When Donald Trump takes his swipes at the "disgusting and corrupt media" and tens of millions of Americans agree, it's not as if they don't have examples in mind.
Consider last week's implication by major news organizations that the president described all illegal immigrants as "animals" during a White House roundtable with California officials. That would indeed be a wretched thing for him to say - had he said it.
Bret StephensHe did not. The Associated Press admitted as much when it deleted a tweet about the remark, noting "it wasn't made clear that he was speaking after a comment about gang members." Specifically, he was speaking after a comment about members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang, infamous for its ultraviolent methods and quasi-satanic rituals. To call MS-13 "animals" is wrong only because it is unfair to animals.
That didn't keep the president's partisan critics from going berserk. "IF you are a decent person and were in a meeting where @realDonaldTrump called immigrants 'animals,' you will denounce him NOW," demanded Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. "Otherwise, what makes you any different?" Maybe one answer is that they would have taken the trouble to hear what Trump said in context.
Then there was Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.: "When all of our great-great-grandparents came to America they weren't 'animals,' and these people aren't either," he wrote on Twitter. Let's assume the Schumer family tree does not include ancestors who kidnapped, drugged, raped and murdered teenage girls.
All this is catnip to the president's apologists, who can now point to a genuine instance of fake news - not merely factually mistaken, but willfully misleading - in order to dismiss the great bulk of negative reportage that isn't fake.
It's also a monumental disservice to anyone who wants to repudiate the administration's squalid thinking on immigration. The Trumpian case against supporters of a liberal immigration policy is that we are indifferent to law, blasé about crime and blind to the social costs illegal immigrants impose on American communities. How better to feed that case than to misrepresent, and then take umbrage at, the president's tough talk on a psychotic Latin American gang?
The blunt truth is that immigrants have brought crime to our shores for a very long time: Decades before MS-13, there were the Dead Rabbits (Irish), Flying Dragons (Chinese), Undzer Shtik (Jewish) and, of course, the Cosa Nostra.
The intelligent answer to Trump can't be that we have nothing to fear when it comes to immigrants, or that every attempt to enforce immigration laws or discuss immigration ills is just a thinly veiled form of xenophobia. The right answer is that, on net and over time, we have far more to gain from immigrants than we have to lose from them.
Conservatives used to get the law of unintended consequences. They understood the economic necessity of demographic growth through immigration, especially now that the number of U.S. births is at a 30-year low. They knew that immigrants, legal or illegal, do not drive up rates of violent crime. And they realized it was vital to promote security and prosperity in Latin America, not least through warm relations and free-trade agreements.
I know it's infuriating that the president habitually conflates illegal immigrants with violent criminals, and that he buries the signal of his bigotries in the noise of his syntax.
We have a president adept at goading his opponents into unwittingly doing his bidding. They did so again this week. Those who despise him for his deceits should endeavor to give no impression of being deceitful in turn.
The New York Times