As if the media hadn’t already covered itself in shame this week by using 9/11 to malign President Trump, it is now using Hurricane Florence as a cudgel with which to beat him.

Yesterday, The Washington Post’s editorial board ran a piece titled, “Another hurricane is about to batter our coast. Trump is complicit.”

Complicit. You read that right. But they weren’t through.

“When it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit,” it read. “He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks. It is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change. But there is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth’s systems to produce disasters.”

In fact there are many questions as to what extent human activity is warming the Earth, though there is a verifiable warming trend, but that’s obviously not the most egregious charge made in the editorial.

To say that President Trump is complicit for this particular hurricane is a stretch, a distortion, a falsity and a swirling storm of mindless bombast. Not to mention highly irresponsible.

But the goal of the editorial, if not the paper, is to convince Americans that Donald Trump is the enemy of the people.

“With depressingly ironic timing,” writes the Post’s editorial board, “the Trump administration announced Tuesday a plan to roll back federal rules on methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is the main component in natural gas. Drillers and transporters of the fuel were supposed to be more careful about letting it waft into the atmosphere, which is nothing more than rank resource waste that also harms the environment. The Trump administration has now attacked all three pillars of President Barack Obama’s climate-change plan.”

In fact, energy companies will work with states to establish initiatives to cut emissions, and those will likely serve as a guideline for new federal regulations when the next Democratic president and his team of central planners take over the Oval Office.

Comedians, talk show hosts, journalists and now editorial boards have tossed aside all pretext and morphed into hysterical activists, lecturing, hectoring and panicking at every turn.

Tantrums are easy. Conversations are harder but the exchange of ideas benefits a society. Those who look to stifle debate or inspire fear among the masses are complicit in creating the unfortunate fallout.