President Trump smeared a prominent television host on Tuesday from the lectern in the Rose Garden with an unfounded allegation of murder, taking the politics of rage and conspiracy theory to a new level even as much of the political world barely took notice.

In an attack that once would have been unthinkable for a sitting President, Trump all but accused Joe Scarborough, a former Republican congressman who now hosts the MSNBC show Morning Joe, of killing a staff member in 2001 even though he was 800 miles away at the time and the police ruled her death an accident.

The President’s charge amplified a series of Twitter messages in recent days that have drawn almost no rebukes from fellow Republicans eager to look the other way but have anguished the family of Lori Klausutis, who died when she suffered a heart condition that caused her to fall and hit her head on a desk.

Trump doubled down on the false accusation even after Timothy Klausutis pleaded unsuccessfully with Twitter to take down the posts about his late wife because they were causing her family such deep pain.

“A lot of people suggest that and hopefully someday people are going to find out,” the President said when asked by reporters about his tweets suggesting that Scarborough had committed murder perhaps because of an affair with Klausutis.

“It’s certainly a very suspicious situation. Very sad, very sad and very suspicious.”

Trump brushed aside the widower’s letter asking that the family be left alone. “I’m sure that, ultimately, they want to get to the bottom of it and it’s a very serious situation,” the President said of Klausutis’s relatives, calling on law enforcement to investigate.

“As you know, there’s no statute of limitations. So, it would be a very good, very good thing to do.”

Scarborough said the President was being “cruel and callous” by making an innocent family the collateral damage of his war against critics. “The widower of a woman who died 19 years ago begged the president of the United States to stop torturing him and his family,” Scarborough said in an interview.

“And yet he continues to torment this family and even went to Twitter accusing Lori of having an affair that resulted in her death.”

Scarborough was in Washington when Klausutis, who was 28, died at a district office in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. The police found no sign of foul play, and the coroner concluded she had an undiagnosed heart condition that caused her fall.

The latest burst of wild allegations and fact-free innuendo came at a time when Trump has appeared eager to redirect attention away from the continuing coronavirus pandemic that has claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 people in the US. Among other things on Tuesday, he boasted about the rising stock market and tried to sow doubt about the results of the coming election.

New York Times News Service