Globe and Mail Trump editorial nothing but ignorant rubbish

by Conrad Black

Ashen and complacent though the Globe and Mail often is, it is a valuable and sometimes distinguished national institution. In these times when the public has, with good reason, lost confidence in the professional integrity of the media, a traditionally credible media outlet is more valuable than ever. In my many decades as a reader of the Globe and Mail (I was also a starting columnist in ROB magazine, but was fired on Christmas Eve, 1997, for having the temerity to be a co-founder of the National Post), and although it has often not dealt gently with me, I have often read pieces that justified its self-nomination as Canada’s national newspaper.

I think in particular of Aug. 10, 1974, the day after the resignation of President Richard Nixon, when Bruce West (a Globe and Mail writer for 40 years), wrote of his admiration for Mr. Nixon as being like a tirelessly courageous prizefighter who fought as long as humanly possible against unjust opposition. He made the points that there was no proof that Mr. Nixon had committed any crimes (there still isn’t), and that history would record that he had extracted the United States from Vietnam while preserving a non-Communist government in Saigon, had normalized relations with China, concluded the greatest arms control agreement in history, reduced the crime rate, initiated a Middle East peace process, and ended conscription and racial segregation and the rioting and assassinations of the preceding era. Despite a strenuous search, I found no other comment anywhere as perceptive and fair-minded.

On Nov. 20, the Globe and Mail published an editorial about Donald Trump which stated that he ”has no use for the rules and conventions of a constitutional democracy,” was an “authoritarian” who “mimicked the harangues of at least one well-known totalitarian monster.” It accused him of uttering a “dehumanizing invocation of a domestic infestation of moral and destructive vermin” which it called ”an echo of how Hitler’s Nazi Germany vilified its politically fabricated enemies, including Jews and Communists.” The animosity of the Communists was hardly fabricated-they fully reciprocated the physical and propagandistic assaults of the Nazis and the allegations of both groups against each other were justified. Donald Trump is a well-known pro-Israeli philo-Semite and almost half his family is Jewish.

The Globe and Mail editorial also asserted that Trump has pledged to “silence his future critics,” and that his chief objection to the more than eight million people who have entered the United States illegally since he retired as president, (described as “undocumented immigrants”), is racist, which are outright and defamatory falsehoods. It also asserts that he is pledged to purge all three million federal government employees, “of anyone who doesn’t support him and replace them with proven loyalists,” and to “expropriate the endowments of private universities.”

He pledged to purge those that had participated in illegal prosecutions of Trump and other Republicans and to tax the income of university endowments if the universities did not meet acceptable standards of academic rigour and racial and ideological toleration. Trump is, in sum, an enemy of “preserving America’s freedoms.” With these views, it is little wonder that the Globe and Mail’s editors found it difficult to explain or understand why Trump has apparently unshakable control of the Republican Party and is now leading polls against all Democrats in next year’s presidential election.

Foreigners often look to Canada as a likely source of perceptive and informed comment on the vast and complex political life of the United States and the ever-mobile currents of American public opinion. Our media is also expected to present Canadians as accurate and insightful a picture of American political events as possible. They have almost entirely failed in that obligation. This column will not assess the comparative merits and shortcomings of Donald Trump, only the lamentable biases of the editorial comment cited.

Trump is a phenomenon outside American political experience: the only person ever elected president who never sought or held a public office elected or unelected, or a high military command. He changed party affiliation seven times in the 13 years prior to his election and is the only person to parlay personal celebrity into election as president.

Once in control of the Republican party, he wrenched it out of the hands of the country club post-Reagan Republicans, who were in policy terms practically indistinguishable from the Democrats, his economic policies attracted millions of minority and lower income voters and was the only prominent American politician in 2015 and 2016 who saw clearly the extent of public discontent with what was widely perceived to be the promotion of the interests of the young and educated middle-class and the financial and entertainment elites at the expense of the lower middle and working classes. Their inflation-adjusted income had been stagnant since the start of the new millennium. There was no mention in the Globe editorial that Trump as president had virtually ended unemployment, oil imports, illegal immigration, and reduced taxes and avoided inflation.

The Nov. 20 editorial gave no hint that the Democrats had politicized the FBI and the principal intelligence agencies, that the National and Central Intelligence directors had misled, while under oath, congressional committees and with the FBI director had been complicit in the publication as authentic intelligence, of a pastiche of lies that had been collected on behalf of the Hillary Clinton election campaign about Trump that they knew to be spurious. There was no mention of the 17 separate activities that the inspector general of the justice department considered to be potential illegalities committed against Trump, including the use of false affidavits to justify tapping the telephones of the president-elect, (a matter which largely caused former FBI director James Comey to claim 245 times under oath a failure to recall recent events).

There was no mention of the immense fraud of the Trump-Russian collusion fable, nor that the first attempt to impeach President Trump was bred on an unexceptionable telephone request of the president of Ukraine about the Biden family’s commercial activities in Ukraine, which are now known to have been a long-standing influence-peddling operation which may have involved serious illegalities, but was certainly unseemly. And of course, there was no mention of the tens of millions of harvested ballots in the 2020 election, in which a switch of 50,000 votes would have changed the outcome, or of the refusal of the courts to hear any of the 19 lawsuits against the constitutionality of the voting and vote-counting changes passed improperly under cover of the pandemic, nor of the non-prosecution of Hillary Clinton for destroying 33,000 emails after her private server was subpoenaed.

There was no mention at all by the Globe and Mail editors on Nov. 20 of the four criminal indictments against Trump which his supporters and many eminent legal scholars who are not his supporters, (such as Professors Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley), consider to be outrageous harassment by a politically corrupted Justice Department. The next presidential election, if Trump is a candidate, will in large measure be a choice between those who prefer Trump to a heinous perversion of the justice system, and those so averse to Trump, they will support or overlook such a deformation of the justice system to be rid of him.

Unless Canada has completely fumbled away its status as a serious country, any aspirant to be its national newspaper will have to do a good deal better than this adulterated rubbish.

First published in the National Post.