Today's Poll Question: Do you agree with Mark Halperin, that only those on the left care that Trump got richer in office?

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Get ready to vote on today's daily poll question at smerconish.com.

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But first, Michael explains it for you right here.

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Welcome to The Smerconish Podcast from SiriusXM.

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For Independent Minds.

**Michael Smerconish** (0:29)
Hello, hello, today is Thursday, it's the 2nd of July. Happy Semi-Quincentennial, Semi-Quincentennial. Yesterday's poll question at smerconish.com drew 29,041 votes. Should a candidate's mental illness be judged the same as a physical illness? 75.15%. I like this result. Three quarters of us said yes, it should. Dr. Robert Klitzman, the Columbia psychiatrist was on yesterday's program and we were talking about Representative Thomas Kane Jr.'s handling of his depression and hospitalization and return to the House of Representatives. There's a follow-up story today from Politico that made the newsletter talking about how colleagues on both sides of the aisle are expressing sympathy for his mental health challenges, gratitude for the fact that he's now returned, but many hedge their comments by saying, and I agree with this, that he could and perhaps should have said something earlier. As I said on yesterday's program, my concern is that unintentionally he probably added to the stigma because if in March it had been a physical ailment, right away he would have said so, there would have been sympathy, cards, flowers, Godspeed wishes, but the silence kind of adds to the, ooh, you know, what's this all about? Maybe this is something to be feared and concerned about differently than if it were a cancer diagnosis, a car accident that resulted injury, you know, fill in the blank. So from Politico, Kane appeared to anticipate that he might be criticized for saying so little as he missed more than 100 votes no matter how sensitive his diagnosis might be. In the floor speech he gave upon returning Tuesday, he described himself as a private person by nature and said that he was still trying to understand what was happening when his office first attributed his absence to a quote unquote medical issue. With regard to today's poll question, well the subject matter is also the focus of a Wall Street Journal editorial. If it were not the journal, I don't know that I'd quote from it, but the fact that it's the journal saying this makes it noteworthy. Headlined The Trump Family and Honest Graft.
Let me just give you three graphs from this.
The Wall Street Journal today, well I just lost my place. Here we go. Oh yeah, this is what I wanted. Quote, the Trumps are seeing their opportunities and taking them. In the tradition of what Tammany Hall's George Washington plunket called Honest Graft, and then parenthetically the journal says, for Princeton history majors, Tammany Hall was a 19th century democratic political machine. I don't know why they singled out Princeton for that, but all right.
Second of two graphs, assuming all of this is legal, it's still an unseemly display of using the presidency for family profit. It's hard to believe the Trump boys would be able to do the same deals if dad wasn't in the Oval Office. The main difference between Hunter Biden's foreign dealings and the Trump projects is that the Trumps are brazenly open about theirs. You know, that was Comer's defense yesterday when questioned by Jake Tapper. He said, well, they're disclosing everything. Graph number three from this same editorial in the journal, foreigners may come to think that they can buy American goodwill or favors if they cut the Trumps in on the action. Americans, and especially his supporters, deserve better from this or any president. Well, Mark Halperin had an interesting take yesterday on the program, saying essentially that only those on the left care that Trump is getting richer in office. And that's today's poll question. That is today's poll question. More on that in a moment.

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The Smerconish Podcast from SiriusXM.

**Michael Smerconish** (4:22)
I watched that exciting win by the US men yesterday.
Two nil over Bosnia Herzegovina. Wow, did I just screw that? Herzegovina. Oh my God, forget I even said it. The US. 1-2-0, they were down for the last half hour, a man. And this Balagon red card and the fact that he now has to miss the next game, which is going to be in Seattle against Belgium.
I don't know, maybe I just don't have a fine understanding of the game. But I didn't see it. I just couldn't see it. I mean, okay, a foul maybe, but a red card for that?