Another ridiculously credulous Trump headline – and article — from the New York Times* (*also maybe wrong)

By
Dan Froomkin
-

[Update at 3:00 p.m. ET, December 11: The Times report may have been both credulous and overstated. A draft of the executive order obtained by Jewish Insider on Wednesday doesn’t include any explicit interpretation of Judaism as a race or nationality. Rather, it ambiguously encourages agencies enforcing a civil rights statute that prohibits discrimination on the basis or race, color, and national origin — but not religion — to enforce it “as vigorously” in cases of discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism. It also calls for those agencies to “consider” the examples of anti-Semitism compiled by an international organization that include “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”]

New York Times marquee Trump reporters Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman reported Tuesday night on an executive order Trump plans to sign Wednesday declaring Judaism a race and a nationality.

Even by Trump standards, it’s a breathtaking move with wide-ranging implications and historic reverberations. Like everything he does, it reflects brazen political goals and needs to be cast in the context of his profound bigotry, which very much extends to Jews.

Most directly, it’s an obvious attempt to kill the BDS “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” movement on college campuses which, modeled on the fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa, is an attempt to sever ties with Israel in account of its inhumane treatment of the Palestinian people.

The move is also a quid pro quo for Trump’s “patron-in-chief” — the anti-BDS-funding casino magnate Sheldon Adelson —  and a sop to the small fraction of American Jews who support Trump despite his far-right policies and his impulse (most recently expressed last week, before an Adelson-funded group of Israel supporters) to call them money-grubbers to their face.

None of this is hard to figure out.

And yet under the spectacularly credulous headline “Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses” – perhaps the most ridiculous Times headline since “Trump Urges Unity Vs. Racism,“ which unlike this one the Times took back —  here is what Baker and Haberman wrote:

President Trump plans to sign an executive order on Wednesday targeting what he sees as anti-Semitism on college campuses by threatening to withhold federal money from educational institutions that fail to combat discrimination, three administration officials said on Tuesday.

The order will effectively interpret Judaism as a race or nationality, not just a religion, to prompt a federal law penalizing colleges and universities deemed to be shirking their responsibility to foster an open climate for minority students. In recent years, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions — or B.D.S. — movement against Israel has roiled some campuses, leaving some Jewish students feeling unwelcome or attacked.

It’s all taken at face value — even the claim that Jewish students are under attack.

And then, the reporters completely accept the framing of Trump as a supporter of American Jews — when most would most certainly say he is not — by writing that he has “positioned himself as an unflinching supporter of Israel and a champion of Jewish Americans” by “moving the United States Embassy to Jerusalem, supporting settlements in the West Bank and recognizing the seizure of the Golan Heights. He also assailed Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, when she said support for Israel was ‘all about the Benjamins,’ meaning money.”

In their fourth paragraph, Baker and Haberman present something closer to the truth — but at arm’s length, writing that “critics complained that such a policy could be used to stifle free speech and legitimate opposition to Israel’s policies toward Palestinians in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.”

Further down, they explained, without attribution, that that the order “will have the effect of embracing an argument that Jews are a people or a race with a collective national origin in the Middle East, like Italian Americans or Polish Americans.”

The Washington Post, chasing the Times story, could have gone with a more skeptical take, but instead, like it did with another story the other day, it basically just rewrote the Times’s headline. CNN at least reported what was happening, not the ridiculous spin: Trump to sign order to interpret Judaism as a nationality.

Twitter’s media critics jumped into action, with Soledad O’Brien arguably leading  the way, as she has been doing a lot lately:

The real story and the real implications were hardly a mystery. Consider:

Reporters! Here is something you can and should crib from in every story about Trump and Jews, about his personal bigotry, by Peter Beinart’s in the Forward:

Trump, after all, in 2013 tweeted that “I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz—I mean Jon Stewart.”

He ran for president on a slogan laden with anti-Semitic associations from the 1930s: “America First.” In 2015 he told a Jewish audience that “You’re not gonna support me because I don’t want your money… you don’t want to give me money, but that’s ok, you want to control your own politicians that’s fine.”

In 2016 he retweeted an image of Hillary Clinton surrounded by money and a Jewish star. He closed his presidential campaign with an ad that showed three Jews—Janet Yellen, Lloyd Blankfein and George Soros—alongside language about “global special interests” that “control the levers of power in Washington.”

In 2017, he said there were “very fine people” among the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville. And in 2018, his racist fear mongering about a caravan of Central American migrants provoked a Pittsburgh man to commit the worst anti-Semitic atrocity in American history.

Trump’s obviously conflicted feelings about Jews evidently present some sort of unresolvable challenge to journalists from our elite newsrooms. Just last week, reporters from the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and Politico engaged in stunning levels of brain-dead stenography in their reports from Trump’s speech in Florida to the Adelson-funded group.

Here is some of what he actually said:

We have to get the people of our country, of this country, to love Israel more. I have to tell you that. We have to do it. We have to get them to love Israel more. Because you have people that are Jewish people, that are great people — they don’t love Israel enough….

A lot of you are in the real estate business because I know you very well. You’re brutal killers. Not nice people at all. But you have to vote for me; you have no choice. You’re not going to vote for Pocahontas, I can tell you that. You’re not going to vote for the wealth tax.

Yeah, let’s take 100 percent of your wealth away. No, no. Even if you don’t like me; some of you don’t. Some of you I don’t like at all, actually. And you’re going to be my biggest supporters because you’ll be out of business in about 15 minutes, if they get it. So I don’t have to spend a lot of time on that.

Washington Post reporter Josh Dawsey’s article Saturday night was headlined “Trump touts accomplishments in address meant to woo Jewish voters and bolster support in Florida,” and the subhead gave Trump props because he “hewed to a script” more than usual.

On Monday morning, the Post finally noted concerns that he had used “anti-Semitic tropes.”

5 COMMENTS

  1. Hey Donnie,
    As an American Jew, I resent you using my religious and cultural identity as a vehicle for justifying your politically-motivated censorship campaigns.

    Protesting Israel’s current anti-Palestinian policies is NOT a form of anti-Semitism, and contrary to your frequent proclamations, Jews who do not agree with Israel on this matter are not inherently less Jewish, less politically savvy, or less patriotic than Jews who support these policies.

    Judaism is not my nationality, and by issuing an edict proclaiming this notion, you are effectively implying that I am “less American” than Christian Americans.

    • Froomkin can issue edicts? Really?

      Trump is HATRED personified and this silly gesture of his does nothing to stop his racist fan base from continuing their smearing of anyone who is not white and Christian and believe that all news is “fake.”

  2. Hi Dan. The Times is actually getting worse, isn’t it, as the danger to the country grows and the need for straight non-credulous reporting is more needed than ever. I assume that stenographers like MAGA Habs, Baker, and Pete Williams get their slant approved by editors up the line (or as part of the newsroom culture the editors prefer to maintain). They don’t seem to understand that by placating righties (who hate them anyway) with bogus narrative and supplicant uncritical “reporting,” they kill the faith and trust of mainstream readers as well–thereby doing Trump’s job (destroying the media’s credibility) for him. The thrust of your column here is yet more evidence of this.

  3. And what happens this morning (I live in France) when I open my digital New York Times? An op-ed “penned” by Jared Kushner trumpeting the “fact” that “Trump is Defending Jewish Students” and more generally is telling everyone that “hate” is evil and will not be tolerated.

    All I see, however, is a cynical ploy to repair some of the damage Trump made over the weekend to a group of Jewish leaders/corporate types and an attempt to try and win some Jewish votes.

    Trump’s Twitter feed is FILLED with hatred every damn day!

    Oy vey!

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.