The French statesman Talleyrand famously observed about the Bourbons, “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” Something similar might be said about New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Once upon a time he was the avatar of a new age of economic interdependence that would lead to global peace. No two countries that each had a McDonald’s, he wrote, would ever go to war with each other. Then came the Balkans Wars in the 1990s. So much for the flat and interdependent world that Friedman purported to have discovered.
In a column of February 18, Friedman was in familiar form. Which is to say flat earth mode. Once more, his judgments were sweeping and apodictic. He declared a “code red” on the state of American democracy. “President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.”
The piece attracted more than 2,700 comments, “a personal record” according to Friedman, who credited the powerful public response to its being “the right column at the right time.” Funnily enough, he wasn’t even supposed to file a column that day. It wasn’t his turn in the weekly rotation. But he was so annoyed by Trump’s tweets in response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s most recent round of indictments that he emailed editor James Bennet to ask if he could file a bonus column, just for the web. “Not my day. Not in print. And it may be the most widely circulated column I’ve ever written,” he told CNN.
It is hard to know what exactly Friedman was so worked up about. It can’t be the Mueller indictments themselves, because nothing in the document released by the Department of Justice on February 17 suggests any collusion between Russians and the Trump campaign, much less Trump himself. It specifically describes the campaign staff who interacted with the paid Russians trolls as “unwitting.”
