Trump, "The New York Times," Patrick Henry, and Some Bad, Bad History

When I find myself thinking "we're toast," this is the kind of thing I mean.

Invoking the U.S. founders is almost always lame, but the wrongheadedness of this instance by Peter Baker, at the top of the front page of today’s New York Times, really takes the cake. The newsflashy subhead is merely banal—“Founders Saw Peril of Unchecked Power” (hm, yes, so true )—but the lead reflects total ignorance of the most basic elements of the founders’ thinking.

And did I mention it’s at the top of the front page?

Quoting Patrick Henry out of context regarding the dangerous potential for U.S. presidents to become tyrants, Baker gives Henry the epithet “revolutionary hero,” no doubt thinking of the famous “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech of 1775, and makes him a representative of “the founders” in general. But the quote here is from a speech in 1788—well-documented, unlike the earlier one—in which Henry passionately urged Virginians not to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

He saw it as a thoroughly tyrannical document. The potential of the president to become a monarch was only one example. Henry didn’t like the House, the Senate, the judiciary, or the whole idea of forming a strong national government in the first place: he’d boycotted the Constitutional Convention. If the Constitution were to become law, he was now arguing, liberty in America would become a thing of the past.

In the quoted speech, Patrick Henry was going up against the founders—not reflecting their thinking.

Anyone with a search engine can find out in two seconds that Patrick Henry was the leading Antifederalist. In the case of this Times article, it’s clear that the search was only for a relevant quote on the presidency from a “founder,” but having found such a quote, couldn’t you take just a moment to skim the source and check its purport? To find out that the tyranny Henry’s talking about also applies to the legislature? that he thinks national majority rule is the kiss of death?

I mean, at The New York Times?

Maybe explore just a tad further and see that in his next speech on the subject, Henry did his best to scare Virginians by warning them that among the horrors of the Constitution was a power of the federal government to “liberate every one of your slaves, if they please”?