Big Mommy is Not Coming to Save Us

there are no refs, there are no refs, there are no refs

There’s this dude, Dan Froomkin. It’s unclear what his job is, exactly, but he’s one soldier in an army of liberals who loudly insist on a plainly false claim about this country and how it works: that Donald Trump endures as a political force because no one will tell the truth about him. This is the “why has the media gone easy on Trump??” narrative, which has somehow flourished for almost a decade now despite the fact that Donald Trump has been covered more critically by our media than any other figure in my lifetime, seemingly to his advantage. The Froomkins of the world are incapable of believing what should be a central political lesson of the past ten years, which is that Donald Trump is a uniquely divisive politician with a lot of baggage who still inspires deep love from vast throngs of people. This election is very tight because Kamala Harris is and has always been a limited politician who has particular difficulty speaking off the cuff, because the Democrats are a feckless center-right party who stand for nothing and thus can’t offer any compelling alternative to the Republicans, and because we live in a country with bozo citizens ruled by a corrupt and evil plutocrat class. But it’s also very tight because Donald Trump is extremely popular with about a third of the population in the United States, a county with an apathetic citizenry and an idiotic presidential election system, such that a guy only a third of the country likes can win the presidency.

Most everyone knows who Donald Trump is, and enough of them like him that he might win next week. They are not unaware of the many charges against him. Some know about them and are willing to ignore them because he will cut taxes and dismantle regulation; many others know about all the various accusations against his character and credibility and it only makes them like him more. And no amount of elite media tsk-tsk-tsking has ever hurt him, ever. Indeed, it’s plainly the case that the media’s antipathy towards Trump is one of his greatest political assets. Earlier this year Froomkin wrote that The Times “isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.” Yes, there are people in the world who seem to sincerely believe both that the New York Times is insufficiently hard on Donald Trump and that, were they harder, he’d be toast by now. But the paper has in fact relentlessly underlined the stakes of the race, has never stopped bringing up Trump’s derangement, and only told the plain truth when it discussed Biden’s age and infirmity. The trouble is that a lot of people like Donald Trump more than they like the New York Times.

Let’s look at the headlines of some recent pieces from the NYT Opinion section.

A Racist Joke at Trump’s New York Rally Could Be a Costly Mistake

Onstage in New York, Trump Gazes Lovingly at His Reflection

That Revolting Rally Was a Sign of Weakness

My Fellow Republicans, It's Time to Say Enough With Trump: The time has come for my fellow Republicans to put country above party.

Trump Says the Country Is 'Dying.' The Data Say Otherwise: Look at trends, not anecdotes.

Why Trump Has an Edge With These 11 Michigan Voters - Even Though They Don't Like Him

Trump’s Biggest Con: Pretending to Support American Workers

Anita Hill: The Smearing of Kamala Harris

‘Crazy’ Is Beginning to Sound Like an Understatement [it’s Trumpers who are crazy, if you couldn’t guess - ed.]

MAGA Unchained in Madison Square Garden: Trump's big rally featured unadulterated racism and more talk of “enemies from within.”

Michelle Obama: ‘I Am Asking You, From the Core of My Being, to Take Our Lives Seriously’

The Real Reasons the G.O.P. Is Spending Millions on Anti-Trans Ads: Republicans are banking on an issue that isn’t a priority for voters - trans rights.

Two Billionaires, Two Newspapers, Two Acts of Self-Sabotage [because they didn’t put out endorsements saying Trump is bad -ed.]

Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being ‘Never Trump’

How Bad Do You Want It, Ladies? – Donald, your insecurity is showing

Could Eminem Snap Gen X Voters Back to Reality? [by saying Trump is bad - ed.]

Trump Acts Erratically. Is This Age-Related Decline?

Don Jr. Is Making Plans [e-e-e-evil plans! -ed.]

Maggie Haberman on What an Unleashed Trump Might Do [bad stuff! -ed.]

The Guardrails [That Kept Trump Caged In, Metaphorically -ed.] Failed. Now It’s Down to Us.

Trump Is Telling Us What He Would Do. Believe Him: The former president's most disturbing statements are not bluster. They are a road map to what he will do if elected again.

How Trump Could Bankrupt Social Security

Trump’s Election Reversal Dreams Are Dead [score one for the good guys!!! -ed.]

There Are Four Anti-Trump Pathways We Failed to Take. There Is a Fifth.

Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy and the Unconfirmables of a Second Trump Administration -Back in the White House, Trump would get input from a bestiary of nihilists, destructionists and even criminals. [are criminals worse than “destructionists”? – ed.]

Why Trump’s Closing Argument Is Full of ‘Locker Room Talk’

James Carville: Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win

America Is Playing With Fire: It's both frightening and disturbing to think that American voters could once again make someone as unhinged and unbridled as Donald Trump the president [unhinged AND unbridled! -ed.]

