150 editorial members of the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild released a statement Tuesday denouncing an editorial in a local paper as “reprehensible” and distancing themselves from it. Here’s the entire editorial, and pertinent parts of it below. Pittsburgh Post Gazette:
If Sen. Dick Durbin wants to disagree about placing merit at the center of our immigration policies, if he wants to take an unlimited number of unemployed and unemployable people because, after all, that’s what most Poles and Irish were called in the 1900s, let him say that. And let Mr. Durbin and the president debate two concepts of American immigration policy honorably and finally find a middle ground where there is agreement and common purpose.
But, when we have a chance to reform the immigration system, and save the Dreamers, and find common ground, let us not get distracted by another cudgel to use against the president. Calling the president a racist helps no one — it is simply another way (the Russia and instability cards having been played unsuccessfully) to attempt to delegitimize a legitimately elected president.
Did the president use a crudity in a private meeting? He says he did not. No one who was there has said he did on the record. But if he did, so what? So what? America today is a sadly crass place where many of us use vulgar, corrosive language we ought not use in private and work conversations. How many of us would like to see and share a transcript of everything we have said in private conversations or at work?
Here’s what the journalists wrote, which the publisher refused to print.
Trump’s parents arrived in this country in the early part of the last century. Frederick Trump was deported from Germany because he was a draft dodger. He ran a brothel in the Yukon during the gold rush. Mary McLeod, Trump’s mother, was from an impoverished background in Scotland. She came to the United States and lived with a sister and worked as a domestic servant until she met Trump’s father at a dance.
Trump decries the “elitists.” Who is the elitist in 2017? Senator Durbin, or Donald Trump, who given his druthers would exclude precisely the same kind of people that his parents were, who came to this country seeking a better life?
The editorial reeks of racism and an elitist establishment mentality, precisely the sort of thing that this hypocritical administration professes to be antithetical to. The journalists were correct to denounce it.