New York Times Opinion Writer Explains Lack of Pro-Trump Columnists

Harvard Jewish Studies lecturer says Mamdani poses no threat

A poster advertising yesterday’s Harvard event with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg and Professor Derek Penslar. Photography and video were banned inside the event, and I complied with that rule, so readers will have to settle for this image. Photo: The Editors.

The New York Times opinion section lacks pro-Trump columnists because it has had a hard time finding people who are “pro-Trump, honest, and not racist,” Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg says.

“There’s not that many people in the middle of that Venn diagram,” Goldberg said.

Goldberg made her remarks Thursday afternoon October 16 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the annual Doft Lecture of Harvard University’s Center for Jewish Studies. The event, “Authoritarianism, Antisemitism, and the Future of America,” attracted about 30 people, including maybe ten students and one armed Harvard University Police officer who loomed outside the room as a security presence. It was sponsored by the Alan and Elisabeth Doft Lecture and Publication Fund.

I had heard about the event from a newsletter of Harvard’s “intellectual vitality” initiative. The moderator of the event, Derek Penslar, who is William Lee Frost Professor of Jewish History and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, said he’d appreciated Goldberg’s “The Argument” podcast with Ross Douthat, a conservative. America “is suffering from a lack of civil argument,” Penslar said.

Alas, the Doft Lecture featured only the left-leaning Goldberg, not the more conservative Douthat, so for “vitality” the audience had to settle for Penslar, a liberal, pushing Goldberg with questions. He appeared to be doing his best, but it wasn’t enough to prevent the event from turning into a kind of anti-Trump rally and group therapy session—an strange look for a university that intermittently claims to be recommitting itself to serious scholarship and research and to viewpoint diversity rather than to politicized groupthink.

Where this was headed was clear almost from the start. “I grew up in Buffalo. I got out as soon as I could,” Goldberg said. That condescending comment was greeted by the Harvard audience with appreciative laughter. Compare it with the more gracious way another prominent journalist, Tim Russert, described the same hometown: “I was surrounded by beauty and history and the sense of possibility that a great city instills in its residents. Buffalo captured my imagination and remains a part of me to this day.”

Goldberg described her youth in Buffalo as an activist forming human chains to defend abortion clinics from Operation Rescue protesters who had been invited in, she said, by the city’s Catholic mayor.

“My parents forced me against my will to go to temple, which I absolutely hated,” Goldberg said by way of explaining her Jewish background.

Goldberg said antisemitism is far worse on the right than on the left. “I just think the antisemites on the left have dramatically less power,” she said, describing them as on “the absolute outskirts of anything like mainstream politics.”

“I do not believe that antisemitism and antizionism are the same thing,” she said.