Photo the Times ran with its editorial.
Photo the Times ran with its editorial.
We are going to be studying what went wrong at the “newspaper of record” in its coverage of this election for a long time. This so-called editorial’s so-called criticism of Donald Trump will be a great place to start.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Everyone knows that the letters CYA stand for “cover your ass.” Everyone, that is, but the New York Times editorial board, which attempted to do just that with respect to Donald Trump and failed miserably today. The Times has finally published “Donald Trump is Unfit to Lead,” after two weeks of hammering President Joe Biden day after day, sometimes even several times a day, including an editorial telling him to give up his candidacy.
I guess we’re supposed to welcome the Times seeming to have come to its senses. After publishing what amounted to an editorial taking apart President Biden for his debate performance by reporter Peter Baker hours after the debate ended on June 27, the Times launched into a full-court-press of negative editorials and stories on Biden, and it hasn’t stopped.
But today, all they did with Trump is to state the obvious. Here are a couple of choice clips from the editorial sub-hed. See if you don’t recognize them:
“He is a danger in word deed and action. He puts self over country. He loathes the laws we live by.”
He loathes the laws we live by? What about the laws Trump is supposed to live by? Oh, gee, I almost forgot. He appointed three members of a Supreme Court who just fucking immunized him and put him beyond the reach of the law. Trump is even trying to get his conviction on 34 counts of fraud in New York State thrown out based on the Supreme Court’s decision.
But did the Times mention these outrages? The convictions? The immunity? The charges of sexual abuse and rape? His theft of top-secret documents from the White House? His inciting of an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021? His attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election? The decision by “his” Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade he’s so proud of?
One guess.
Perhaps the worst thing about what they did publish is the editorial’s out-of-left field soft-focus look-back at the Republican Party. After citing some of the problems the Times feels are facing the country, they tell us nostalgically, “The Republican Party once pursued electoral power in service to solutions for such problems, to building ‘the shining city on a hill,’ as Ronald Reagan liked to say.” What any of that has to do with Donald Trump is beyond me. Trump’s party ceased resembling anything even close to “Republican” eight years ago, as its “leaders” capitulated to the authoritarian they found in their midst.
But did the Times give mention to Trump’s authoritarianism? To his racism? His threats to unmake our government and replace it with one in his own image? His threats to imprison millions of undocumented immigrants in concentration camps before deporting them with little if no judicial recourse?
One guess.
But here is what the Times editorial board did do. They made sure to include this: “The Democrats are rightly engaged in their own debate about whether President Biden is the right person to carry the party’s nomination into the election, given widespread concerns among voters about his age-related fitness.”
The Times couldn’t even get through an allegedly negative editorial about Trump without taking yet another shot at Biden. I will also note that there was not a corresponding dig at the alleged subject of their editorial, Donald Trump, for showing signs of age-related cognitive distress, most recently at his Tuesday rally in Florida, where he confused, in speaking of his own offspring, who was married to who or remains unmarried, not to mention several dives into mis-speak as he ping-ponged from sympathy for mothers whose children died from drug overdoses to the “terrible” state of the nation’s airports.
And nowhere was to be found any criticism of Trump’s love affair with Vladimir Putin, his stated hatred of NATO, and his promise to end U.S. support for our ally, and Europe’s ally, Ukraine.
With such a target-rich environment as Donald Trump, the New York Times fired blanks.
We are going to be studying what went wrong at the “newspaper of record” in its coverage of this election for a long time. This so-called editorial’s so-called criticism of Donald Trump will be a great place to start.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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