Jay Billington Trump and The Post

The first week in December the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president by a considerable margin, Donald Trump, was in my area (exactly 17.2 miles away from my home according to Mapquest) and I could have gone to see him speak, but I didn’t know about it. Unfortunately, I am heavily dependent for my news on my home-delivered Washington Post and they didn’t tell me that he was speaking at the fairgrounds in Manassas, Virginia, on the night of Wednesday, December 2.

In fact, I didn’t even know what I had missed until Friday. The Post apparently didn’t bother to cover his Manassas speech right there in a Washington suburb. A friend in another state notified me about an Associated Press article he had seen on Trump’s speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington on Thursday night. What the friend had told me about the AP article made me want to hear the full speech, which I found on YouTube. I was surprised to hear Trump refer in that speech to his rally so near to me in Manassas the night before.

During the Franklin Roosevelt era, it was The New York Times, but at least since Watergate, no one better represents America’s ruling establishment than The Washington Post, and The Post is absolutely frantic about Trump’s political success. I have summed up their Trump coverage with a poem on my web site:

Trump Tarred

If you believe The Washington Post

You’re sure that Trump has to go.

Of mud they’re slinging the most

Since they took on Tail Gunner Joe.

And why is it that Trump seems to be driving The Post and the ruling establishment berserk? One might think that it is because he is a dangerous demagogue, as indicated by his recent call to forbid all Muslims from entering the United States “until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," but that would be giving them too much credit. (Perhaps he is just a very clever demagogue and the really important part of his public call is the part we have put in quotes. Wouldn’t we all like to know what was going on at San Bernadino, the Boston Marathon, and on 9/11 for starters?) The real reason for their apoplexy is hinted at in an even more recent poem of mine:

Our Leaders’ Blueprint

What is the plan at home?

Relentless immigration.

What is the plan abroad?

Unceasing intervention.

Where is all of this leading?

To a collapsing nation.

Trump is full of a lot of tough talk about further building up our already bloated military, but at least when he’s in less conservative venues than places like Manassas and Raleigh, North Carolina, where he spoke Saturday night, he’s quick to remind people that he publicly opposed our invasion of Iraq. As it pounds away editorially on President Barack Obama for not intervening more openly and forcefully in Syria and Ukraine, The Post, on the other hand, is loath to remind us that it—and its “liberal” ally, The New York Times, and the American press across the political spectrum—was all for the aggressive Iraq misadventure, as was the touted “presidential campaign frontrunner,” Hillary Clinton. (That’s how I heard WTOP, the local news radio station, refer to her over the weekend.)

Trump is not onboard, it is clear, with either part of the ruling establishment’s blueprint.

An even deeper reason for the treatment he is receiving from The Post and the rest of the press was on display the night after the Manassas rally. This is from the AP article:

The party’s 2016 front-runner openly questioned Israel’s commitment to the Mideast peace process in his remarks to the Republican Jewish Coalition, echoing comments he made the night before in an interview with The Associated Press. He drew boos after refusing to endorse Jerusalem as the nation’s undivided capital. And he suggested to the influential group simply wanted to install a puppet in the White House.

“You’re not going to support me even though you know I’m the best thing that could happen to Israel,” Trump said. “I know why you’re not going to support me — because I don’t want your money. You want to control your own politician.”

We are reminded of the Richard Reeves quote from his book President Kennedy: Profile of Power, which we have reproduced in our article “The Kennedy Assassination and the Press”:

Jewish Democrats, particularly in New York, did not yet fully trust the son of a man who had been accused of being both anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi. Nor did John Kennedy, comfortably surrounded by Jewish staff members, trust all Jews, particularly New Yorkers. "I had the damnedest meeting in New York last night," he had said to his friend Charlie Bartlett one day in the early fall of 1960. "I went to this party. It was given by a group of people who were big money contributors and also Zionists and they said to me, 'We know that your campaign is in terrible financial shape!'...The deal they offered me was that they would finance the rest of this campaign if I would agree to let them run the Middle Eastern policy of the United States for the next four years.

We are also reminded a little bit of Senator Jay Billington Bulworth’s meeting with Hollywood donors, although contrary to the press’s reports, Trump was not nearly so rude to the gathering in Washington. In fact, as one watches the video of the full presentation the impression that one gets is that he is pandering excessively to the group. Why is he showing such an overweening concern for the interests of a foreign country, one might ask. Aren’t these all fellow Americans he’s speaking to? Shouldn’t the interests of this country come first with them? Clearly, they don’t. But as one reads the AP story, and particularly The Post’s own story, he did not pander to Israel enough to suit the audience, and, one gathers, to suit The Post, either.

“Donald Trump drew a few rare boos toward the end of his appearance at Thursday's Republican Jewish Coalition candidate forum, after refusing to say that Jerusalem should be the undivided and recognized capital of Israel,” The Post begins its online article. Never mind that the position that Trump has taken is thoroughly statesmanlike and truly the only opening position that one can take on the ticklish question of the fate of Jerusalem if he is interested in achieving any sort of lasting peace arrangement in Palestine.

“If you’re going to make a great deal you can’t go in with the attitude that we’re going to shove it down…”, Trump says, quite reasonably, but we don’t see Trump’s further elaboration in the article.

