Donald Trump responded Sunday to a mock front page/editorial published Saturday by the Boston Globe. The Hill reports Trump attacked the paper during a NY rally:

“How about that stupid Boston Globe? It’s worthless, sold for a dollar,” Trump said during a rally Sunday in Rochester, N.Y.

“They pretended Trump is the president and they made up, the whole front page is a make-believe story, which is really no different from the whole paper. … The whole thing is made up.”

“They wrote a totally dishonest story, totally dishonest,” Trump said during the rally Sunday.

Trump was reacting to a mock front page which featured fake headlines from a year in the future when Trump is president.

The fake front page, which featured mock articles about mass deportations, a trade war and soldiers refusing orders to kill ISIS’ family members, was accompanied by a more traditional editorial which read in part:

Donald J. Trump’s vision for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.

It is easy to find historical antecedents. The rise of demagogic strongmen is an all too common phenomenon on our small planet. And what marks each of those dark episodes is a failure to fathom where a leader’s vision leads, to carry rhetoric to its logical conclusion. The satirical front page of this section attempts to do just that, to envision what America looks like with Trump in the White House.

It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it.

This being the Boston Globe, the paper is not endorsing Ted Cruz as an alternative to Trump:

Action doesn’t mean political chicanery or subterfuge. It doesn’t mean settling for an equally extreme — and perhaps more dangerous — nominee in Ted Cruz. If the party can muster the courage to reject its first-place finisher, rejecting the runner-up should be even easier.

While I have no doubt the Globe is genuinely shocked and dismayed by Donald Trump’s rhetoric, this editorial/stunt seems to go a bit beyond what most people think of as journalism. Unless the Globe has a crystal ball we don’t know about, they are crossing a line with a page of fabricated, imaginary news stories. Needless to say, one could do the same thing for any of the Democratic candidates as well. Sander’s tax plan could cause a new worldwide depression. Clinton could launch a new war in the middle-east. But the role of newspapers is to report, not to write shitty science fiction headlines from the near future.

One also can’t help but notice the Globe’s solution requires the party to dismiss both candidates who have received nearly all the votes and delegates from GOP voters around the country. For a paper ostensibly concerned about crossing lines that should not be crossed, this seems like a pretty clear call to ditch any semblance of democratic process. One does not have to envision literal riots in the streets to think that many GOP voters would find this upsetting. It’s the equivalent of the Wall Street Journal demanding Democrats ditch both Sanders and Clinton and install Jim Webb as the nominee because he seems somewhat more reasonable to conservatives. Do you think, maybe, there might be some consternation on the left if that were to happen?

Of course this is a win-win scenario for the Boston Globe. If Trump or Cruz win the nomination the paper gets to hand-wring over America’s dire future. If, on the other hand, the GOP blows up the party by ditching the candidates who actually ran (and won delegates), well, that would ensure a GOP loss which would suit the Globe’s editors just fine. The best thing for the GOP to do is point at the Boston Globe and note they are no longer doing news.