Of the roughly ten pages of non-advertising copy in the main section of today's paper, approximately four are devoted to the presidential prospects of a certain NYC condo promoter.
That includes for the umpteenth time the main editorial, which today informs us that Mr. Trump is "destroying the GOP." Surely I'm not the only aging lefty scratching my head over why that's supposed to be a bad thing!
A lot of the fear-mongering seems to be based on a misreading of Trump's supposed base, the poorly educated white working class. These are the folks left behind by the wholesale embrace of so-called free trade deals by the political establishment over the past thirty years or so. In an opinion piece by Peter Klein, we are treated to this;
Today, free trade deals have encouraged the natural economic flow of goods, from places that can make them most efficiently to places that can afford them. This allows countries such as the United States to focus on higher-wage skilled jobs that require education. But where does that leave those Americans who never got that education? No wonder Donald Trump loudly proclaimed, "I love the poorly educated!"
The first two sentences are a reflexive rehash of the same old baloney Mulroney used to peddle when he was promising Canadians "jobs, jobs, jobs" if only we voted for NAFTA. Yup, the brown folks south of the Rio Grande were gonna take all the shit jobs and leave the smart white folks in the north all the computer engineering and rocket scientist jobs! That turned out pretty much the same for Ohio as it did for Ontario. Lots more jobs went south than were created for the new generation of highly educated workers, and an entire generation of blue-collar workers, and not just white ones, were hung out to dry, permanently.
Notice how that "natural economic flow of goods" turd is incongruously dropped in the middle of the apple pie here, in the hope that you won't notice. Shipping US salmon to China for processing and then shipping it back to America for sale is not a "natural" flow of goods, but that's the kind of foolishness that flows from trade deals.
As for that explosion in high tech jobs, there are more foreign high-tech workers entering the US on B-1 temporary visas than ever before. Meanwhile, there's an employment crisis among American millennial university graduates. That's a group absolutely primed to fall for Trump's anti-trade-agreement and anti-foreign-worker rhetoric, which tends to be subsumed in mainstream denunciations as "racist."
The "Trump=racist" meme is one of the more popular weapons in the anti-Trump toolkit, but even within the pages of the Globe, it trips over its internal contradictions. Right there on A10 Eric Andrew-Gee has two feet worth of column inches puzzling over the fact that Trump the Hispanic basher is running neck and neck with both of the Hispanic candidates among the Hispanic voters in their home state of Florida!
And how ironic that the only black candidate in the race would throw his support behind the racist Trump!
But here's what bugs me most about our national newspaper of record devoting almost half of their main news section to Donald Trump; there's an awful lot of other stories that have been left out to make room for him.
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