The Times is ready for fascism

Yesterday, about forty minutes into a crucial town hall, Donald J. Trump just gave up. The heat was cranked up too high inside the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center (not a new problem there apparently), and at least two people in his audience fainted. Pouring sweat, tired of answering his supplicants’ questions, he ordered his team to crank up the music. He then just stood on stage, sometimes dancing a little, not really saying anything, for nearly an hour.

The playlist was, both aesthetically and in the context of early 21st-century politics, insane. James Brown’s “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.” Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain.” Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Luciano Pavoratti’s rendition of Schubert’s melody for the Ave Maria. The capper was probably Elvis Presley’s “An American Trilogy,” which opens with the first full verse and chorus of “Dixie.” The moderator, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, mouthed along to the Confederate anthem as the former president swayed with his eyes closed.

If anyone, literally any other major party’s presidential candidate in U.S. history, had put on a display like that, the national response would have been somewhere between bewilderment and fury. Seriously, imagine it. Imagine if this was Howard Dean or Bob Dole. Imagine if in 2016 Hillary Clinton had cajoled followers who were trying to leave a rally that had functionally ended twenty minutes before with people fainting, telling them that at least they might “lose four or five pounds” if they stayed. (Trump said this at around the 52-minute mark.)

Imagine if Joe Biden had stopped a critical, last-ditch campaign event in June, refusing audience questions and deciding instead to dance like a stiff weirdo for an hour. Or just imagine the coverage on Fox News — on MSNBC! — if Kamala Harris just quit in the middle of a critical, last-ditch campaign event, then demanded his followers stay in the stifling heat for an hour to dance to his batshit personal comfort music, so he wouldn’t look like a loser on national television.

But this is Donald Trump, and so it is all, as the wags like to say, “priced in.” It is priced in that he operates as the unreproachable head of a cult of personality. The fact that he grooves in his spare time to sexist anthems from the 1960s and racist hymns from the 1860s — priced in. Also priced in: Trump’s promise of expanded concentration camps in a second term. “Bloody” mass deportations. Stripping citizenship from people born in the United States. Ordering the U.S. military to shoot protesters opposed to him. All of these, and more, are now priced in.

In short, America’s tastemakers and elite media have priced in the one fact that was at the center of every real debate since he came down that golden escalator nine years ago. They now all take for granted that Donald Trump, a man who is essentially a coin flip from retaking the presidency, is a fascist.

And yet, the most influential news outlet in the country has taken it as its mission to make him seem as palatable as possible to its readership, in case of — or possibly in preparation for — his return to the White House.

Don’t believe me? Look first at the New York Times’ coverage of yesterday’s rally. Under the headline “Trump Bobs His Head to Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour,” reporter Michael Gold did everything possible to make the candidate’s behavior—and that of his rally-goers—seem fun, approachable, and not at all disqualifying. Gold leaves out the title and subject of the James Brown song, and doesn’t mention the rendition of “Dixie” at all. He quotes, without context, Noem’s dig about the arena (and not, say, the Trump campaign) supposedly not being able to afford air conditioning — helpfully flagging it for the reader as “a joke about inflation,” without bothering to look up the outside temperature in Oaks, Pa. (It was 54 degrees at 6 p.m., when the rally was scheduled to begin, meaning this wasn’t an AC problem at all.)

Most notably, a newspaper that for years refused to refer to Trump’s profligate bullshit as “lies” because they could not say for sure that Trump “knew [a] statement was false” then ventured reportorially into his brain. Gold decided, all by his lonesome, that Trump merely “seemed to decide that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned — and, it appeared, for himself — if he fired up his campaign playlist.” Neither Gold nor his editors thought it newsworthy to even mention Trump’s advanced age, much less work into their analysis the inevitable mental and physical toll a last-minute campaign push would take on an obese 78-year-old, who in just over three weeks will be the oldest human being to contest a U.S. general election. (Again, compare this to the virtual full body scan to which the Times subjected Biden on a near-daily basis until he finally dropped out of the race.)

OK, you say, but who cares, it’s just one story about one weird rally. And you might have a point — if it was the only story in which they gave Trump a break today. Another story by Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman on the Trump campaign likely breaking election finance law to fund his campaign got the headline “Trump Leans On Creative Bookkeeping to Keep Up in Cash Race.”

Meanwhile, Times politics reporter Maggie Astor weighed in with a video explainer on Trump and Harris’s respective positions on immigration. Harris, Astor says in a critical tone, is taking a “harder stance” on unauthorized border crossings than she took during her 2020 primary campaign and is pledging to keep in place a Biden policy on asylum that is “the most restrictive border policy enacted by any modern Democratic president” — a position meant to appeal to moderate voters that threatens to alienate progressives.

