Image by Stéphan Valentin.

Last Sunday’s New York Times featured the paper’s top White House correspondent Peter Baker’s late-breaking discovery that “In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity Is Not Trump’s Mission.”

Below I dig into the Times’ stunning unearthing of this breakthrough story—who knew? – and how “the national paper of record” relates its discovery to Donald Trump’s response to the assassination of the fascist youth leader Charlie Kirk. I offer a critique in the form of italicized interjections.

Any More Late Bulletins?

NYT/Baker: President Trump does not subscribe to the traditional notion of being president for all Americans… Politics…is about division — debating big ideas vigorously until one side wins an election or carries the vote in Congress. But [no recent US president has] practiced the politics of division as ferociously and consistently as Mr. Trump, for whom it has been the defining characteristic of his time on the national stage.

Street: As my father (a high school and college cub reporter at his town’s local newspaper) used to say, “any more late bulletins?”

The Times’ storyline here is more than a decade old. It is quite an understatement: Trump is a wannabe fascist strongman-for-life who is waging war on the majority of Americans and on previously normative bourgeois democracy and rule of law (such as they are) with a viciously racist, sexist, violent, and xenophobic nationalist politics of “Us and Them.”

The Times’ “traditional notion of being president” has always been a ruse. US presidents have primarily served the nation’s capitalist and imperialist ruling classes.

“Conventional Presidential Playbook”?

NYT/Baker: “The first few minutes of President Trump’s Oval Office address after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week followed the conventional presidential playbook. He praised the victim, asked God to watch over his family and talked mournfully of ‘a dark moment for America…”

Street: Not really. Charlie Kirk was a noxious fascist youth leader working to create a genocidal racist, arch-patriarchal, and Christian white- and xenophobic-nationalist Amerikkka. Trump spent the opening minutes of his “Oval Office [Fatherland News] address” noxiously extolling his fellow far-right hatemonger Kirk as a freedom-loving champion of democracy, justice, and free speech.

There’s a Name for This: FASCISM

NYT/Baker: “…Then he [Trump] tossed the playbook aside, angrily blaming the murder on the American left and vowing revenge. That was stark even for some viewers who might normally be sympathetic. When Mr. Trump appeared later on Fox News, a host noted that there were ‘radicals on the right,’ just as there were ‘radicals on the left,’ and asked, ‘How do we come back together?’ The president rejected the premise.........

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