By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva
Nothing gets past the ace political correspondent/pundit/bloviator/expert for The New York Times, Peter Baker. Just this week he breathlessly revealed the shocking truth about the corrupt depraved bigot and leader of the Republican Party, this Donald Trump guy:
Former President Donald J. Trump once again made clear on Thursday night exactly where he stands in the conflict between the American justice system and the mob that ransacked the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power nearly two years ago.
He stands with the mob.
You don't say.
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| Huge Times scoop: Trump sides with mob |
The “once again” is doing a lot of work because if you have been a faithful reader of the Times since Trump stuck his finger in the nation's political eye in 2015, you might not have heard the truth about his extremism and his embrace of white supremacy and fascism before.
The untutored reader might have reached this conclusion when Trump announced his candidacy by claiming that Mexico was sending over rapists and assassins. But to the Times, this was NBD. Their announcement story treated Trump's candidacy as a source of hilarity:
Donald J. Trump, the garrulous real estate developer whose name has adorned apartment buildings, hotels, Trump-brand neckties and Trump-brand steaks, announced on Tuesday his entry into the 2016 presidential race, brandishing his wealth and fame as chief qualifications in an improbable quest for the Republican nomination.
Improbable. Trump's racist attack on Mexican immigrants made it into paragraph never of the story.
Peter Baker wasn't available in the summer of 2015 to weigh in Trump because he was traipsing around with Barack Obama as the Times's Chief White House Correspondent.
But the Times reached into its endless bench of hacks to declare that Trump was no threat, no problem, and just comic relief from true Republican statesmen like ... Jeb Bush.
Here's Trump whisperer Maggie Haberman handicapping his chances in June 2015:
Good one, Maggie.
A couple of months later, Times pundit Joe Nocera, having rigorously reviewed Trump's views, including his racist anti-immigration lies, concluded:
I wonder, in fact, whether even now Trump is a serious candidate, or whether this is all a giant publicity ploy....
I’m not alone in wondering this, of course. Several Republican consultants I spoke to openly questioned whether Trump is in it for the long haul. “You would see him spending a lot more money if he were putting together a true national infrastructure,” said Rick Wilson, a Republican strategist [Whatever happened to that guy? – Ed.].
...
He’ll be out before Iowa. You read it here first.
We sure did, Joe.
Let's fast forward two years, after pantloads of lies and sexist and racists smears that led him to an Electoral College victory, to Trump's open embrace of neo-Nazi racists after their rampage in Charlottesville. Here's Maggie Haberman again:
President Trump reverted Tuesday to blaming both sides for the deadly violence in Charlottesville, Va., and at one point questioned whether the movement to pull down Confederate statues would lead to the desecration of memorials to George Washington.
Abandoning his precisely chosen and carefully delivered condemnations of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis from a day earlier, the president furiously stuck by his initial reaction to the unrest in Charlottesville. He drew the very moral equivalency for which a bipartisan chorus, and his own advisers, had already criticized him.
“I think there is blame on both sides,” the president said in a combative exchange with reporters at Trump Tower in Manhattan. “You had a group on one side that was bad. You had a group on the other side that was also very violent. Nobody wants to say that. I’ll say it right now.”
The story treated Trump's embrace of violent white extremism as yet another of his famous “controversies.”
Fortunately, Peter Baker was now available to weigh in:
Intentional or not, many of his most divisive comments charge directly into one of the most delicate issues in American life, race, whether it be his attacks on illegal immigrants, his “both sides” equivocation after the racial violence in Charlottesville or now his blasts at African-American football and basketball stars like Mr. Curry, the Golden State Warriors player who said he did not want to visit the White House for a traditional champions ceremony.
Speaking with reporters before boarding Air Force One on Sunday, Mr. Trump insisted race was not the issue. “This has nothing to do with race,” he said. “I never said anything about race. This has nothing to do with race or anything else. This has to do with respect for our country and respect for our flag.”
To his supporters, Mr. Trump’s approach does not necessarily seem polarizing so much as animating. In an us-and-them world, he is speaking to a part of the country that has long felt ostracized by those who seem to have everything, whether it be Washington politicians or high-paid sports stars.
“Polarizing” and “divisive,” like cheering for the Red Sox in Yankee Stadium.
The obvious defect of this characterization is the equation of the two sides: the pro-Nazi side and the anti-Nazi side. If the problem is polarization and not Nazis, then the solution advocated by clowns like Soprassata Dave Brooks and Andrew Yang – reducing divisiveness – make sense. If the problem is Nazis (spoiler alert: it is!) then the Brooks/Yang line is dangerous gibberish which only distracts from the crisis at hand.
We perseverate on the Times's years-long failure to recognize the true nature of Trump not because it is great fun to rubbish pompous thin-skinned hacks like Baker and Haberman (although to be honest, it is), but because the failure to call out extremist white-supremacist fascist-adjacent subverters of democracy is a continuing threat.
The Times, seven years late, has finally understood the menace of Trump and Trumpism. But what about the party he leads and the base who remain faithful to him? And what about the equally odious Republicans who are setting themselves up as the safe non-addictive alternative to the Tiny Toadstool?
Is the Times recognizing the threat they pose to our constitutional order and our remaining liberties?
What do you think?
Please give a warm welcome to the loathsome and just re-elected Governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis. Ron works harder than anyone (and certainly harder than the low-energy Tangerine-Faced Grifter) to undermine democracy and free speech and promote hatred and bigotry. He hasn't said boo about his rival's Turkey Day dinner with Nazis and Jew haters. He hasn't condemned them or their views.
Just before that debacle but after DeSantis's fascist and bigoted politics were known to the meanest intelligence, the Times offered up this breathless analysis:
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| Polarization and divisiveness can lead to bad things |
Fears of a divided field are why some have embraced Mr. DeSantis as the Republican who appears, in extremely early polling, to be the most formidable potential challenger to Mr. Trump, though political history is littered with early front-runners who fizzle.
“One of the reasons why Florida has done well is because over the last few years, we stood out as the free state of Florida,” Mr. DeSantis said. He never mentioned Mr. Trump by name but contrasted his approach to the pandemic with that taken by the Trump administration and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist. “We refused to let the state of Florida descend into some type of Fauci-ian dystopia.”
The Times saw no reason to note that Florida's COVID death and disease rates were terrible or that Dr. Fauci's advice has always been rooted in the best available science.
To be fair one opinion columnist (Frank Bruni) has been willing to tell it somewhat like it is:
It is not normal to release a campaign ad, as DeSantis did last month, that explicitly identifies you as someone created and commanded by God to pursue the precise political agenda that you’re pursuing. Better words for that include “messianic,” “megalomaniacal” and “delusional.”
But the 76 trombones of drivel blaring in the Times's Opinion section tend to drown the occasionally sensible comment. So far the hard-boiled savvy journalists on the news side haven't let the readers know just how dangerous and crazy ol' Go-Go Boots DeSantis is. (Hint: Worse than Trump.)
We hope that they catch on faster than was the case with the Tangerine-Faced Fascist. But we're not optimistic that we'll get the real story anytime soon.
Based on his past performance, we expect Peter Baker to let us know what a menace DeSantis is by . . . 2029.
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