Interestingly, neither the AP story nor The Post’s own reporter’s story of Trump’s appearance before the Jewish group ever appeared in the print edition of the newspaper. Each was only available online if you knew to look for it. One would get the distinct impression that Trump’s radical departure from the usual presidential kowtow for Zionist money is something that The Post would prefer that people not know about. They did manage to tell their readers about his appearance before the Jewish group, but the news was buried deeply away on page A4 in an article that is headlined “Trump to attend CNN debate despite threatening boycott” (The title is slightly different in the online version.) Beside the article there is a photo of Trump with this caption: “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the Republican Jewish Coalition in Washington. He drew scattered jeers from the audience after declining to say that Jerusalem should be the undivided and recognized capital of Israel.”

The article concludes in this carping fashion:

After the speech, longtime conservative activist Gary Bauer said Trump lost momentum by the end.

“When it started, they were skeptical, and you could feel the room warming to him,” Bauer said.

“I think he turned a lot of people. And then he lost them because he couldn’t just say, ‘Of course, Jerusalem is the capital. We won’t negotiate on that.’ ”

It is most disingenuous of The Post not to tell us that Bauer is a bit more than a “longtime conservative activist.” The following is from Wikipedia (with one link added by me):

[Bauer] also serves on the Executive Board of Christians United for Israel, a lobby group headed by John Hagee. Gary Bauer was one of the signers of the Statement of Principles of Project for the New American Century (PNAC) on June 3, 1997. He also serves on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel.

Now there’s a fine objective commentator on a presidential candidate’s position of Israel. One can only wonder how much Zionist money he gets to say things like that.

Trump in Northern Virginia’s Former Redneck Capital

Although I have been able to find no evidence online that The Post covered Trump’s Manassas rally in any way, from the other reports I have found, one can see that this local appearance by the runaway leading Republican candidate for president was certainly newsworthy. Here is a brief synopsis of some of the reports that I did find:

WTOP:  They tell us that there were 75-100 opponents there and show a video of them protesting.  They never tell us how many supporters were there and they have no video of the speech or the supporters.

Bloomberg: They have a rather long article about his "80-minute barrage" but tell us next to nothing about what he said in those 80 minutes.  They say he drew a lot fewer people than Obama did in the campaign in 2008 there at the fairgrounds when Obama attracted 100,000.  They do say that this was indoors vs. Obama's outdoor rally.  They don't tell us how many people Trump drew, what the capacity of the indoor facility was, or how little pre-rally publicity there was.  They also have an entirely negative video of their pundit running down Trump, with no video of the actual rally.

C-Span: Here we get to see a video of the actual gathering and speech.  The indoor facility is small and appears to be filled to capacity, with everyone forced to stand.  It's pure bunkum to contrast this turnout unfavorably to the turnout for Obama in 2008.  Still, there is no estimate of the crowd size, but I don't think they could have gotten any more people into that venue.

NBC4:  Provides only sketchy coverage and a video that mainly reflects the press's negative stereotypes of Trump.

WJLA (ABC7):  Headline: "Protestors present at Trump campaign rally in Manassas," but the report seems to capture the size and enthusiasm of the crowd: “Presidential candidate and billionaire Donald Trump got a rousing, rock-star reception at a Manassas rally Wednesday night, an event that also drew dozens of angry protesters.

“Hundreds of people waited hours in line to see the GOP frontrunner in person.” (Emphasis added.  And it was raining and cold.)

WUSA9 (CBS):  A fairly straightforward account of the rally and presentation without any crowd size estimates.  

Fox5dc:  They speak of a "large crowd" and a "few dozen" protestors, but have no estimate of the size of the crowd.  The reporter in their video says there are "several thousand" supporters.  She interviews both supporters and opponents.  An opponent says something very interesting.  Prince William County is a vibrant and diverse community, he says, where 40% of the people speak a language other than English at home and "Trump doesn't belong here." I think the man unwittingly put his finger on one big source of Trump's appeal.  You certainly couldn't have spoken of Prince William as such a polyglot county 20 years ago.

The Intercept:  “A confrontation between Trump, the latest avatar of white ethnic nationalism, and the Black Lives Matter organizations seemed inevitable. But it didn’t take place Wednesday night. Several Black Lives Matter organizers trekked to the Washington, D.C., suburb of Manassas, Virginia, on a damp, cool evening, with the hope of disrupting a Trump rally there. They were stopped at the door by event organizers who refused to allow in anyone, even with a ticket, who had on T-shirts or carried signs that disparaged Trump. The activists were wearing T-shirts that simply read ‘black lives.’” 

In his presentation to the Jewish group Trump expresses great confidence that he will win both the Republican nomination and the presidency, barring some unforeseen incident. At that point, perhaps thinking of what happened to Senator Bulworth, he mentions the large Secret Service detail that has been assigned to protect him. As I reflect upon what happened to JFK, let us hope that, like Louis Farrakhan, he has his own security detail as well.

David Martin

December 8, 2015

Addendum

I have finally stumbled across The Washington Post’s article on the Manassas rally. It is deceptively entitled “Trump says he plans to visit Israel to meet with Netanyahu,” inadvertently giving away their own priorities, as opposed to the priorities of the American public. They give no indication of the size of the crowd, except to say that it was “standing-room only.” The article was not in the print edition and was very hard to find on the newspaper’s web site.

David Martin

December 28, 2015

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