And Trump? Well, he “goes far further,” Astor admits, after the video’s halfway mark. For instance: “He plans to round up millions of undocumented immigrants and detain them in camps while they wait for deportation.” (Oh!) He also “plans to rely on a form of expulsion that doesn’t involve due-process hearings” and “to deputize local police officers, and National Guard troops from Republican-led states to carry out immigration raids.” (My emphasis added.) “He also wants to revoke the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship” — which, I need to add here, was a core plank (maybe the core plank) of George Lincoln Rockwell’s American Nazi Party in the mid-20th Century.

Yet after all that, Astor returns to her bottom line: “with Trump’s opposition,” Harris will probably struggle to get her bipartisan border security bill passed if she’s elected.

I’m sorry — that’s the bottom line? The most personally and officially corrupt man ever to sit in the Oval Office — a guy whose one term was defined by a) mismanaged crisis that left over a million Americans dead and pushed over ten million out of work, b) two impeachments, and c) a last-ditch effort to violently overthrow the U.S. government in a bid to remain in power indefinitely — is now literally promising to violently round up tens of millions of people including U.S. citizens, shove them into concentration camps without even pretending to follow due process, and deport them en masse at gunpoint. And all the paper of record can say is well, yeah, but Harris is kind of a flip-flopper who will have to work hard to get legislation through Congress.

Great job. Stellar analysis.

Trump’s fascism is so priced in that the Times does not consider a declaration by Trump’s own former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, that Trump is, quote, “a total fascist,” “a fascist to the core,” and “the most dangerous person ever” is not even worthy of a standalone story.

The admission appears in Bob Woodward’s new book War, which officially comes out today. The longtime Washington Post reporter says that Milley told him that on March 6, 2023, during a reception at the Willard Hotel. (The fact that Woodward sat on that detail for nearly two years to shove onto page 178 of his nineteenth book is something that should also probably get more discussion.) Woodward adds later in the book that Trump asked of Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020, “Can’t you just shoot them? … Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Milley and Trump Defense Secretary Mark Esper, he reports, “only narrowly dissuaded Trump from ordering 10,000 active duty troops” into Washington.

Even though copies of War have been circulating in Washington for weeks, and Milley’s comments have been reported in dozens of other outlets for days, the Times hasn’t done a single story about them. On Monday, the paper slipped the quote in as a factoid into the 25th paragraph of a campaign notebook by Shawn McCreesh about the fact that many of Trump’s supporters don’t believe he will follow through on his threats of violence. Today, they finally made it into a blog post … about Kamala Harris. It’s under the headline: “Harris agrees Trump is a fascist: 5 takeaways from her interview with Charlamagne Tha God."

Someone asked on Threads why the Times not only ignored Milley’s comments but seems to be intentionally ignoring the most important angle of the election entirely. Longtime Times political reporter and former deputy Washington editor Jonathan Weisman replied that few voters get their news from the Times (“around 7 percent,” he claimed), and that “they are almost all voting for Kamala Harris.” Putting aside the veracity of those claims, as well as Weisman’s absurd statement that the Times does not influence other outlets with its coverage, as Jamison Foser writes in his newsletter, the implication here is obvious: “The New York Times thinks its role is to soften the resolve of people planning to vote against Donald Trump.”

Why? Maybe A.G. Sulzberger can answer that. Or maybe it doesn’t matter. Just as Trump’s deep mental state during last night’s awkward dance party may forever remain a mystery, we can only deal with the obvious facts before us: Everyone with an ounce of sense knows the stakes of this election. Some are simply choosing, for whatever reason, not to act on them, or even say them out loud.

I’m gonna end by saying one last thing that everyone knows, but is worth repeating: This race is up for grabs. The 47th presidency of the United States is coming down to seven states, all of which are functionally tied in the polls. If Kamala Harris wins every state and district in which she currently has an actual statistical lead, plus Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, she wins. If Trump peels off any of those, holds North Carolina, and flips back (or steals) Arizona and Georgia¹ , he’s going back to the White House — probably never to leave it voluntarily again.

I’ll be here, covering the end of the campaign for as long and as well as I can. If you aren’t on the list already to get this newsletter in your inbox, you can sign up or upgrade below. And if you already subscribe, share it with someone else:

1  Or, any two of NC, AZ, and GA, if he wins Pennsylvania.