With the preposterous second-place president calling the New York Times fake news and the enemy of the American people, I opened Monday’s edition of that publication to behold the fraud and treason.
“Pence tells a wary European Union that it has Trump’s support,” blared a front-page Times headline.
Apparently, Vice President Mike Pence did not tell the European Union any such thing, or maybe the EU is not wary. Or both.
“Merrick Garland has reached acceptance about nomination,” declared another of the paper’s large headlines.
Apparently, former President Barack Obama’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, who never got so much as a courtesy from the Republican Senate, has not reached acceptance about that, and remains as highly irritated as he ever was.
“Millions in South Sudan need food, U.N. says,” according to another headline.
Apparently, either the South Sudanese are well-nourished or the United Nations did not actually say the obvious that they aren’t.
Over in the sports section a headline said, “Dustin Johnson’s win secures top spot in rankings.”
Apparently, the pro golfer of that name won no tournament over the weekend, or, if winning one, certainly did not place himself atop the world golf rankings by doing so.
Why, oh, why, would a newspaper defraud us that way? What kind of perversity is it that purposely infuses the American people with misinformation about whether a guy won a golf tournament or whether the South Sudanese are malnourished?
The preposterous second-place president has answered that question: It’s because the newspaper is the enemy of the American people, engaging in such vile and sinister conspiracies against us as to leave us hopelessly at sea about … everything.
You’re saying that’s cute — maybe you are — but that I should get serious.
All right, then.
Here was the biggest headline on the front page of the Monday edition of the New York Times: “Trump allies quietly push plan for Russia and Ukraine.”
The article reported that, before Mike Flynn resigned as national security adviser — which he may not have done, since the New York Times said he did — two business pals of President Trump, along with a Ukrainian lawmaker tied to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, delivered to Flynn’s office a plan to settle matters between Ukraine and Russia and permit the lifting of American sanctions on Russia.
Now that, you see, represents the precise kind of thing the preposterous second-place president calls fake news.
That’s because the reported plan amounts merely to an outside group’s working paper in a long process, and did not represent the president’s position — yet.
But its front-page declaration in the New York Times would make it appear that Trump had buddies working ad hoc to cook up a way to let him serve his Russian masters and get rid of the sanctions against them.
That’s not fake news. It’s not false. It’s a scoop, an inside scoop, a valuable scoop, one that advises discerning readers of a development they need to know about as they seek to come to terms with controversies about their new administration and Russia.
The article can sound a needed alarm on a looming possibility. Or it can force the White House to account for — or abandon— whatever actions it may be contemplating.
The article thus serves the American people as their friend — certainly no enemy — by putting them in the loop where they need to be but where the preposterous second-place president doesn’t want them.
At worst, the article was overplayed.
An overplayed news article reflects bad news judgment in the afternoon editors’ meeting, a condition I’ve observed at every newspaper where I’ve worked.
What Trump calls fake news by an enemy of the American people is the same kind of afflict-the-comfortable treatment — the same kind of alarm-sending and calling-to-account reporting — that drove Hillary and Bill Clinton to calling the New York Times that blankety-blank, blankety-blank blankety-blank.
You see, it was the Times — an editorially liberal newspaper that is generally even-handed and ground-plowing in its news pages — that first broke and then sustained the drumbeat of articles about the Clintons’ failed land deal back in Arkansas called Whitewater.
The articles were overplayed, but not fake, and not treasonous. The Clintons did not allege any such thing. They merely let their resentments simmer.
The articles amounted to nothing on their own, really, except the appointment of a partisan and abusive independent counsel who spent enough taxpayer money to keep himself in business until Clinton took a shine to a flirty intern flashing thong underpants.
The difference is that not even the Clintons were remotely so narcissistic and megalomaniacal as to emulate Trump and declare that nettlesome news articles about them were the work of enemies of the American people.
The news coverage is the same as always, as good as ever, at times as overplayed as ever. The difference is the precipitous decline in the quality and character of our president.
L’etat c’est moi, Trump is essentially saying, meaning that he, like Louis XIV, is the state. But he most certainly is not.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.