George Wallace – Memphis Flyer

For reasons he cannot fathom, President Donald Trump has been asked recently about anti-Semitism, not just the rising number of incidents both here and abroad but also — as he oddly interpreted a question at his latest news conference — his own attitudes. As for the latter, he is, by his own testimony and that of others, no anti-Semite. If he were, he’d have to hate one of his own daughters, her husband, and their children, who are all observant Jews. So when he declares, “I am the least anti-Semitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life,” his crude hyperbole aside, I believe him.

Richard Cohen

But either out of calculation or instinct, Trump operates as an anti-Semite of old in the way he describes the news media. Listen for the anti-Semitic tropes: Journalists are urban — or as the communists used to say, cosmopolitan. They live in a bubble, a kind of ghetto. They are rootless — another communist opprobrium — in the sense that few journalists work where they were born and are not responsible to their original community. They are politically and culturally liberal and secular, meaning they are free of conventional morality or religion. They can lie. They can sin. They can, as a result, be attacked with impunity.

Anti-Semitism is largely a spent force in America. We live in an era of Seinfeld and Streisand and Stewart. A Jew ran for vice president (Joe Lieberman), and one recently ran for president (Bernie Sanders), and both of last year’s presidential nominees have a child who was married by a rabbi. This is not your grandfather’s America. That one was virulently anti-Semitic. Issur Danielovitch became Kirk Douglas, Charles Lindbergh cuddled with Hitler, Jews fleeing the Holocaust were told to go somewhere else, and my mother had to go from Pearl Rosenberg to Pat Tyson to find work as a bookkeeper. All that is gone.

What remains, though, is the continuing need for some force that could serve as a scapegoat. Trump, a man of considerable ability in such matters, has found it in the media. As it always was with anti-Semitism, portions of the culture were already receptive. Many people needed to find someone to blame for a society that was becoming less comforting, less conventional, that was depressing their standard of living, closing their factories, favoring foreign labor — doing all the things that Jews once supposedly did. Here is Trump at his news conference last week:

“Unfortunately, much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles, in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests and for those profiting off a very, very obviously broken system. The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice. We have to talk about it, to find out what’s going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.”

This is a neo-Hitlerian statement — only the word “Jews” is missing. Not missing is the alien, secular big city, the unnamed “special interests,” the loaded word “profiting,” and, of course, the utter mystery of it all. Why are these people doing such things? Why do they lie? Why do they want to hurt “the American people”? Why? It’s because they are not-like-us. They are evil.

You may argue that this is nothing new. I remember Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s corrupt vice president, ranting against the liberal press. At one Agnew event I covered, his denunciation of the media brought Republican women out of their chairs, fists in the air, shouting their agreement and serenely unaware that Agnew’s words were probably written by future New York Times columnist William Safire.

George Wallace, both a racist and self-pronounced champion of the working man, castigated the press for its unaccountable hostility to Jim Crow, naming “the Time magazine,” “the Newsweek,” and so on. Still, even an Agnew or a Wallace would have shied away from Trump’s expansive conspiracy theory.

Trump has set himself an agenda. He must rid America of the evil that he describes and that is visible only to him and his followers. He must, in other words, rein in the news media, limit their scope and influence — a task that will become more and more urgent as he fails in his presidency. The fault for that, after all, cannot be his. He will go from florid-faced fool to brooding menace. It is an old pattern. Only the scapegoat is new.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

It isn’t easy to put George Wallace, the Neshoba County Fair, and “why we are in Iraq” in the same column space, but here goes.

I literally could not believe my eyes last week when I read in a column by Wall Street Journal deputy editor Daniel Henninger that George Wallace was “shot dead” while running for president in 1972.

As everyone apparently doesn’t know, the former governor of Alabama was shot and wounded in 1972 but lived until 1998. The gunshot paralyzed Wallace, and images of him in a wheelchair are icons of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s when, to put it mildly, he remained politically active and, in his later years, often apologized for his racist past.

It is a cardinal sin of journalism to point at someone else’s errors. I have made my own share and will doubtless make another one very soon as cosmic punishment for writing this. But Henninger’s column, which is unfortunately headlined “Wonder Land,” seems to me to explain, in a way, something about The Wall Street Journal editorial page and even why we are in Iraq.

The headline on the column is “1968: The Long Goodbye.” The thrust of it is familiar to regular readers of the Journal such as me: Many of America’s problems can be traced back to the permissiveness of the 1960s. Along with denunciations of the Clintons and Mississippi tort lawyers, this is one of the touchstones of the Journal‘s editorial page.

The year 1968, when I was 19 years old and in college, was particularly traumatic: President Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek reelection; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; the violence outside the Democratic Party national convention in Chicago, to name a few.

Wallace got roughly 13 percent of the vote as a third-party candidate for president in 1968. Richard Nixon won. Wallace was indeed shot but not shot dead four years later when his political appeal was perhaps even stronger.

The error was corrected in the online version of the Journal on Friday and in the print newspaper on Saturday. How it got in the column in the first place is as baffling as why. You would think that one of the greatest newspapers in the world would have copy editors for even the best opinion writers. It’s hard to think of an innocent explanation for “shot dead.” Maybe the copy desk did it. It isn’t very likely that Henninger meant to say “not shot dead” or “almost shot dead” or simply “shot” but wrote it as “shot dead.” I guess if you believe the Sixties and the hippies ruined America, it makes a better story if George Wallace was not just shot but “shot dead” even if it is tantamount to saying the civil rights movement was never the same after King was “wounded” in Memphis in 1968.

It was my second “say what?” reaction to a national columnist in two weeks. David Brooks of The New York Times wrote that Ronald Reagan was not appealing to Southern racists to bolster the Republican Party when he defended “states’ rights” at the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980.

Three civil rights workers were killed in Neshoba County in 1964. I covered the annual fair for UPI in 1980 and got a first-hand look at Cecil Price, the deputy who turned the young men over to their killers. Another mainstay of the event was racist former Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, who played and sang “Are You From Dixie?” Reagan knew perfectly well what he was doing.

So here’s my theory. Ideologues, left or right, sometimes blind themselves to facts that don’t fit their view of the world or make up new ones that fit it better. Here comes the great leap — you might say this is what the Bush administration and its mouthpiece, the Journal’s editorial page, did on the war in Iraq.

That’s enough. Like I said, my own howler of an error is probably right around the next corner. It won’t do any good to say I have been a faithful reader of The Wall Street Journal for 30 years, always praise it extravagantly when I talk to would-be journalists, and admire its disdain for on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand commentary. My goose is cooked.