A note on my coverage. My goal in writing about Trump has been to write about him like he was any other president. That standard is practically impossible to keep, because his offenses are at a scale and frequency so far beyond the historic norm.
The standard of "Would this story merit dropping everything and writing about immediately?" is one normal presidents meet every few weeks, or less. For Trump it's several times a day.
Yesterday @gregpmiller reported Trump making one of the most anti-Semitic comments any modern president has uttered. A normal pol would be facing calls to resign over this: nymag.com/intelligencer/…
@gregpmiller last night, trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. Again, a resignation-level by normal standards nymag.com/intelligencer/…
@gregpmiller In the middle of that, I wrote about the Senate Ukraine report, which is the culmination of a scandal over which Trump was impeached nymag.com/intelligencer/…
@gregpmiller Anyway, I am not complaining, merely noting that the effect of all this is to make my goal of holding Trump to normal standards impossible. There's just too much. And I think this happens with political journalists in general.
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Actually, Barack Obama was a highly popular and effective president, and the campaign to convince Democratic elites he was a failure was deeply misguided nymag.com/intelligencer/…
David Dayen can't respond to the argument, so he'll just lean into the premise any argument coming from an ideological enemy should be ignored
I think it's clear to anybody who has read the article that the argument is that Biden did pass "large-scale green-energy investments," but his domestic agenda was OVERALL much less transformative than Obama's.
“Hiding beneath the surface” is a construction writers like to use when they want to claim somebody is making an argument they are not in fact making. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
This @qjurecic piece cites two articles, one of which is mine, against disqualifying Trump on 14th Amendment grounds. My argument is that the stakes (throwing a presidential nominee off the ballot late in the game) requires a no-doubt claim. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
@qjurecic It is clear J6 was an insurrection, and I *agree” Trump engaged in insurrection, but there is a wisp of doubt about the claim Trump personally engaged in insurrection: nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Interviewing Trump has some news value, and I appreciate @kaitlancollins is trying hard to stop him from filibustering, but giving him a pro-Trump audience is a disaster and I don't understand the choice.
The whole effect of the crowd to cheer him and laugh at his jokes is to frame Trump as the tribune of the people.
Even in a world where @kaitlancollins was correcting every Trump lie as they spewed forth -- and we are pretty far from that world -- the braying crowd would make Trump look like the victor.
My feature on the Republican campaign to gain ideological control of the schools has gotten some interesting and positive responses. Here's @rweingarten
Why Republicans have become obsessed with schools as centers of political indoctrination nymag.com/intelligencer/…
My story covers a lot of ground, but I want to highlight a few points. First, the Republican belief that schools are inculcating progressivism is not entirely imaginary:
The trouble is that first, Republicans have exaggerated the scope of the left-wing slant in schools:
I agree -- this should move your Bayesian priors, but I suspect there's also a lot more investigation coming, and the most sensible thing is to hold off conclusive judgment.
Worth noting that left-wing echo chamber Twitter has retroactively decided my column is mainly about the Reed affidavit, but it is in fact almost entirely about reporting in the New York Times. Just look at the headline, the photo, or 90% of the text! nymag.com/intelligencer/…
What is chef's kiss about this tweet is that both halves being compared -- my view of the Reed affidavit, and my view of youth transition research -- are completely made up