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rfmcdonaldTorontoist's Christopher Bird fisks a Conrad Black column written in defense of Trump. Yes, yes, I know, why pay attention to the opinions of a convicted felon. Bird's fisking is a delight.
Because of Conrad Black’s historical ties to Postmedia, and because there are still Canadians out there who respect Black as some sort of intellectual paragon—despite, you know, the crimes and all—he still occasionally writes columns for the National Post. He uses this space to remind us that he’s an Important Historian in addition to being a felon (and Black’s historical writing is fine, so long as you don’t mind there being certain… issues… with his discussion of Indigenous peoples). We are all expected to pay homage to his bloviating about modern politics, receive his wisdom, and take his arguments seriously.
There is a central problem with this thesis statement, which is that Black’s personal biases taint his work. Or, to put it another way, Black has a nigh-terminal case of Old-White-Man-Forgives-Other-White-Men-Their-Foibles Disease; this was particularly evident in his infamous televised interview with Rob Ford on ZoomerTV. It’s also prominent in Black’s columns about the American election, of which his latest is a sterling example—Conrad Black is forgiving of Donald Trump (and there is so much to forgive), and thus needs to explain to us all that, no, the presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton was in fact “even” instead of what actually happened, which is that Trump melted down in front of a massive national and international audience and acted like an incontinent toddler. But never fear: when a conservative contrarian is needed to tell the public what actually happened, Conrad Black is always at the ready!
There is so much to unpack here, but let’s try to go through the lowlights:
Trump, though given to tangents and grating egocentricities, was sensible and his views were not immoderate.
During the debate Trump claimed that the Federal Reserve was abandoning its nonpartisan duty in order to assist the Democrats and Barack Obama. He repeatedly described the United States as a “third world country” and particularly—and nonsensically—complained about American airports in this regard. His justification for being sued in the 1970s for discriminating against Black people was to point out that he had settled the lawsuits and that lots of people were being sued for the same thing. (Which is not really a great defense because there was a lot of discrimination against Black people then.) And this is before you consider all of the insane things Hillary Clinton pointed out that Donald Trump has said during the campaign where he simply lied and pretended he had never said them.
