New York Times column declares Trump 'professional racist' who is waging war on cosmopolitan culture

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg says Trump caused a crisis of democracy. (Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

A scathing Op-Ed published in The New York Times on Tuesday calls President Trump a “professional racist” who is causing a “breakdown of democracy” across America with a “war on cosmopolitan culture.”

Michelle Goldberg’s piece, headlined, “We have a crisis of democracy, not manners,” begins with a tale of the time white nationalist Richard Spencer was kicked out of his gym and called a Nazi. Then, Goldberg unfavorably compares the outspoken white supremacist to Trump.

“This incident did not generate a national round of hand-wringing about the death of tolerance, perhaps because most people tacitly agree that it’s OK to shun professional racists,” Goldberg wrote. “It’s a little more complicated when the professional racist is the president of the United States.”

Conservative strategist Chris Barron told Fox News the column “shows just how out of touch liberals in America are today,” not that Trump won because he “flipped the votes of millions of working-class Americans in places like Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Ohio.”

The Times columnist then dived into the controversy surrounding the Virginia restaurant that asked Press Secretary Sarah Sanders to leave on Friday night on the heels of Trump surrogates Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi and Kirstjen Nielsen also being harassed and heckled.

“Naturally, all this has led to lots of pained disapproval from self-appointed guardians of civility,” Goldberg wrote before noting, “There’s a moral and psychic cost to participating in the fiction that people who work for Trump are in any sense public servants.”

The Times columnist said she doesn’t blame restaurant staffers who decided not to help Sanders “unwind after a hard week of lying to the public about mass child abuse.”

Goldberg said that public shaming is happening because of a laundry list of Trump’s actions, ranging from winning on Election Day with “help from a hostile foreign power” to selecting “right-wing” Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

“It’s less a result of a breakdown in civility than a breakdown of democracy,” she wrote.

The Times columnist then wrote that unless Democrats prevail in the midterm election, Americans will be forced to watch “as the president cages children, dehumanizes immigrants, spurns other democracies, guts health care protections, uses his office to enrich himself and turns public life into a deranged phantasmagoria with his incontinent flood of lies.”

Goldberg added that “civility police” would point out that conservatives had equal disdain for President Barack Obama – but the derision isn’t equal, in her eyes, because Trump is “racist.”

“The right’s revulsion against a black president targeted by birther conspiracy theories is not the same as the left’s revulsion against a racist president who spread birther conspiracy theories,” she wrote.

The Times columnist said that people have treated Sanders and other Trump surrogates “with the sort of public opprobrium due members of any other white nationalist organization.”

Goldberg ended her column by declaring that if Trump supporters don’t want to hear from angry citizens and continue to "wage war on cosmopolitan culture" then they should stick with eating at the Trump Grill, which is located inside Trump Tower.

“I can’t think of a more tone deaf message than the main stream media and the left bleating on about a ‘war on cosmopolitan culture.'"

— Conservative strategist Chris Barron

“I can’t think of a more tone deaf message than the mainstream media and the left bleating on about a ‘war on cosmopolitan culture,’” Barron said.

NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck told Fox News that the Times column is what a “scorching hot take” looks like.

“She painted leftists as somehow victims in all this, which is such a tiresome trick the left plays when people they don't like are in power. The image she paints of anyone who's not in her camp is one of brutality and violence that's such a tired trope yet it's actually dangerous. She's advocating for a more dramatic return to tribalism and that'll do nothing to cool the temperature of our discourse,” Houck said.