The New York Times‘ Peter Baker, who earned widespread recognition for his reporting on “Russia collusion,” wrote a “news analysis” article on Sunday evening titled: “More Than Ever, Trump Casts Himself as the Defender of White America.”
Baker waved aside Trump’s appeals to black voters, and a policy record that includes criminal justice reform, Opportunity Zones, funding for historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and record-low black unemployment and poverty.
“Not in generations has a sitting president so overtly declared himself the candidate of white America,” Baker wrote. He declined to provide an “overt” example, however, settling instead for a Trump retweet of a criticism of Critical Race Theory.
Baker continued: “The message appears designed to galvanize supporters who have cheered what they see as a defiant stand against political correctness since the days when he kicked off his last presidential campaign in 2015 by denouncing, without evidence, Mexicans crossing the border as ‘rapists.'” (Baker omitted Trump’s caveat: “Some, I assume, are good people.”)
As for evidence of Trump’s “overt” appeal to “white America” in 2020, Baker offered speculations about covert messaging:
While he initially voiced concern over the killing of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis this spring, which touched off nationwide protests, he has focused since then almost entirely on defending the police and condemning demonstrations during which there have been outbreaks of looting and violence.
He has described American cities as hotbeds of chaos, played to “suburban housewives” he casts as fearful of low-income people moving into their neighborhoods, sought to block a move — backed by the Pentagon and Republican lawmakers — to rename Army bases named for Confederate generals, criticized NASCAR for banning the Confederate flag, called Black Lives Matters a “symbol of hate” and vowed to strip funding from cities that do not take what he deems tough enough action against protesters.
Baker then concluded, without evidence, that Trump is “reaching out to a subset of white voters who think the news media and political elites see Trump supporters as inherently racist,” thereby casting Trump supporters as — well, inherently racist.
Moreover, Baker quoted an NAACP official who said of Trump’s rhetoric: “It’s all dangerous, and it’s all potentially violent.”
Read Baker’s full article here.
In 2018, the New York Times staff shared the Pulitzer Prize for “deeply sourced, relentlessly reported coverage in the public interest that dramatically furthered the nation’s understanding of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign.”
Subsequent investigations found there was no such collusion at all.
In August 2019, the Times‘ executive editor, Dean Baquet, informed staff that the paper would be shifting focus from Russia to racism.
One result was the “1619 Project,” an effort to rewrite American history with slavery, not democracy, as the core principle.
The founding essay of that project also won a Pulitzer Prize, despite having had to issue corrections after falsely claiming that the preservation of slavery was a major motivation for the American Revolution.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His new book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.