The Times is a great newspaper, sure, but the "closeted MAGA zealots on the NYT masthead" are doing some genuine harm.
I don't have the patience to extract the essence from this long rant in Tom Scocca's INDIGNITY Substack post today, so here's the whole thing:
___________
Why Won't People Take Donald Trump's Threats Seriously?
ON THE FRONT page of this morning's New York Times, the paper's scene reporter on the Donald Trump presidential campaign, Shawn McCreesh, described a confounding feature of the Trump 2024 movement:
One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.
The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.
The contrast between the raging, bigoted, ever more explicitly fascist Trump on the campaign stump and the Trump in the campaign polls is genuinely shocking. Trump the candidate is vicious and addled, visibly decrepit, unable to articulate a vision of the next four years beyond tariffs, ethnic cleansing, and a generalized vengeance. Yet Trump the candidacy is moving toward November as a standard, largely stable Republican presidential entry, seemingly destined to get the usual number of votes from the usual people in the usual places.
Talking to Trump supporters at his campaign appearance last week at the Detroit Economic Club, McCreesh came away with quotes that showed them in a state of acute denial, if not outright unreality. A “a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich.” who was a “former chief financial officer” told McCreesh he didn't believe Trump was really going to carry out mass deportations or implement punitive tariffs. Of the promised deportations, the source said, “He may say things, and then it gets people all upset, but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that."
A “40-year-old Detroit man who owns a book publishing company,” when asked about Trump's announced plan to purge the federal civil service, told McCreesh “It could just be for publicity.” A “49-year-old woman from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who works in sales for a radio station,” when asked about Trump's vows to “go after” the Biden family, said “I don’t think that’s on his list of things to do.”
Why—after all these months of presidential campaigning and all these years of witnessing Trump in action—did these people in Detroit still seem to take him neither literally nor seriously? What would it take for the public to recognize how gravely, and how openly, Trump is threatening the basic premises of small-D democratic and small-R republican government?
Well. In that paragraph in which McCreesh explained the problem, the hyperlink for “jailing political opponents” leads to a story by four Times reporters about how “the former president has escalated his vows to use the raw power of the state to impose and maintain control and to intimidate and punish anyone he perceives as working against him.” A note at the bottom of the story reads: “A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2024, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Paints His Foes As Due for Punishment.”
While that article ran on page A17, the front page of the Times displayed the headline stack “TRUMP EMBRACES TARIFFS AS A CURE FOR WIDER NEEDS / CLAIMS ARE EXPANDING / Trade Experts Say Pitfalls Outweigh the Benefits to Most Americans”—a critical look at Trump's trade platform, but one that treated it as a platform offered up by a regular candidate. The Donald Trump on the front page was maybe a threat to the expert consensus on import policies, or to the overall economy, but he wasn't threatening to lock anybody up.
McCreesh's link to “one really violent day” went to a brief September 30 Times story that was only published online. Instead, the next day's front page featured “In Vance’s Unabashed Approach, Trump Sees Fiery Kindred Spirit,” a story about “a unique partnership developing” between Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, describing how Trump “seems to be enjoying a more collaborative role with someone he views as a kindred political spirit to help lead his MAGA movement back into the White House.”
And the link to “a bloody story” didn't lead to a Times article at all, but to a user-made clip from a Trump rally on C-Span. The most prominent Times coverage of the remark came more than a week after Trump said it, in a long feature story describing the candidate's ongoing lies about how Aurora, Colorado, has supposedly been taken over by Venezuelan gangs; the story noted that Trump had said that getting rid of the gangs would be “a bloody story.” That piece ran on page A12, on a day the front page was “TRUMP UNHARMED AFTER SHOTS FIRED AT FLORIDA COURSE.”
The Aurora story, like McCreesh's dispatch from Detroit, captured the Times' confused approach to the Trump problem, in which publishing after-the-fact news analysis somehow ends up outranking, if not completely superseding, the work of publishing the news. The Times was reconstructing how the lies about Venezuelans had made it into Trump's campaign repertoire, without ever having constructed the story that Trump was lying in the first place.
