insinuation

"I want to say he would be desirous of that, but I don't think he could have," says Christopher Elias, assistant professor of history at the American University in Cairo and author of "Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation."

It was an outrageous lie by insinuation, but why he lied is not mysterious.

Other critics took aim at the price of the earrings, speculating that they were $800 Tiffany & Co. pearls, the insinuation being that wearing an expensive accessory somehow makes Harris ineligible for the office she seeks.

Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X and Tesla, embraced conspiratorial insinuation, publicly wondering why a registered Republican, and then a 2016 Trump voter, had tried to kill the former president while “no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.”

Other Trump surrogates retreated to the comforts of conspiratorial insinuation.