Klan. He called the KKK a “leftist terrorist organization.”
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/01/politics/jeffrey-lord-van-jones-cnn-debate/index.html
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jeffrey-lord-van-jones-cnn-kkk
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/business/media/jeffrey-lord-fired-trump-cnn-nazis.html
Lord’s interpretation of history was not historical right – his interpretation of history was hysterical, and it was wrong.
The Klan was never a “leftist organization.” It supported the Democratic Party when the Democratic Party supported segregation and Jim Crow laws. When Democratic President Lyndon Johnson rejected racism for civil rights, the racists, who had once supported the Democrats, shifted to the GOP.
To argue otherwise is to perpetuate an appalling incorrect and racist version of history.
Lord did so to support an appalling and racist presidential candidate.
A year later, Lord took his opinions even further to the right when he engaged in an exchange of opinions on Twitter with Media Matters president Angelo Carusone.
Lord ended the exchange by sending Carusone a tweet with the Nazi salute, “Sieg Heil!”
CNN then hired Lord.
https://money.cnn.com/2017/08/10/media/jeffrey-lord-cnn-ties/index.html
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/cnn-fires-commentator-jeffrey-lord-nazi-salute-tweet/
Trump then praised Lord in a speech in Pennsylvania with Lord in attendance.
“Hi Jeffrey. The great Jeffrey Lord. He was on fake news CNN for a long time. He was one of my few sources of truth,” Trump said.
But given Trump’s fondness for Adolf Hitler it would have been appropriate for Lord to respond to Trump with the words,
“Sieg Heil.”
SEE ADOLF HITLER