What antecedent had the Times given the benighted Michiganders to convince them that Trump is a real threat? McCreesh's own campaign coverage has tended to strike what the Times takes to be a wry and knowing tone: telling the reader, when Trump visited a convention of Moms for Liberty—the racist and homophobic book-banning activist group—that the organization “can get a bit carried away” and that “one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler.” The paper later revised the piece and appended a correction, explaining “It was not an accidental use of the remark.”
Writing about Trump's increasing tendency to ramble, and how Trump had dubbed his the wandering style “the weave” and claimed it was intentional, McCreesh wrote, “it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.” It was an amusing account of an amusing character.
The day after his Detroit appearance, Trump went on to Aurora, where he told his rally crowd, “It is the enemy from within, all the scum that hate our country, that is a bigger enemy than China or Russia.” Now he wasn't talking about even imaginary Venezuelans, but his political opponents: scum.
The lead story on the front of the next day's Times was “MUCH OF WORLD TREATING TRUMP AS POWER BROKER / SHADOW WHITE HOUSE / Touching Base With Him Is a Ritual for Many Foreign Leaders.” The day after that, citing its own polling, the paper went with “DEMOCRATS FACE SIGNIFICANT DROP IN BLACK VOTERS / 2020 NUMBERS DOWN / Trump Chips at Support Among Black Men, New Poll Shows.” Why would anyone believe the country is deep in a crisis of democracy? If that were so, wouldn't it be front-page news?
__________
The Times has been burying the stories about crazy Trump and formulating sanitized headlines for the front page. It's not Cancel Culture Goes Mad.
Go get 'em! Of all the twisted responses to Trumpism, blaming the New York Times is the craziest. Thank you for applauding the Times' many significant contributions to public understanding & action. Journalists known to me personally are thoughtful, insightful, caring and intelligent [even you!] Mistakes are made but are corrected publicly. It's easy to fault others for shortcomings and oversights when we are blind to our own foolishness.
The Times is a great newspaper, sure, but the "closeted MAGA zealots on the NYT masthead" are doing some genuine harm.
I don't have the patience to extract the essence from this long rant in Tom Scocca's INDIGNITY Substack post today, so here's the whole thing:
___________
Why Won't People Take Donald Trump's Threats Seriously?
ON THE FRONT page of this morning's New York Times, the paper's scene reporter on the Donald Trump presidential campaign, Shawn McCreesh, described a confounding feature of the Trump 2024 movement:
One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will.
The former president has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department and jailing political opponents. He has said he would purge the government of non-loyalists and that he would have trouble hiring anyone who admits that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen. He proposed “one really violent day” in which police officers could get “extraordinarily rough” with impunity. He has promised mass deportations and predicted it would be “a bloody story.” And while many of his supporters thrill at such talk, there are plenty of others who figure it’s all just part of some big act.
The contrast between the raging, bigoted, ever more explicitly fascist Trump on the campaign stump and the Trump in the campaign polls is genuinely shocking. Trump the candidate is vicious and addled, visibly decrepit, unable to articulate a vision of the next four years beyond tariffs, ethnic cleansing, and a generalized vengeance. Yet Trump the candidacy is moving toward November as a standard, largely stable Republican presidential entry, seemingly destined to get the usual number of votes from the usual people in the usual places.
Talking to Trump supporters at his campaign appearance last week at the Detroit Economic Club, McCreesh came away with quotes that showed them in a state of acute denial, if not outright unreality. A “a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich.” who was a “former chief financial officer” told McCreesh he didn't believe Trump was really going to carry out mass deportations or implement punitive tariffs. Of the promised deportations, the source said, “He may say things, and then it gets people all upset, but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that."
A “40-year-old Detroit man who owns a book publishing company,” when asked about Trump's announced plan to purge the federal civil service, told McCreesh “It could just be for publicity.” A “49-year-old woman from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who works in sales for a radio station,” when asked about Trump's vows to “go after” the Biden family, said “I don’t think that’s on his list of things to do.”
Why—after all these months of presidential campaigning and all these years of witnessing Trump in action—did these people in Detroit still seem to take him neither literally nor seriously? What would it take for the public to recognize how gravely, and how openly, Trump is threatening the basic premises of small-D democratic and small-R republican government?
