Trump finally sends the NY Times over the edge

The folks who run The New York Times are hysterical – beyond hysterical – at the thought that any American in his or her right mind could possibly be supporting Donald Trump.

How else to account for the following articles the Times has published on its Facebook news feed over the last three days? 

Donald Trump’s message resonates with white supremacists.  “Intentionally or not, Mr. Trump’s campaign is mobilizing white supremacists so much that he has their support despite awkward attempts to publicly disavow it.” Author: Jonathan Mahler.

What wouldn’t Jesus do? “What stuns me is how my fellow evangelicals can rally behind a man (Trump) whose words and actions are so at odds with the central teachings of our faith." Author: Peter Wehner.

Donald Trump retweets post with quote from Mussolini. “Donald J. Trump on Sunday morning used his Twitter feed to post a quote attributed to Benito Mussolini, the founder of the fascist movement, from a parody account.” Author: Maggie Haberman.

Goldman Sachs puts worker linked to Donald Trump on leave. "The only Goldman Sachs employee to contribute to Donald J. Trump's campaign has been placed on administrative leave." Authors: Suzanne Craig and David W. Chen.

Donald Trump elicits shock and biting satire in European media. "His nearly every move and pronouncement has been reported from Paris to Berlin to Helsinki." Author: Dan Belifsky.

If Donald Trump changed genders. "The Trump campaign’s success doesn’t say anything good about our progress toward gender equality." Author: Frank Bruni.

The Times’ penultimate anti-Trump story to date, “Measuring Donald Trump’s Supporters for Intolerance,” appeared on February 23, the day after the South Carolina primary. It reported that polls showed “nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation which freed slaves in the Southern states during the Civil War. Only 5 percent of Mr. Rubio’s voters share this view. This isn’t about Trump. It’s about his supporters.”

As long as it was linking candidates to their supporters' views, the Times could have reported that, "More than 50 percent of Hillary Clinton's supporters believe it is acceptable to butcher a child in the womb under the auspices of birth control." That, unlike the Emancipation Proclamation, would have actually been relevant to the upcoming election since the next president will likely be appointing Supreme Court justices who could overturn Roe v Wade but, because the Times' editorial board supports abortion, it ignored that story.

While the media is, ostensibly, supposed to report the news objectively, it doesn’t and never has and the conservative media is as biased to the right as the liberal media is to the left. But the Times’ hysteria about Trump is, even for a newspaper that last endorsed a Republican for president in 1956, above and beyond when it comes to biased reporting.

Times’ writers seem genuinely mystified that anyone could find anything at all appealing about Trump. That’s because the Times is written by and for eastern liberals who, in their own ways, are every bit as parochial as conservative residents of the rural Middle West (a term the Times persisted in using to refer to America's heartland until a few years ago) and South. I say this as someone who grew up in a narrow-minded conservative rural Missouri town but spent most of his adult life living in narrow-minded liberal New York and its narrow-minded liberal Connecticut suburbs. Narrow-mindedness is a two-way street but you have to get out of your ivory tower and onto the street to fully understand the extent to which traffic flows both ways.

Perhaps if the Times would dispatch its reporters to flyover country to spend time with some of the millions of otherwise reasonable people who support Trump – and yes, there are, apparently, at least some who believe it’s not acceptable to own slaves – it would find that his popularity isn’t just a reaction to political views with which it disagrees, it’s the reaction of ordinary Americans fed up with being told how to think in the guise of “news" generated by media outlets like the Times and Fox News. It is richly ironic that both the nation’s leading left- and right-wing news outlets don't even attempt to disguise their fear of Trump, who refuses to kowtow to their editorial boards.

Maybe Trump is a fascist and a racist and a misogynist who believes that slavery shouldn't have been abolished. Perhaps he’s a child molester who tortures puppies for fun and has already selected the sites for the concentration camps to which he plans to send his political opponents for extermination.

If he is elected and turns out to be any of these things and the Times reports on it, a large percentage of the public isn’t going to believe them precisely because of the hysterical and misleading reporting it’s doing at this stage of the election.

The Constitution guarantees freedom of the press but with that freedom comes implicit responsibility for journalists to attempt to report the news fairly -- something the Times, whose slogan is "All the News That's Fit To Print," is abrogating in favor of hysterical backed-into-a-corner journalism that makes the National Enquirer look downright stately. 

On the off chance that Trump wins in November,  the Times editorial board would do well to get a grip right now and try to understand why his message seems to be resonating with millions of voters, rather than publishing ridiculous stories like the ones listed above lest it lose what little credibility it still has.

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