A Second Trump Administration Would Be a Carnival of Corruption and Greed

Why the Oil and Gas Industry Is So Afraid of Kamala Harris: The Democratic candidate's agenda takes climate change seriously

Sorry, Trump: 'There Is No American Race or Blood That Outsiders Can Pollute'

The One Thing About Trump I Am Not Worried About: This time around, it would be much harder for Trump to try to steal the election

Trump's Charity Toward None: The Catholic Church's latest scandal: fawning over Donald

American Business Cannot Afford to Risk Another Trump Presidency: Donald Trump is not running as a champion of business. He is running as a tribune of populist grievance.

My friends: that all comes from about ten days of the paper’s Opinion section.

It’s incredible that so many people sincerely believe that the Times is a secretly pro-Trump publication, as they don’t even bother to pretend that their op/ed section is a space where actual pro-Trump sentiment is going to be shared, outside of a once-or-twice a year novelty piece. (Pieces which inevitably result in Democrats pissing their pants in rage, to no effect.) There is indeed a loud right-of-center contingent there, but they’re all Never Trumpers, or else they’re like Ross Douthat, which is to say firmly, safely outside of mainstream Trumpist culture war. David French is the country’s most prominent Never Trumper, and Bret Stephens is a Never Trumper, and Pamela Paul is [edit] anti-Trump, and David Brooks is inhabited by the ghost of David Broder. If they go so easy on Trump, why can they not scare up a single authentically pro-Trump voice for the Opinion page? This recent NYT piece asks nine members of their editorial team to reflect on who they’re voting for and why. All nine are voting for Democrats. It’s a bunch of plugs for Harris or the Democrats generally and one weird endorsement of an environmentalist who stole his wardrobe from the Lumineers tour bus. They couldn’t even find a single staffer to endorse a Republican for appearance’s sake, to ward off the obvious criticism. Not one!

There a bare handful of pieces that are mildly critical of the Democrats mixed in with the ones I’ve listed above, perhaps three or four, though usually from the perspective of being unhappy that they’re not running a better campaign against Trump. There’s some opportunistic policy axe-grinding, such as in this whine about inflation… in which the author declares himself an Anti-Trumper in the first sentence. One of the Wallace-Wells brothers, the Mario and Luigi of soggy liberal catastrophism, complained about both candidates sucking up to the crypto industry. What you certainly won’t find are any pieces that are straightforward and unapologetic endorsements of Donald Trump, his party, or his agenda. None. Because they can’t run such pieces; if they did, they’d face rage from subscribers and revolt from staffers. The people in charge there know that much better than I do. People don’t like their Wordle and tres leches recipes sullied with proximity to honest-to-go Trumpism. What I can’t comprehend is how people like Froomkin can look at a list like the one above and think that an independent newspaper that doggedly holds on to a vestigial, now-theoretical non-partisan philosophy could be more anti-Trump - or how he could look at that list and still think that it matters what the New York Times says about Trump at all.

I almost feel bad for the bigwigs at the NYT. Almost. They are, after all, the news media’s last winners, a publication that by dint of prestige and commercial success can operate with almost total impunity, an imperial newspaper. But you might hope that the relentless way they have prosecuted the anti-Trump case, and the fact that this effort has conspicuously failed to placate BlueAnon, would compel them to ask themselves a hard question: why, exactly, do they continue to maintain the limp pretense that the paper is in any sense neutral or nonpartisan, in any capacity - as a host of opinions, as an employer, as a newsgathering agency? Why bother? It would certainly seem that a healthy majority of the people who work there want the paper to be a straightforward liberal Democrat propaganda outfit; conservatives will never see them as anything but. The set of journalistic values that pushed papers like theirs into that direction in the first place is functionally dead. (You have to have a newspaper industry for there to be some sort of newspaper industry ethical code.) Complete surrender when it comes to courting conservative readers has already been accomplished and has not hurt their thriving business model. The subscribers just want to be told that everything they already believe is correct.

And, most importantly, even if they’re trying to make their argumentative spaces friendly to any other kind of person than two-Subaru-household Democrats, they’re obviously failing to accomplish such a thing. If you go out of your way to pull together a collection of your staffers to talk about Decision 2024 and how they’re voting and why, and not one of them is even pretending to have entertained the thought of voting for Republicans, and no one in editorial seems to have noticed that fact… why not just give Dan Froomkin what he wants? Why not put Nancy Pelosi on the masthead? Why not just become the Park Slope Pravda that your critics, and your employees, and the market want you to be? Whatever once inspired this Argos-like devotion to the fig leaf of neutrality, which no one within or without your publication still believes in, you are not achieving anything like balance or neutrality or ideological diversity in fact. Handwringing about deficits and talking about prudent market reforms isn’t leftist, but we’re talking about a pro-Democrat bias here, and the Democrats are objectively a center-right party. Either way, you’re doing just enough to give Republicans all the ammunition they need to call you biased while still enraging Democrat ISIS with your limp waves at balance. For what? For who? What is this pretense for?

