August 5, 2019 --

In his July 24 Wall Street Journal column, Holmes W. Jenkins, Jr., took the media to task for rushing to call the president a "racist,: Jenkins wrote that "reporters should report facts and do interviews and leave the moralizing to the people they quote."

He went to say, "It is simply an assertion by Mr. Trump's critics that he had racist intent. It can never be more than that unless Mr. Trump decides to declare himself racist." (The critics were in full force, July 28, to repeat the "racist" accusation for the President's call on Rep. Elijah Cummings to deal with the problems of his Baltimore district before criticizing conditions along our southern border.

Mr. Jenkins also pointed out that President Trump's statement on the 2017 protest in Charlottesville, against a statue of Robert E. Lee "expressly exclud[ed] neo-Nazis and white nationalists from the category 'very fine people' [but] was translated by the media into 'Trump calls neo-Nazis and white nationalists very fine people.'" Jenkins added: "And anyone who insisted on Mr. Trump's actual words was accused of abetting racism." The columnist continued, tellingly, "Mr. Trump has shown that he does not need code when he wishes to vilify. Overwhelmingly his targets have been media and related elites who for the most part look nothing like the four congresswomen of color [or like Rep. Cummings]."