David Cole writes:
Take last week. The press, which is fast proving to be the Chief Inspector Dreyfus to Trump’s Clouseau, began hammering the man hard over the plague of “neo-Nazi” and “white supremacist” bomb threats being phoned in to Jewish community centers. Trump condemned the threats (many Muslim leaders won’t even condemn the outright murder of Jews, and most “mainstream” journalists never insist that they do), but the press still wasn’t satisfied. And being the crafty scoop-meisters they are, reporters soon discovered that while Trump was publicly denouncing the telephonic Kristallnacht, he privately told a group of state attorneys general that the threats might not actually be from actual anti-Semites. He suggested that the threats might in fact be “the reverse”: someone looking “to make people—or to make others—look bad.” In other words, the threats might be coming from someone with an agenda that has nothing to do with wanting to blow up Jews.
You could almost hear the sound of every journalist in D.C. getting a hard-on. “We got him!” Trump the “conspiracy theorist.” Trump the “denier” who dares to suggest that the greatest threat to the Jewish people since Haman’s lottery might be nothing more than a hoax. Sure, Trump has not only survived but prevailed against every other supposedly fatal armor-chink and “smoking gun” his opponents have trotted out, but this one will surely sink him. The Jews are facing an existential threat, and Trump suggested it might be nothing more than a mischief-maker with a personal agenda.
And then an arrest was made…
