Liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow has instituted a policy of not addressing Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump by name in any of his pieces.
Blow acknowledged the rule in his latest column on Thursday, which was all about Trump.
“I don’t even use that man’s name in my columns anymore,” Blow explained. “That avoidance can drive some readers crazy, but he drives me crazy, so there, we’re even.”
Blow wrote that Trump’s perpetual standing at the top of the GOP field in national and state-level polls, despite his inflammatory rhetoric on Muslims, is due to the news media that initially treated him as a comical side show.
“The media exploited the man for ratings — they saw an entertaining jester prone to outlandishness who supplied airtime and column inches,” wrote Blow, even as Trump supplied material for his own column, “and he exploited the media to fill his bottomless pit of emotional need and to stroke his immense ego.”
“Everyone was fully aware of the incestuous relationship,” he continued. “It was all about money, money from ratings and name recognition.”
Blow has been intensely critical of Trump in the past. In 2011, he wrote about a time that he supposedly met Trump.
“I first met Donald Trump a couple of months ago at a cocktail party,” he wrote at the time. “Someone introduced us, and he immediately started in on a speech about how beloved he was among blacks. He said that everywhere he went, blacks were telling him to run for president and that some hip-hop stars had told him that he was the most popular white man among black people. … I was stunned — a smirk frozen on my face. Why this speech? Why me?”
Blow is the latest media figure to set up a policy against Trump. This week, Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington announced that her left-leaning website would no longer treat its Trump coverage as “entertainment” given that his campaign has become “ugly and dangerous.” And Ben Smith, editor of BuzzFeed, informed his staff in a memo that it’s appropriate to label Trump a “mendacious racist.”
The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment from the Washington Examiner media desk.
