Donald Trump isn’t letting a little thing like plagiarism prevent him from appointing Monica Crowley to be assistant secretary of the Treasury for public affairs, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.
You may recall that Crowley had been slated to become a deputy national security adviser to Trump at the start of his administration. However, she decided to “pursue other opportunities” before she started the job but after more than 50 instances of plagiarism were found in her last book and even more in her Ph.D. dissertation.
Of course, the plagiarism was no barrier for regular appearances on Fox News where she was treated as a serious analyst and, of course, Trump supporter.
In an opinion column for The Washington Post last month, Professor Daniel W. Drezner wrote about her appointment to the Treasury Department in April:
In April, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin hired serial plagiarist and Fox News contributor Monica Crowley to be a Treasury Department spokeswoman. According to the New York Times’s Alan Rappeport, “the White House wanted to add staff members who, like Ms. Crowley, could be counted on to fiercely defend Mr. Trump’s policies on television as the 2020 election season gets into full swing.” Because there is nothing like lame denials of serial plagiarism to bolster the credibility of a government spokeswoman.
Well, now, that less-than-credible government spokeswoman is getting a promotion.
Crowley may be a poor plagiarist but she’s a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire. In 2016, when she was on track to become Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Ellen noted some of her favorites in Crowley's repertoire:
She accused CBS’ Bob Schieffer of offering secretly-coded campaign suggestions to Obama advisor David Axelrod (October 12, 2010).
She has opined that the War on Christmas is really part of a secular progressive plot to “strip organized religion, God and faith out of the public square” so that government can step in and “fill that void” (November 27, 2012).
She hyped the baseless conspiracy theory that DNC staffer Seth Rich was murdered by the Clintons (August 10, 2016).
And my personal favorite: that time she blamed the Obama administration for her decision not to eat a cheeseburger (June 28, 2011).
While it’s easy to laugh, Crowley’s hostility to the press is no joke. Media Matters notes that she “has pilloried journalists as 'dishonest, hostile, biased, rude fake news'" and has "regularly decr[ied] the 'corrupt,' 'leftist' media while praising Trump for putting the 'dishonest, hostile, biased, rude fake news in its place.'”
Media Matters also points out that Crowley is at least the 17th former Fox employee to join the Trump administration and, in her new job, replaces Tony Sayegh, also a former Fox contributor.
You can watch Crowley play the victim after being caught plagiarizing below, from the March 7, 2017 Hannity.
I note for the record that for most people, the economy in general has continued to moderately improve as it did under President Obama, given that Pence inherited a growing economy that had modestly recovered from the huge Republican recession of 2008. (And he didn’t inherit a “mess” as falsely claimed by his childish spokesman) But I must also note that the Tax Transfer inflicted by the GOP has grievously injured millions of Middle Class employees and Blue State residents by raising their tax brackets and erasing their deductions. And the Pence people added injury to insult by messing with the withholding rates last year in a vain play to convince everyone they’d received a fantasy “tax cut” before the midterms.
The actual economic policies pursued by the Pence White House, including the Tax Transfer, the abandonment of multiple international agreements, and the constant infantile tantrums about how they want to inflict tariffs, are not helpful for long-term economic growth, despite the sugar high the wealthy and the corps are enjoying at the moment. But you’ll never hear that from a person as truth-challenged as Crowley.
