The New York Times carefully sandwiched the disturbing Democratic trend of increasing mob behavior by liberals and Democrats -- culminating in the hysterical reaction to Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation -- into a story that made it about a hypocritical Trump.
In Thursday’s Times, reporter Peter Baker put the onus on the President, not the mob-instigation of his political opponents in “‘Unhinged’? No, Trump Tells Opponents, You Are.” The text box: “Trying to turn the tables on Democrats, using their words.”
The online headline underlined that Trump-centric spin: “Trump’s Contradiction: Assailing ‘Left-Wing Mob’ as Crowd Chants ‘Lock Her Up’”:
When President Trump mocked a Democratic senator at a midterm election rally the other night, the crowd responded with one of his supporters’ favorite chants from his own campaign two years ago. “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!”
The arena boomed with shouting voices and they kept going. “Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” Mr. Trump smiled and soaked it in. Then he assailed the Democrats for becoming “an angry left-wing mob.”
From the pot-and-kettle department of politics, the president is trying to turn the tables on his opponents this fall. A master of divide-and-conquer campaigning who gives critics belittling nicknames, calls his foes “evil people” and has encouraged supporters to “knock the crap” out of protesters, Mr. Trump hopes to convince the public that his opponents are the ones who are “totally unhinged.”
....The women who confronted senators in elevators with stories of sexual assault and the demonstrators who protested in the Senate chamber or outside the Capitol are at Mr. Trump’s rallies now part of a leftist cabal, a dangerous rabble.
....
Mr. Trump has often engaged in what some analysts call projection, describing his opponents in the same terms they use to describe him. While his own mental stability has been questioned, Mr. Trump regularly calls his foes “crazy,” “psycho,” “wacky” and “mentally deranged.” Just weeks after a former aide published a book about him titled “Unhinged,” he applied the same word to Democrats.
Even when Baker ran down some of the Democrats’ recent instigations, he framed them as a response to Trump, as if they had no agency of their own:
At least some Democrats seem increasingly intent on matching Mr. Trump in his pugilistic politics, adopting a fight-fire-with-fire approach. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. this year boasted that if they were in high school together, he would have “beat the hell” out of Mr. Trump for disrespecting women -- to which the president replied that if they did fight, Mr. Biden “would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”
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Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, told supporters that if they see a member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet in a restaurant or store, “you get out and you create a crowd.”
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Hillary Clinton waded into the debate this week in an interview with CNN when she rejected the notion of civility with Mr. Trump’s Republicans....Civility can return, she said, only when Democrats win control of the House or the Senate.
Baker could have added plenty more, including the attempted assassination of Republican congressmen on a baseball field, the attack on Sen. Rand Paul, and a “doxxing” (releasing personal information) of Republican Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee by a Democratic congressional staffer, Jackson Cosko, during the fraught Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. But The Times has yet to even mention Cosko, according to a nytimes.com search.
Baker was determined to make Trump the issue, not the Democrats:
Mr. Trump has hardly been a leader in the civility movement. He has described many Mexican immigrants as “rapists,” mocked a reporter’s physical disability, called lawmakers and journalists “sleazy” and “corrupt,” and derided some of his own fellow Republicans as “very weak,” “failed” and “lightweight.” The other night, he suggested that a Democratic senator is a drunk.
....
His messages at his latest rallies include inherent contradictions. Upset at the allegations made against Justice Kavanaugh, he lately has extolled due process, even as he bathes in “lock her up” chanting about opponents who have never been charged with a crime. He has talked about the presumption of innocence but says he is “99 percent” sure Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, leaked a letter accusing Justice Kavanaugh of sexual assault, basing his conclusion not on evidence but on her “body language” in denying it.
Well, Feinstein’s office would certainly be high on a list of suspects of leaking Christine Blasey Ford's letter.
