Just hours after the first presidential debate of 2024, the New York Times editorial board, citing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, urged him to quit the race. They issued no such directive to Donald Trump, whose only moments of coherence during the 90-minute contest came in the form of lies.
The Times’s love affair with Trump is reprehensible—but it’s not new. In fact, it goes back decades.
The first evidence of the Times’s infatuation with Trump appeared on November 1, 1976: a profile so gushing that he could have written it himself, except for its use of complete sentences.
“He is tall, lean and blond, with dazzling white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford,” wrote Judy Klemesrud, who needed either new eyewear or a stint in rehab.
Klemesrud’s journalistic atrocity yields too many howlers to mention, but here’s an especially gobsmacking one: “Mr. Trump, who says he is publicity shy, allowed a reporter to accompany him on what he described as a typical work day.” (What rare access, Judy!)
Amazed that he is to receive an award from a Jewish group, the publicity-shy Trump notes, “I’m not even Jewish, I’m Swedish.” (He’s neither.) The article also states that he was “a student at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated first in his class in 1968.” A 1984 Times story belatedly corrected this whopper: “Although the school refused comment, the commencement program from 1968 does not list him as graduating with honors of any kind.”
That’s right—it took the Times eight years to (partially) correct an article as riddled with falsehoods as Melania’s book. The “paper of record” had already established its lax approach to holding Trump accountable.
Was the Times going easy on Donald because it had discovered what the New York tabloids had already figured out—that Trump stories sold papers?
The Times would surely deny that its pampering of Trump—then and now—has been driven by a thirst for profits. Money, however, clearly motivated one of the darkest chapters in the Times’s codependent relationship with him
I like to criticize the Times because I think its owner and editors pay attention. If too many influencers complain that the Times’ coverage doesn’t tell the whole truth about Trump, that they fail to report his latest outrage (was it his story about Arnold Palmer’s penis or his fake appearance as a worker in a McDonald’s, where the “customers” were carefully selected Trump partisans?)