Before you dismiss the above headline as referring to The New York Times’ opinion page or the editorial board and think, well of course they would say something like that, take a moment to recalibrate. We’re not talking about a New York Times columnist. This isn’t another impossibly-woke missive from the op-ed editors. This is a “straight news” headline from the front page of Wednesday’s edition: With Tweets, Videos and Rhetoric, Trump Pushes Anew to Divide Americans by Race.
Rest assured that there is not a single piece of evidence within the body of the story to prove that this is what President Trump is trying to do. But you already knew that.
“Trailing in national polls and surveys of crucial battleground states, and stricken by a disappointing return to the campaign trail, Mr. Trump has leaned hard into his decades-long habit of falsely portraying some black Americans as dangerous or lawless,” report Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin. “And he has chosen to do so at one of the most tumultuous periods in decades as Americans protest recent episodes of police brutality against black people that have highlighted the nation’s long history of racial injustice.”
First of all, we would like to see Maggie and Johnny defend the word “falsely” in that paragraph. Are they willing to go on record as saying that no black Americans are dangerous and/or lawless? That would be quite the revelation, because we’re pretty sure that would put black Americans, as a population, above literally every other racial group in the history of the world. It would certainly indicate we have a major problem with our crime statistics as well, seeing as how the FBI chronicles 2,570 homicides committed by black offenders in 2016. How can that be if literally every single black American is peaceful and harmless?
We get that racial sensitivities are running high in the Gray Lady’s newsroom, but really?
All right, what else ya got, Maggie.
“Over the last few days the president has tweeted context-free videos of random incidents involving black people attacking white people and baselessly argued that President Barack Obama, the country’s first black leader, committed ‘treason.’ In an interview with the Catholic News Agency that was posted online on Monday, Mr. Trump said he planned to sign an order to protect national monuments at a time when statues of Confederate generals are being torn down across the country,” they report.
Context-free videos, you say? Would that be like the context-free videos the media has been joyfully sharing that shows various police officers, besieged by anarchist protesters, going a little too far to keep the peace? The rest of this…criticizing Obama means dividing the country by race? Protecting monuments does so?
“As president, Mr. Trump has rarely been so inflammatory on race in such a narrow window of time, from his recent tweet about a doctored video purportedly showing a ‘racist baby’ to his use of a racist phrase — ‘Kung flu’ — to describe the coronavirus at his rally in Tulsa, Okla., on Saturday,” they continue.
That “doctored video” of the racist baby was actually mocking CNN for their ridiculous racial coverage. And “Kung Flu,” seriously? No one gives a damn.
“At his rally in Tulsa, which drew far fewer supporters than anticipated, Mr. Trump made no mention of the massacre of black residents in the city’s Greenwood section in 1921, or of the Juneteenth holiday a day earlier that celebrated the end of slavery. Instead, he again bemoaned the tearing down of statues,” they wrote.
Ah. So Trump is launching a racially-divisive campaign by not mentioning the things that The New York Times considers worth mentioning, including this holiday that no one had heard of ten seconds ago.
The New York Times is right about one thing: Someone is trying to “divide Americans by race.” They’re just woefully wrong about the perpetrator.
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