Your double whammy for the day: Eric Boehlert on how the press inexplicably continues its whitewashing of Trump’s speeches pairs nicely with John Stoehr on how critics of so-called “cancel culture” are koshering Trump for white people who don’t want to appear racist.
Boehlert:
There comes a point — and we’re way past it — when reporters covering Trump should be honest with what they’re witnessing. It shouldn’t be left to “opinion” writers to note that Trump speeches aren’t merely “divisive” as the New York Times reported on Friday. The speech was undemocratic as Trump demonized civil protesters, and dangerous as he portrayed them as lurking enemies of the state.
This kind of chronic whitewashing has come to define political journalism in the Trump era. As he becomes increasingly desperate while his polling numbers fall, Trump’s loud cries for armed confrontation may become more acute, and it’s the job of journalists to describe exactly what’s happening, and not hide behind polite euphemisms.
Stoehr:
I’m not going to say much about “cancel culture” except that it’s almost entirely make-believe. Critics do not generally take into account actual arguments made by social reformers but instead fabricate arguments in order to undercut them. The point that I want to make is that Stephens and other dishonest intellectuals comprising maybe half the pundit corps are in effect, to borrow from the late Philip Roth, koshering Trump. In the novelist’s The Plot Against America, Charles Lindbergh, renown for antisemitism as much as aviation, defeats Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 with the help of a rabbi who “koshers” him—that is, makes clear to non-Jews who do not want to vote for an antisemite that Lindbergh’s antisemitism is fine. It’s OK to vote for him. (Many thanks to Seth Cotlar for bringing this aspect of Roth’s novel to my attention.)