Well. In that paragraph in which McCreesh explained the problem, the hyperlink for “jailing political opponents” leads to a story by four Times reporters about how “the former president has escalated his vows to use the raw power of the state to impose and maintain control and to intimidate and punish anyone he perceives as working against him.” A note at the bottom of the story reads: “A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2024, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Paints His Foes As Due for Punishment.”
While that article ran on page A17, the front page of the Times displayed the headline stack “TRUMP EMBRACES TARIFFS AS A CURE FOR WIDER NEEDS / CLAIMS ARE EXPANDING / Trade Experts Say Pitfalls Outweigh the Benefits to Most Americans”—a critical look at Trump's trade platform, but one that treated it as a platform offered up by a regular candidate. The Donald Trump on the front page was maybe a threat to the expert consensus on import policies, or to the overall economy, but he wasn't threatening to lock anybody up.
McCreesh's link to “one really violent day” went to a brief September 30 Times story that was only published online. Instead, the next day's front page featured “In Vance’s Unabashed Approach, Trump Sees Fiery Kindred Spirit,” a story about “a unique partnership developing” between Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, describing how Trump “seems to be enjoying a more collaborative role with someone he views as a kindred political spirit to help lead his MAGA movement back into the White House.”
And the link to “a bloody story” didn't lead to a Times article at all, but to a user-made clip from a Trump rally on C-Span. The most prominent Times coverage of the remark came more than a week after Trump said it, in a long feature story describing the candidate's ongoing lies about how Aurora, Colorado, has supposedly been taken over by Venezuelan gangs; the story noted that Trump had said that getting rid of the gangs would be “a bloody story.” That piece ran on page A12, on a day the front page was “TRUMP UNHARMED AFTER SHOTS FIRED AT FLORIDA COURSE.”
The Aurora story, like McCreesh's dispatch from Detroit, captured the Times' confused approach to the Trump problem, in which publishing after-the-fact news analysis somehow ends up outranking, if not completely superseding, the work of publishing the news. The Times was reconstructing how the lies about Venezuelans had made it into Trump's campaign repertoire, without ever having constructed the story that Trump was lying in the first place.
What antecedent had the Times given the benighted Michiganders to convince them that Trump is a real threat? McCreesh's own campaign coverage has tended to strike what the Times takes to be a wry and knowing tone: telling the reader, when Trump visited a convention of Moms for Liberty—the racist and homophobic book-banning activist group—that the organization “can get a bit carried away” and that “one of their local chapters once accidentally quoted Adolf Hitler.” The paper later revised the piece and appended a correction, explaining “It was not an accidental use of the remark.”
Writing about Trump's increasing tendency to ramble, and how Trump had dubbed his the wandering style “the weave” and claimed it was intentional, McCreesh wrote, “it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.” It was an amusing account of an amusing character.
The day after his Detroit appearance, Trump went on to Aurora, where he told his rally crowd, “It is the enemy from within, all the scum that hate our country, that is a bigger enemy than China or Russia.” Now he wasn't talking about even imaginary Venezuelans, but his political opponents: scum.
The lead story on the front of the next day's Times was “MUCH OF WORLD TREATING TRUMP AS POWER BROKER / SHADOW WHITE HOUSE / Touching Base With Him Is a Ritual for Many Foreign Leaders.” The day after that, citing its own polling, the paper went with “DEMOCRATS FACE SIGNIFICANT DROP IN BLACK VOTERS / 2020 NUMBERS DOWN / Trump Chips at Support Among Black Men, New Poll Shows.” Why would anyone believe the country is deep in a crisis of democracy? If that were so, wouldn't it be front-page news?
__________
The Times has been burying the stories about crazy Trump and formulating sanitized headlines for the front page. It's not Cancel Culture Goes Mad.
Go get 'em! Of all the twisted responses to Trumpism, blaming the New York Times is the craziest. Thank you for applauding the Times' many significant contributions to public understanding & action. Journalists known to me personally are thoughtful, insightful, caring and intelligent [even you!] Mistakes are made but are corrected publicly. It's easy to fault others for shortcomings and oversights when we are blind to our own foolishness.