Eugene Robinson is an associate editor at the Washington Post, but it’s not clear whether he actually reads what’s in his own paper.
Robinson on Thursday made the very original point that President Trump is a racist, referring to a Post report from the previous day on how the administration is denying passports to some people along the southern border on suspicion they may not be U.S. citizens.
“At this point, the Trump administration has the burden of proving this is anything other than vile, unadulterated racism,” wrote Robinson.
(Mind you, on July 5, Robinson began a column stating, “Racism is a feature of the Trump administration, not a bug.” But seriously. This time Robinson really means it when he calls Trump a racist.)
The actual Post report, of which it’s not obvious Robinson read, included that “the State Department began during Barack Obama’s administration to deny passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley.” (The Post later updated its report to include that the Bush administration actually did the same thing as well.)
The Bush administration, as the Post reported as far back as 2008, found that there was “a history of birth certificate forgeries” in southern Texas “for Mexican-born children dating to the 1960s.”
Citing an administration official, the Post also reported that “the federal government won convictions against dozens of South Texas midwives from 1967 through 1997 for fraudulently registering births that they did not deliver.”
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which no longer exists, said in 2002 that “at least” 65 midwives had been convicted of this type of fraud since the 1960s and that there were “about” 15,000 fraudulent birth certificates issued to people born in Mexico.
This is all data printed in the Washington Post, and yet, strangely, none of it was included in Robinson’s column.
He also didn’t return my email request for comment Friday on whether he thought any of this information was relevant.
The Trump State Department now says that passport denials along the southern border are actually lower than they were during Obama’s second term in office, during which it peaked in 2015 at 36 percent.
Under the current State Department, 2017 saw a 28 percent rate of denial and 2018, so far, has seen a 26 percent rate of denial, according to the department’s data.
Is none of this context important?
To the average person, it matters. But Robinson, and almost all of the national media, won’t mention it.
That’s what passes for “analysis” in today’s press, so long as you call the White House racist.
