Veteran NYTimes Columnist Laments the Rise of Trump’s Big Lie, Then Blames the Far Left For It
Thomas L. Friedman invited me for lunch at his office at The New York Times Washington bureau last week. It was all off the record, so I can’t tell you anything he said.
I can, though, tell you two things — what I ate and how I felt after. I ate a turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato on whole wheat bread, with a bowl of strawberries and a chocolate-vanilla milkshake for dessert that was so good I needed to take a nap after lunch.
What I felt afterward was this: For all you trolls on the Internet who say that Friedman can’t write two sentences without one of them being a cliché, here’s a news flash: He just wrote another trenchant column about the need to defend democracy around the world, starting with Ukraine and including the United States, and despite the main threat to democracy being rising far-right authoritarianism abroad and at home, he managed to make the “far left” the main bugaboo of our times. (And he also wrote a sentence with two colons in it, like the one that starts this paragraph, and somehow the New York Times’ copy desk let him get away with it.)
For a columnist who many think is an old war horse who should have long been put out to pasture, especially after his gleeful and misguided cheerleading for the 2003 invasion of Iraq (“suck on this”?), Friedman’s latest piece shows he still knows how to channel the views of a bygone time, when the elites of both parties in Washington thought they knew what was best for the country and felt it was their job to run the world, and when it was easier to attack the political left for pointing to America’s flaws than doing anything to actually fix those flaws.
I left our lunch with a full stomach but a heavy heart.
Friedman didn’t say it in so many words, but he didn’t have to. I could hear it between the lines. He’s worried that while the Ukraine crisis has revived bipartisan support for an America that defends democracy overseas, and re-established Friedman’s standing as the columnist most likely to be invited to the White House for the kind of private, off-the-record lunches that presidents have used for decades to telegraph their views to the world, he may not be able to get everyone to follow his line of thinking.
It’s clearly Friedman’s priority, above any other issue. He knows this is why he is the longest-serving columnist on the New York Times opinion page, writing two pieces as week since 1994, a year longer than Maureen Dowd. While the rest of the New York Times opinion page has been coming apart at the seams, with longstanding liberals like Nicholas Kristof leaving to chase dreams of getting elected governor of Oregon, goofballs like neo-liberal/neo-conservative Bari Weiss quitting to make more money off of amplifying grievance politics via Substack, and occasional unsigned editorials appearing that seem to reflect the publisher’s out-of-date view that the left is as much of a threat to America as the right, Friedman seems to think he is still the best person to hold it all together.
But with every passing day, every mass shooting, every racist dog-whistle, every nation-sundering Supreme Court ruling, and every bogus claim of election fraud by the hundreds of MAGA Republicans running to take control of state legislatures in order to truly steal the 2024 election, it gets harder and harder to take Friedman seriously when he tries to balance those outrages with a few incidents of speakers run off campus by hotheaded students and some past rhetoric about defunding the police by justifiably angry racial justice protestors. I really wonder if Friedman can bring elite opinion together using that old move of equating the outrages of the left with the outrages of the right when the MAGA right is so obviously a much graver threat, as the government’s own assessment found last year.
I fear that Friedman is going to break something very valuable very soon. And once he breaks it, it will be gone — and we may never be able to get it back.
I am talking about his ability to convince his elite audience that his take on the world is worth listening to. For he is right that we are starting into an abyss now, one where the peaceful, legitimate transfer of power is the keystone of American democracy. It is indeed one thing to elect Donald Trump and other pro-Trump candidates who want to restrict immigration, ban abortions, cut taxes on the rich, ignore climate change, etc. And it is indeed another thing to be facing a political movement powered by the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen and Democrats are sheer evil. It terrifies Friedman and me alike that these people are openly telling us that they, and only they, know the truth of the 2020 election and that in 2024 they will make sure to fix things their way.
I am worried because we are seeing a national columnist who is telling us publicly that even though the authoritarian right is on the rise, he won’t risk his reputation as a centrist by taking a position that puts him just a teensy bit out on the political left.
And this saddens me, because: I HAVE BEEN THERE.
One of my formative experiences in journalism was reading Friedman use his New York Times column to expound brilliantly about the conflicts and contradictions of the Middle East, dancing delicately on the sensibilities of the his readers with carefully couched criticism of Israel’s rightward drift but never fully coming out and saying what needed to be said: that the far-right settler movement in Israel was never going to be stopped unless the United States imposed tough conditions on the billions in aid we gave the country every year. Despite even admitting to me once that US aid to Israel was like the oil propping up other militaristic and nationalist regimes in other parts of the Middle East, Friedman never was willing to write the whole truth about what the US could do to stave off the rise of religious ethno-authoritarianism in Israel. So don’t tell me that it can’t happen here too.
And I say this as someone who genuinely admired the many insights in Friedman’s first book about internet-enabled globalization, The World is Flat, and even made it into a column of his about the need for a major third party in the United States (a topic that we still agree about). It is stomach-turning to watch him make such a strong case for opposing the danger of rising fascism in America and end it with a silly attack on the Democratic party’s “far-left wing,” chiding it for trying to lift domestic spending levels on long-neglected constituencies to something faintly close to a bloated military budget that no Serious Person ever mentions, and claiming sans any evidence that the “far-left … saddled Biden and every Democratic candidate with radical notions like ‘defund the police’” (a slogan that has been mentioned a thousand more times by its opponents than its supposed adherents). Not only is this blowing things ways out of proportion, it’s just dumb politics, because the Democratic left played a huge role in the 2020 defense of Biden’s election victory and will be a big part of every future effort to protect election integrity in America.
One of the cardinal rules of White House access journalism is that you don’t get invited back for another private lunch with the president if you question his version of events, so Friedman writes a column like this one, without blushing, without adding for example observations like “maybe Biden shouldn’t have assumed that Democratic leaders in Congress could deliver their whole caucus for a massive agenda that asked no one to give anything up” or “maybe he shouldn’t have prematurely declared victory over COVID last July.” Or, god forbid, “maybe Biden is should stop living in a fantasy land filled with invisible Republican moderates like his old pals in the Senate cloakroom.”
There’s no question that with columns like his latest one, Friedman is showing even after being wrong on so many topics, he is back. He is still capable of a trenchant piece that focuses our attention. But for how long?
As Friedman writes, to defeat Trumpism we need only, say, 10 percent of Republicans to abandon their party and join with a center-left Biden, which they can be convinced to do if everyone who is pro-democracy in America focuses their fire on what the far-right is now in the midst of doing with their abortion bans, book bans, and plans to raise taxes on the poor and sunset Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. But we may not be able to get even one percent of Republicans to shift if nonsense from centrists about some huge and horrible “far left” defines political reality.
So that is why I left my imaginary lunch with Friedman needing a nap.