Columnists Dana Milbank and Donald Lambro, to cite just two examples, owe Trump and their own readers an apology for the distortions in their columns.
By now, it should be getting pretty tiresome — liberals blaming Republicans generally, and President Donald Trump, in particular — for racism or anti-Semitism. Twisting of facts and history are now the stock in trade for liberals, who distort both recent and the distant past to advance their agenda.
It is not surprising that a left-wing columnist such as Dana Milbank of the Washington Post distorts the past to trash Trump; sadly, a supposed conservative columnist, Donald Lambro of the Washington Times, does the same thing.
Milbank used his syndicated column recently to cite a former Democrat governor of Illiniois, Rod Blagojevich, now imprisoned at a federal correctional institution in Colorado, to besmirch Trump, and while he is at it, the entire Republican Party. Blagovjevich was convicted for his effort, as governor, to sell who he’d appoint to a vacant U.S. Senate seat for a campaign contribution.
Blagovjevich, clearly embittered at the Democratic Party, which turned on him a few years ago, recently wrote from his prison cell, “Today’s Democrats would have impeached [Abraham] Lincoln for obstruction of Congress and abuse of power when he unilaterally issued his Emancipation Proclamation.”
Milbank then quoted Blagovjevich saying that “the Democrats of that day opposed it [emancipation of the slaves].” To this, Milbank retorted, “Thus does Blago’s time machine skip 150 years of history in which the parties switched places on race.”
In effect, Milbank is insinuating that today’s Republican Party has replaced the Democratic Party as the pro-slavery party, its past support for legal segregation, or at the very least, white supremacy. Clearly, the Democratic Party was the home for most segregationists in the years after the Civil War, well into the 1960s. The mantra is that all of those ardent Southern segregationists in Congress simply switched to the Republican Party, along with most of the white voters of the South.
This is non-historical. The truth is that, out of 40 or so clearly identified segregationists in Congress, exactly two switched parties, one in the House and one in the Senate. The lone prominent segregationist to flip to the Republican Party was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Most of the noted segregationists remained Democrats until their deaths, including George Wallace of Alabama; Lester Maddox of Georgia; and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia.
In fact, Al Gore’s father — Senator Albert Gore, Sr., of Tennessee — voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as did Bill Clinton’s mentor in Arkansas, William Fulbright. For that matter, a significantly larger percentage of Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than did Democrats.
This does not mean that any Democrat today, in or out of public office, should be held responsible for what happened over a half-century ago, or even longer, as was done by Dinesh D’Souza, in one of his popular movies. D’Souza rightly exploded the “segregationist Democrats became racist Republicans” myth that Milbank persists in perpetuating, but he created a few of his own, such as the sainthood status he placed on the Republican Party from the time of its inception, and casting the Democratic Party as uniformly evil throughout its long history. For example, it is despicable how D’Souza essentially implied that Democrat Andrew Jackson raped a slave, when there is not a shred of historical evidence for such a charge. Jackson might be castigated for many things, but lack of fidelity to his wife, Rachel, is not one of them.
In Lambro’s syndicated column, he describes a rising tide of anti-Semitic violence in the United States — “a machete wielding” attack on American Jews in New York City; the shooting of four Jews in Jersey City at a kosher grocery; and another attack in a San Diego synagogue.
Somehow, this anti-Trump “conservative” columnist uses all of these despicable acts to besmirch President Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, for not stopping it. But Trump has condemned anti-Semitism as a “scourge,” which must be ended, and has a Jewish daughter and son-in-law. It was Trump who moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. There is no credible evidence that Trump harbors any anti-Jewish feelings at all.
Despite all of that, Lambro cites the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, as an example of Trump not caring about the hatred of Jews. Lambro says that “anti-Semitism was on full display” at the rally, then asserts that “when Trump was asked what he thought of the rally, he replied there were ‘some very fine people on both sides.’”
What is on “full display” in Lambro’s column is that he has allowed his hatred of Trump to lead him to write a gross distortion of what Trump actually said. There is certainly nothing wrong in disagreeing with this or that said by Trump — conservatives have had legitimate complaints about some of his statements, to be sure — but an honest reporting of what Trump said after Charlottesville should be demanded of Lambro and the others who insist on repeating a falsehood.
What Lambro wrote was not a truthful rendition of the events. Trump actually said, “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than the neo-Nazis and white supremacists.”
So, there you have it. Clearly, in contradiction to Lambro’s false reporting, Trump did not say that neo-Nazis and white supremacists were “fine people.” On the other side, he said that it also included “some fine people, but you also had troublemakers and you see them come with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats.”
Either Donald Lambro has not read Trump’s actual remarks, and he is just repeating what he has read in the liberal mainstream media, or he has read Trump’s actual remarks, and has chosen to convey a false impression to his readers as to what Trump said. One can only speculate as to Lambro’s motivation in either case.
These distortions by Lambro and Milbank are what pass for commentary today, far too often. No one should be unfairly tarred as a racist or an anti-Semite, and these two commentators owe their readers an apology and a retraction.
Photo: Sean824/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Steve Byas is a university instructor in history and government, and the author of History’s Greatest Libels, a book in which he challenges many of the falsehoods perpetrated against many historical figures, including Thomas Jefferson, Joseph McCarthy, and Christopher Columbus. He may be contacted at [email protected]
