It is no secret that the New York Times is an arm of the Democratic Party, but this piece–a news story in the paper’s U.S. Politics section, not an op-ed–illustrates how far over the edge the Times has gone.
The theme of the article is that Donald Trump is a racist:
Donald J. Trump first established his connection with the largely white Republican base more than a decade ago by stoking discomfort with the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president — the beginning of the so-called birther movement.
It was Obama who claimed to have been born in Kenya. That is what his official biography said for more than a decade. If he had been born in Kenya, he would not be a “natural born Citizen” and thus ineligible to be president. Trump was wrong because Obama lied; he actually was born in Honolulu. But the controversy over his citizenship had nothing to do with his race.
This week, Mr. Trump lobbed his latest racially charged attack at former Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina, the daughter of Indian immigrants and his closest competitor in the New Hampshire primary, by repeatedly flubbing her given name, Nimarata Nikki Randhawa.
On Friday, Mr. Trump referred to Ms. Haley as “Nimbra” in a post on Truth Social, his social media platform, three days after facing criticism for dubbing her “Nimrada.” Ms. Haley has long gone by her middle name, Nikki.
Both are racist dog whistles, much like his continued focus on Mr. Obama’s middle name, Hussein, and add to a long history of racially incendiary statements from the campaign trail.
The Times reports as a fact that Trump’s flubbing of Haley’s name is a “racist dog whistle.” But he mocks all of his opponents in various ways, not just Haley. It was Haley, not Trump, who brought up her ethnic background, claiming to have been made fun of as a “brown person” when she was young. And the claim that Trump has “a long history of racially incendiary statements” on the campaign trail is mere assertion, unsupported by anything in the “news” story.
The Times keeps returning to its “birther” theme:
In February 2011, Mr. Trump started pushing the racist lie that Mr. Obama was not a U.S. citizen when he was testing the waters of a potential presidential campaign. Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, discussed the so-called birther issue on almost a nightly basis that April, until Mr. Obama showed reporters his birth certificate later that month.
The idea that Obama was born in Kenya, not the U.S., was not a “racist lie”–again, an astonishing assertion in a news story. It was Obama who said he was born in Kenya, and if that were true he would be ineligible for the presidency. Race had nothing to do with it.
That year, he questioned the citizenship of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, the first Latino senator from the state, who was born in Canada. Mr. Cruz’s mother is American, which automatically conferred citizenship.
Trump says many stupid things. Immigration law has changed over the years, and he was wrong about Cruz. But Cruz is white. While Trump’s comments about Cruz were dumb, they had nothing to do with race.
During his failed 2020 re-election bid, he falsely claimed that Kamala Harris, who would become the first woman and first person of color to be elected vice president, did not meet the country’s citizenship requirements.
The link goes to a Times story that quotes Trump as follows:
Mr. Trump, speaking to reporters on Thursday, nevertheless pushed the attack on his opponent. “I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements,” Mr. Trump said.
“I have no idea if that’s right,” he added. “I would have thought, I would have assumed, that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.”
So the Times mischaracterizes what Trump said. In fact, his comment goes to the concept of “birthright citizenship,” since Harris’s parents were both immigrants and, I take it, non-citizens. Birthright citizenship–the idea that the 14th Amendment makes anyone born in the United States a citizen, regardless of circumstances, so that, for example, a Chinese woman who is soon to deliver a child can fly to the U.S. and have the baby, and that baby is forever a citizen–is deeply controversial. The Times quotes the far-left, hotheaded partisan Larry Tribe for the proposition that what Trump said was “total B.S.” So that is Tribe’s opinion, but the idea that disagreeing with Larry Tribe on an issue of constitutional interpretation makes Trump a “racist” is ridiculous.
Donald Trump, as I said earlier, does say a lot of dumb things. A few of them may be racially “insensitive” by the hothouse standards that prevail in bad liberal arts colleges and the New York Times. But if Trump is a racist, why do so many blacks and Hispanics support him? That is a question that the Times does not try to answer.
As Steve noted earlier, if Trump is a racist he is a singularly ineffective one. The Times might say that Trump, like Mephistopheles, wills evil but does good. Because, based on results, it would seem that Joe Biden is the racist:
Looking at those numbers, I conclude that the average African-American is smarter than the average New York Times reporter.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/01/donald-trump-racist.php
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