Heather Mac Donald Prophets of Doom The dishonesty with which the media has portrayed Donald Trump from the beginning threatens our civil coexistence.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/prophets-of-doom
A quiz: Who said the following, and which speaker did the New York Times deem dark and demagogic?
“We’re not going to have a country” if my opponent wins.
My opponent is “a threat to our democracy and fundamental freedoms.”
“There is one existential threat:” my opponent.
“The only existential threat to humanity is climate change, and [my opponent] didn’t do a damn thing about it.”
The 2024 presidential election “might carry near-existential stakes.”
Blacks and Hispanics “have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. . . . [they] have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home.”
“America must heed this warning”: my opponent is a “fascist.”
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country” as my opponent.
“Folks don’t care if tanks roll by on the way to the store as long as the milk doesn’t cost more than 4 years ago.”
Answer key: The first quote is from Donald Trump. The rest are from: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Joe Biden, the New York Times, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Kamala Harris, and a New York Times reader.
Yet the Times accuses Trump alone of making “fear an animating force” in his campaigns, of using “fear as a tool” to stir up his base, and of taking “doomsday prophesying to a new extreme.” Trump alone sends the “dark, apocalyptic” message: “Be Afraid!” according to the Times. By contrast, Harris, Biden, and the Times are merely telling the truth about the existential threat that is Trump—and, in the case of Biden’s comments about black parents, about the existential threat that police pose to blacks.
The New York Times has always charged Trump with demagoguery. Over the last several weeks, however, it has made Trump’s allegedly darkening rhetoric an obsessive theme. The Times’s lack of self-awareness regarding its own hysterical rhetoric and the rhetoric of Trump’s Democratic opponents is typical of the mainstream media’s blinding self-righteousness. Democrats routinely traffic in fear-mongering about right-wing threats to democracy, to the future of the planet, to “reproductive freedom,” to the safety of “minoritized” persons and the gender-nonconforming, and to freedom of speech. (This last charge is the most preposterous, coming from the party of speech codes, the silencing of “hate speech,” and the campaign against “disinformation.”) Do Democrats see themselves as sober soothsayers? Yes. Conservatives see themselves that way, too. What counts as hyperbolic fear-mongering depends on one’s prior assumptions.
Still, the Times’s current crusade to paint Trump as uniquely apocalyptic and uniquely dangerous represents a new level of duplicity. Exhibit A for Trump’s darkening rhetoric is his promise, as the Times puts it, to “use the power of the presidency to crush those who disagree with him.” Trump has “openly suggested turning the military on American citizens simply because they oppose his candidacy,” claims the paper. If that were true, Trump would indeed threaten democracy.
But Trump said no such thing. The Times and others are basing this accusation on a Fox News interview from October 13. Anchor Maria Bartiromo had asked the former president if he was “expecting chaos on election day.” “Not from the side that votes for Trump,” he answered. Bartiromo then suggested that Chinese infiltrators might seek to disrupt the election. Trump rightly downplayed this conspiracy theory. The “bigger problem,” he said, is the “enemy within. . . . We have some bad people. We have some sick people, radical left lunatics. . . . it should be very easily handled by—if necessary, the National Guard, or, if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”
This statement was classic Trump: impetuously phrased and needlessly condensed. It makes no concessions to sensitive liberal ears. But however imperfect, even regrettable, Trump’s choice of language, it is clear from context that he is not, as the Times puts it, contemplating “turning the military on American citizens simply because they oppose his candidacy.”
Bartiromo had asked him about “chaos on election day.” She was referring to the possibility of riots breaking out if Trump wins. Given the predilection of leftists to annihilate stores, set cars on fire, and attack government property when the political process makes a decision that displeases them, the question is not just reasonable but urgent. One would have to have been living in a news blackout for the last decade not to predict urban violence following a Harris defeat. But even if one believed such a risk was de minimis, a good faith reading of Trump’s response shows that he was referring to that risk in contemplating calling out the National Guard or the military “if necessary.” Any other meaning is nonsensical. How would the National Guard target people who had merely voted for Harris? The soldiers would have no idea who had cast ballots for whom.
Perhaps the Times has by now so defined deviancy down that it equates riots, or rather, left-wing riots, with political disagreement. When the Times writes that Trump wants the military to “crush those who disagree with him,” perhaps it is in fact referring to Antifa thugs, who are, in the Times’s view, simply exercising their rights of political expression. But charity requires ruling that possibility out.
To conservatives, those who pillage and destroy are, to put it bluntly, “sick” and “lunatic.” A more sophisticated speaker might phrase things differently, but the underlying reality is the same. Trump has used such language before to refer to rioters, as the Times, which keeps an obsessive tab on his every utterance, must know.
The Times is not the only political player to willfully misread Trump’s comments. Harris told a rally in Erie, Pa.: “He considers anyone who doesn’t support him or will not bend to his will an enemy of our country. He is saying that he would use the military to go after them.” Harris’s misreading is even more egregious than that of the Times, since she has more political power and more of a duty of truthfulness.
It is too late to expect Trump to speak with precision and prudence. As the Times itself notes, many of his supporters treat his more flamboyant pronouncements as theater, not as serious policy. One’s partiality in either direction also depends on one’s assumptions. Conservatives are as alarmed by leftists’ rhetoric as Democrats and other leftists are about Trump’s. We give our side the benefit of the doubt but hear the worst in the other side’s excesses.
But the “Trump wants to hunt down his opponents” meme is beyond ordinary partisan filtering. It speaks to the dishonesty that has characterized the media’s approach to the Trump phenomenon from the beginning. It is that dishonesty, not Trump’s worldview, that is becoming increasingly dark and that threatens the possibility of civil coexistence.
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