Maybe the dominoes really are falling at The New York Times. Last week I wrote, enthusiastically, about Paul Krugman, an insufferable my-brain’s-on-Windex crank who contributed pro-Democrat bile to the paper for 25 years, announcing his retirement. I think he was shown the door, or sensed the coming pundit execution, but was surprised at the subdued reaction from left-wingers on social media. Had Krugman slinked away a year ago, it would’ve been seen as one more example that democracy—the “American Experiment”—was hanging by a sheet of agate cold type rescued from a bottom drawer. No replacement is yet on the docket, but don’t expect another David French or Ezra Klein. I can smell from Baltimore that Nicholas Kristof is next on the down-escalator.
On Dec. 17th, Bret Stephens, the sometimes-conservative who was poached from The Wall Street Journal in 2017, told Times readers, in a column headlined “Done With Never Trump,” that it was time to give the president-elect a pass in the coming year and tone down the vitriolic rhetoric that he, and most of the liberal media, have repeatedly droned on about since 2016. Stephens was in the second tier of the #NeverTrump brigades (Times editorial writers, The New Yorker’s David Remnick and propagandist-for-hire David Frum led the charge), mostly because on occasion he committed the sin of agreeing with a Trump policy in his first term, but his words must sting those who’ve Kept Strong.
He wrote: “We [Never Trumpers] also talked a lot about democracy. That’s important: The memory of Jan. 6 and Trump’s 2020 election lies were the main reason I voted for Kamala Harris. But if democracy means anything, it’s that ordinary people, not elites, get to decide how important an event like Jan. 6 is to them. Turns out, not so much. What ordinary people really cared about this year were the high cost of living and the chaos at the border. Why did Trump—so often deprecated by his critics as a fortunate fool—understand this so well while we fecklessly carried on about the soul of the nation?”
He’s correct, even if his condescending mention of “ordinary people” shows that he’s only on Step Three in Pundit Rehab. It’s a common “elite journalist” tic, referring to Americans who don’t sniff their rarefied air as “ordinary” or “average.” I don’t know what that means: is a helicopter pilot, a janitor, a teacher, a beautician, a security guard, a mechanic, a poet or publicist “ordinary” or “average”? As David Dinkins, the late ill-fated mayor of New York City said in 1990, his constituents comprised a “gorgeous mosaic.”
Stephens continues: “What else did we not sufficiently appreciate? That, as much as Trump might lie, Americans also felt lied to by the left—particularly when it came to the White House cover-up of Biden’s physical and mental decline.” The Wall Street Journal ran a long story last week about the Biden “cover-up,” which, while interesting but irrelevant at this point, mostly showed that the Beltway media had the goods on Biden but kept the lid on it. One WSJ excerpt: “If the president was having an off day, meetings could be scrapped altogether. On one such occasion, in the spring of 2021, a national security official explained to another aide why a meeting needed to be rescheduled. ‘He has good days and bad days, and today was a bad day so we’re going to address this tomorrow,’ the former aide recalled the official saying.”
It still stymies me that the DNC and alleged Party leaders didn’t stamp their feet and insist Biden step down and allow for a primary where a functioning Democrat—Kamala, Mayor Pete, Gavin Newsom, The Ghost of Will Rogers—could take on Trump for an entire campaign. Arrogance, I guess, but also really, really stupid.
Some Times pundits haven’t yet been contacted by management to tone it down, at least for several months. Frank Bruni wrote last week the outdated, once-standard Trump jeremiad, completely missing the point: “If Trump fails by established metrics, he’ll declare those metrics bogus and delegitimize the experts and agencies that calculate them. And there’ll be no shortage of partisan players in the Babel of news media and social media to support him in that scheme. We saw that when they indulged his lies after the 2020 election. They’ve grown only more submissive since.”
That’s a Bluesky interpretation from a columnist/Duke professor who simply doesn’t matter anymore. Whether Bruni’s aware of that, I don’t have the foggiest, but at some point he’ll awake from his on-repeat reverie, and think, holy cow, I’m behind the curve.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023