The New York Times’s latest scoop — that President Trump is somehow to blame for the assassination attempts on his life — is a classic. The newspaper has just been ordered by a federal court to stand trial yet again for allegedly libeling Sarah Palin for stirring up passions that led to the shooting of Congresswoman Gabby Giffords and others in 2011 at Tucson. Blamed if the Gray Lady isn’t up to her old tricks, this time against the 45th president.

This has emerged in the wake of the arrest of what appears to be a would-be sniper lurking near where Trump was playing golf in Florida. “The latest apparent assassination attempt against the former president indicates how much the American political landscape has been shaped by anger stirred by him and against him,” says the Times in an all too typical begging the question, i.e., assuming the truth of the problem one is investigating.

“In the space of less than a week,” the story continues, “the once and possibly future commander in chief was both a seeming inspiration and an apparent target of the political violence that has increasingly come to shape American politics in the modern era. Bomb threats and attempted assassinations now have become part of the landscape, shocking and horrific, yet not so much that they have forced any real national reckoning.”

So it can hardly be surprising that President Trump hauls off and starts trying to blame the assassination attempts on his Democratic Party critics. That it’s not surprising doesn’t make it okay, just predictable. The paper ran out a separate story under a headline that said, “Trump, Using Harsh Language, Urges Democrats to Tone Down Theirs.” The subhead noted that Trump “has his own history of using violent language.”

This mudslinging reminds us of the time that the Gray Lady’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, managed to land a piece on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal complaining about how Trump had been accusing the press and various others of treason. He had called out the Times for exposing our cyber attacks on Russia’s electrical grid. What this amounted to, Trump had said, was “a virtual act of treason.” 

It turned out, though, that Mr. Sulzberger had neglected to mention the fact that his own reporters and columnists had been accusing Trump of Treason. One column, by Charles Blow, was run out under the headline “Trump, Treasonous Traitor.” Simply put, Mr. Blow said in his column, “Trump is a traitor and may well be treasonous.” Paul Krugman got in on the act too, in a column called “The New Climate of Treason.”

Even the great Nicholas Kristof jumped on the bandwagon, writing a column that stopped short of calling Trump a traitor but wasn’t all that kind to President Nixon. The column ran under the headline “‘There’s a Smell of Treason in the Air.’” It all seemed to put Mr. Sulzberger on the back foot, lecturing Trump for alleging treason by the press. “Who’s to say the president didn’t pick up that kind of language from the Times itself?” we asked.

Which brings us back to what the Times is doing today — trying to blame President Trump for the attacks — or attempted attacks — on his own life. Mr. Sulzberger’s new gripe is that Trump could threaten the freedom of the press. In a Washington Post op-ed, he warns of an unnamed “former leader” returning to office “on a populist platform” and blaming “the news media’s coverage of his previous government for costing him reelection.”

“At The Times,” Mr. Sulzberger suggested, “we are committed to following the facts and presenting a full, fair and accurate picture of November’s election and the candidates and issues shaping it.” Yet the kinds of reckless accusations being thrown around by Trump are, at worst, no worse than what’s being dished out by the Times. Let’s just hope Mr. Sulzberger’s unnamed future president of America isn’t a regular reader of the way the Times stokes this story.