I mean, I still think it would be good if the country’s largest journalism outfits existed as something other than fonts of Democratic talking points. But I’m afraid I can only afford to pay for the one subscription.

I’m sorry to fixate on the Times, on the occasion of this election, but the paper is a convenient synecdoche for our educated liberal class and their relationship to authority. They have such exacting demands for the New York Times because the New York Times is the paper of record, which is to say, the organizing manual of the people in charge, a vestige of the comforting sense of normalcy from childhoods many people miss, the Way Things Work. The Times is to front-of-class liberal strivers now what Mr. Rogers was to them as children - a comforting orienting mechanism that suggests to them that there is some moral authority that has dominion over the universe and ensures that, in the long run, the good goodies defeat the bad baddies. And this has been reflected again and again in the Trump era, the fact that American progressivism is dedicated to no policy, precept, or perspective more ardently than to their belief that eventually, the teacher will mete out classroom discipline and the world will function according to their own sense of transcendent order. After all, they as a class have lived such safe, privileged lives that things have usually worked out for them that way. So they engage with politics in exactly this way, thinking that the average voter gives a single fuck about whether Trump “violates norms,” insisting on talking about January 6th instead of paying for groceries, whining and whining and whining in the expectation that, eventually, justice will settle in the way it reliably does on Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.

I have long referred to this behavior as working the refs. Like the way Mike Tomlin jaws at the refs at a Steelers game, hoping to build up some capital with them for later in the game. Of course, the crucial part of that behavior is that at an NFL game referees actually exist. There’s an ineradicable beliefs, among liberals in general and media liberals especially, that there are some arbiters of truth and justice in the world who will hear the pleas of the righteous and come save them if only they ask loudly enough, often enough. If only they demonstrate just how badly things have gone wrong, surely the world must necessarily provide relief. Donald Trump stoked an insurrection! He grabs women by the pussy! He cares nothing for norms, rules, or institutions! He’s uncouth! But the only thing more indifferent to these complaints than the voters is the universe. Yes, Donald Trump is a monster. But so what? What does that have to do with politics? Nobody cares. They knew what he was in 2016, and they elected him anyway. You have to have a political plan to defeat him, an appeal to make ordinary, distracted, low-information voters prefer your agenda, and 21st century Democrats still don’t know what that plan looks like. Mostly because the Democrats are a party without an identity, and a vile party with an identity beats a party without one.

Another way I would put all this is that liberals never stop looking for Big Mommy, the nurturing maternal force that turns pain and fright into happiness and confidence, the serene and benevolent authority that will restore order if only the righteous ask. The inescapable cry of Democrats in 2016 was “This is not normal!” I still sigh when I think about it. “This is not normal.” As if there was ever any such thing as normal; as if it was normal when George Bush slaughtered Iraqis and fiddled while thousands of Black people drowned in the street in New Orleans; as if it would matter, in any way, if we were to somehow collectively decide that what was happening was in fact not normal. There are no refs! It doesn’t matter how much you beg. There are no refs. Big Mommy is not coming to save you. There is no transcendent force out there that will restore justice for you if you beg. The people who believe there are mostly went through life as anxious, endlessly-striving Type A children of helicopter parents, which engendered in them a faith in an orderly universe that I’m afraid does not exist once you find problems your parents can’t fix, once the rotors are no longer egg-beatering above you. You don’t have to succumb to seeing all of politics as selfishness and fear of the other. You do have to show people that their own best interest and the best interest of the worst off are one and the same. Liberals should be really good at that. But the Democrats are hamstrung by their dogged commitment to Clintonism and Third Way politics. Yet somehow when they lose, their supporters revert to “This is not normal! Big Mommy, why is this happening?”

If you want to appeal to the voters, cool. The evidence is very clear: they don’t care about Trump’s profligate personal corruption. Sorry. Find something else to talk about.

Al Gore lost and deserved to lose because he ran a horrific campaign. Hillary Clinton lost and deserved to lose because she ran a horrific campaign. Kamala Harris is running a horrific campaign and, while I pray to God she wins, she does not deserve to. And until the Democrats, and their representatives in the media, and their donor class, and their voters stop acting as though Donald Trump’s monstrousness itself will bring them victory, they can’t move forward. Trump is old and unhealthy and will not be with us much longer. But there will always be conservative demagogues who exploit xenophobia, economic insecurity, and fear. You have to beat them with appeals to making a better world for voters; you have to give voters their bread. Voters don’t care about norms, and the universe doesn’t care about what’s fair. And if that’s too destabilizing to the worldview of a certain kind of person, they should take it up with their therapists. Though I suspect, sadly, that therapy might not be too constructive for many of them. Because I’m willing to bet that they want their therapists to be Big Mommy too.