How To Fight Trump The New York Times Way: Speak Softly, For F*ck's Sake Put That Stick DOWN!

Times Editorial Board makes David Brooks sound like the SDS.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Be of good cheer, America! The nation’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, has joined the Resistance, although it would prefer we come up with a less incendiary term if it’s not too much trouble. To mark Donald Trump’s first hundred days in office, the Grey Lady informs us in a headline (gift link) that it’s time to “Fight Like Our Democracy Depends on It,” then devotes much of the editorial itself to explaining that “fight” shouldn’t be taken as a call for literal combat, or even for rowdy demonstrations in the streets, but rather a call to oppose Trump’s assault on democracy “soberly and strategically, not reflexively or performatively.”

It’s a bit like Paul Revere had been followed by a second rider calling out “However, it must be noted that King George is a legitimate sovereign and many of his actions have been legal, albeit highly objectionable!”

The editorial starts out well enough, warning in very measured but emphatic terms that

The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction. Mr. Trump is attempting to create a presidency unconstrained by Congress or the courts, in which he and his appointees can override written law when they want to. It is precisely the autocratic approach that this nation’s founders sought to prevent when writing the Constitution.

But again and again, the authors make a point and then undermine it with “howevers.” Yes we must resist Trump, but we have to be careful to do it with a broad coalition that doesn’t risk alienating anyone, especially not the conservative people in coalition who are principled enough to oppose Trump but might decide to support him instead if they see anyone at a protest wearing an “EAT THE RICH” T-shirt.

So much of the editorial is useless throat-clearing that you want to hand the editors a lozenge. Stuff like this:

The building of this coalition should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College.

Well there’s your ready-made sign for the May Day protests down at the statehouse today.

caption...

That’s hardly the end of it: We’re also told that many of Trump’s opinions are in fact more popular in polling than those from Democrats, like on immigration, although several paragraphs later the editorial finally gets around to pointing out that you can do tough immigration policy and still preserve due process.

Worse, the editors brush off Trump’s elimination of any attempts at enforcing civil rights, saying he has “reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support.” Christ. Many Trump voters would support a return to Jim Crow if they could get away with it — oh, but there we go being intemperate again.

Trump’s coziness with Vladimir Putin and pardons of January 6 thugs who tried to reverse the election? Well sure, the Times strongly opposes those, but heavens, they’re both well within the scope of legitimate authority, so maybe we shouldn’t call them the embrace of a fellow fascist or the prelude to building a corps of unaccountable, violent Brownshirts who have vividly demonstrated their willingness to beat the crap out of other Americans, even Holy Law Enforcement Americans, if Trump asks them to.

It’s an incredibly frustrating mess to read because of all that soft-pedaling. Trump has “trampled on the law” and exceeded anything close to the normal bounds of executive authority! But oh, dear, the editors also must acknowledge, mustn’t they, that some parts of the executive branch have “suffered from too little accountability in recent decades.” Well then, guess we can’t make too much fuss about how Trump and his unelected pal Elon Musk threw USAID into the wood chipper, leading to starvation and death and babies being born with AIDS again in poor nations.

Oh, hey, know what? The name “Elon Musk” appears exactly zero times in the editorial. That seems like a very concerning omission.

The editors carefully build their case against Trump, noting the many ways he’s following the authoritarian playbook of other elected strongmen like Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, India’s Narendra Modi, and others, noting that not one of them needed a violent coup to come to power but nonetheless have choked out any semblance of democratic opposition. Excellent point! So maybe don’t keep undermining the argument by tut-tutting about how we must be very careful and deliberate, because supposedly “the stakes are too high to prioritize emotion over effectiveness.” But why should we suppose that passionate opposition won’t be effective?

Hell, all the shilly-shallying (now there’s a respectable term!) damn near hides one of the most hopeful points in the whole misbegotten editorial, so I will do our Gentle Readers the favor of underlining it, because honestly, it’s something I hadn’t considered. The editors, citing Times columnist Nate Cohn, point out that where all those other modern-day strongmen have remained broadly popular with their citizens even as they take a wrecking ball to democratic institutions, Trump’s own efforts to do the same thing are pissing off Americans in huge numbers.

The more he fucks up America, the more Americans hate it, and the more his loyalists look like a bunch of creepy weirdos. We are, of course, translating that from the Times’ far more proper tiptoeing, which says of those other modern tyrants, “Their popularity helped them erode democracy. Mr. Trump’s unpopularity will make it harder for him to do so.”

That’s it. That’s the best thing in the piece, and goddamn, it would be much more effective in rallying people without all the pussyfooting.

In conclusion, though it pains us to say so, Fuck the New York Times, although we must acknowledge it raises many legitimate points and in many other respects, outside its editorial timidity, is often a valuable source of legitimate journalism on important topics.

Right in the earhole.

---

David Brooks, His Eyes Uncovered!

---

[NYT (gift link)]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d rather make a one-time donation of the money you’ll save by cancelling your New York Times subscription, here’s the button for that.