Last Saturday, The New York Times published an extraordinary story. What made the story extraordinary wasn’t the event the Times covered. What made it extraordinary was the way the Times covered it.
On its front page, top right—the most precious space in American print journalism—the Times wrote about Friday’s press conference in which Donald Trump declared that a) he now believed Barack Obama was a US citizen, b) he deserved credit for having established that fact despite rumors to the contrary and c) Hillary Clinton was to blame for the rumors. Traditionally, when a political candidate assembles facts so as to aggrandize himself and belittle his opponent, “objective” journalists like those at the Times respond with a “he said, she said” story…
But the Times, once a champion practitioner of the “he said, she said” campaign story, discarded it with astonishing bluntness. The Times responded to Trump’s press conference by running a “News Analysis,” a genre that gives reporters more freedom to explain a story’s significance. But “News Analysis” pieces generally supplement traditional news stories. On Saturday, by contrast, the Times ran its “News Analysis” atop Page One while relegating its news story on Trump’s press conference to page A10. Moreover, “News Analysis” stories generally offer context. They don’t offer thundering condemnation.
Yet thundering condemnation is exactly what the Times story provided. Its headline read, “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.” Not “falsehood,” which leaves open the possibility that Trump was merely mistaken, but “lie,” which suggests, accurately, that Trump had every reason to know that what he was saying about Obama’s citizenship was false.
The article’s text was even more striking. It read like an opinion column. It began by reciting the history of Trump’s campaign to discredit Obama’s citizenship. “It was not true in 2011,” began the first paragraph. “It was not true in 2012,” began the second paragraph. “It was not true in 2014,” began the third paragraph. Then, in the fourth paragraph: “It was not true, any of it.” The article called Trump’s claim that he had put to rest rumors about Obama’s citizenship “a bizarre new deception” and his allegation that Clinton had fomented them “another falsehood.” Then, in summation, it declared that while Trump has “exhausted an army of fact checkers with his mischaracterizations, exaggerations and fabrications,” the birther lie was particularly “insidious” because it “sought to undo the embrace of an African American president by the 69 million voters who elected him.”
* The amazing thing to me was that the CNN panel which followed that event were so furious that they had been “played” (their word) by Trump in such a fashion. And then to see in the NYT that Trump’s questioning Obama’s birth place, after Obama had sold his books on the basis of his having been born in Kenya and raised in Hawaii and Indonesia, was considered by the esteemed editors a “lie.” I never knew that one could “lie” by asking a question.
* I think Trump is deliberately and naturally very funny.
His comment to the effect that Hillary probably paid PR guys $2 million but he came up with “Crooked Hillary” all by himself for free tickled me no end.
I thought SPY Magazine’s characterization of him as the “short-fingered vulgarian was funny. But he’s much funnier than they were.
And as adaptable and resilient as he’s proven himself to be under the relentless, unfair and dishonest onslaught by the left, I bet he’s pretty healthy psychologically. Certainly healthy enough to be POTUS.
* The left always marched humorously in lockstep. The pranks those guys pulled seemed mean-spirited whereas Trump’s stunts are more good-natured. They wouldn’t have called their followers “deplorables”–that’s what they would have called the squares or straights. They laughed at the Establishment but they didn’t laugh at themselves. They were full of righteous indignation thinly overlaid with smug humor. It was obvious to me as a teenager that in the left’s eyes, all people were equal but some people were more equal than others.
