http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/conrad-black-in-defence-of-donald-trumpThe principal news about Donald Trump’s candidacy for the U.S. Republican presidential nomination is not the sometimes controversial things that he says, but the increasingly hysterical responses to him from the traditionally respectable political quarters that he discomforts. In this shrill political atmosphere, he is not the chief offender to civil standards of political discourse. Roger Cohen wrote in The New York Times last week, and he was reprinted in the National Post on Wednesday, that Trump was reminiscent of Hitler, that there were serious comparisons between Weimar Germany (1919-1933) and the contemporary United States, and that American politics is being Europeanized. By this, Cohen meant succumbing to the charms of France’s Front National, fascism, and, quite explicitly, Nazism. Unfortunately, this theme was taken up in a National Post editorial and letters on Thursday, Dec.17. The editorial represented Donald Trump as “manifestly a mean-spirited, egomaniacal buffoon unfit to govern.” In The Globe and Mail the same day, Trump was lampooned by the urbane John Doyle as a practitioner of Dr. Joseph Goebbels’ Big Lie.
I wrote about the Trump candidacy in my column in the National Review Online (New York) last week and it was widely reposted, including by Donald himself. He is not my preferred candidate but I denounced the Cohen piece, as well as the comparison of Trump with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy by Max Boot, a distinguished guerrilla war and Middle East expert. Now that the Cohen comments have migrated to Canada, I say that that column, and reflections like it, including these local echoes, are ignorant, false, and grossly misleading. There is no comparison to be drawn between any of these individuals, except in contrasts, and the outrages committed by this sort of Trump-accuser are far more egregious than even Donald’s clumsiest sallies.
