It’s extremely insulting to the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump for The New York Times to publish an opinion piece that compares the president to Adolf Hitler.
Bill Maher brushes off liberal critics ahead of Trump meeting
Comedian Bill Maher is planning a White House meeting with Donald Trump, facilitated by Kid Rock, despite years of political criticism.
Straight Arrow News
Comedian Bill Maher devoted time on his HBO show April 11 to talk about his recent dinner with President Donald Trump at the White House. Maher’s “book report” on what happened during his meeting with Trump went viral.
Maher is a devoted liberal who has had many disagreements with the president. Yet, he was willing to at least talk with Trump in this setting. And it turns out he was pleasantly surprised.
The outrage from the left over Maher’s “betrayal” of progressive values was swift and unhinged.
The worst response I’ve seen appeared April 21 in The New York Times. In a so-called satirical essay, Larry David of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Seinfeld” fame mocked Maher’s dinner with Trump by writing about his own fictional dinner with Adolf Hitler.
Democrats – and the Hollywood elite – for years have reveled in comparing Trump to Hitler, so the concept is nothing new. But the lengths to which David went in doing so – and the fact that The Times gave him a platform – are a new low.
It also exposes a clear double standard in the news media that places conservatives at a disadvantage.
NYT tries to gaslight Americans about comparing Trump to Hitler
To explain the odd decision to publish David’s screed, Patrick Healy, deputy opinion editor, wrote an accompanying piece in which he defended the paper’s “high bar for satire.”
“Larry’s piece is not equating Trump with Hitler,” Healy wrote. “It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that. Sometimes the best way to make an opinion argument isn’t in a traditional essay. Americans are inundated with news; it can sometimes take a satirical provocation to break through, even at the risk of causing offense.”
Talk about gaslighting at its worst.
David didn’t just mock Maher’s decision to have dinner with Trump. The point of his piece is that Trump is so awful that it’s as morally repugnant to meet with our nation’s president as it would have been to dine with Hitler in Nazi Germany.
It’s insulting for The Times to try to paint the essay as anything but one that equates Trump with Hitler.
David makes clear his message − that talking to Trump is like talking to Hitler − at the beginning of his essay: “Imagine my surprise when in the spring of 1939 a letter arrived at my house inviting me to dinner at the Old Chancellery with the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler. I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship. No one I knew encouraged me to go. ‘He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.’ But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side ‒ even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.”
If Trump is Hitler, what does that make the 77 million Americans who voted for him?
When I read David’s piece, the first thing I thought about was the reaction to a very different opinion article published in 2020.
At the time, James Bennet was the head of The Times’ opinion team when the paper ran an op-ed from U.S. Sen Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas. Cotton penned a piece advocating for sending in the military to help cities deal with violent riots in the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police.
It was a valid piece to run from a sitting senator, especially one who appeared to have the ear of the president. Yet, Bennet suffered immediate backlash and persecution from his coworkers, who claimed the op-ed somehow made them unsafe. Bennet eventually was forced to resign.
I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that The Times’ staff is not up in arms over an opinion comparing Trump to Hitler because most of the social justice warriors in the newsroom agree with David’s conclusion. No doubt, the current opinion editors will remain in their jobs.
Imagine for a minute whether such “satire” would be tolerated if the president in question were Barack Obama or Joe Biden instead of Trump. Imagine if a viewpoint comparing a Democratic president to Joseph Stalin came from a conservative instead of a Hollywood progressive.
This double standard is bad enough on its own merits. It’s also extremely insulting to the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump. If the president is “Hitler,” are all these voters “Nazis”?
Certainly not. Yet, that’s the implication that The Times’ opinion editors have promoted.
It’s no mystery why so many people don’t trust the legacy news media. The New York Times just gave them another reason why they shouldn’t.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at [email protected] or on X: @Ingrid_Jacques
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