The Trump Enabler

When the histories are written, the New York Times will be remembered for being one of the primary reasons Trump happened. The Times has some fine writers and columnists, but during the 2016 election cycle no media source with such a massive platform did more to undermine Hillary Clinton and normalize Trump. The Times continues to wallow in "journalistic" sewage.

Daily Kos Managing Editor Barbara Morrill explicated Times fanboy Michael S. Schmidt's fawning tongue bath interview with Trump, wherein nothing Trump said was challenged, and everything was validated. Natasha Bertrand of Business Insider, who has emerged as one of the finest reporters of the Trump era, also had a revealing tweet:

It was no surprise that one of Trump's primary Times enablers, that paragon of content-free access "journalism" Maggie Haberman, jumped on Twitter to defend her colleague.

x Said with equal respect, your public persona has become based in part on the very real idea that this president is quite different than others. That goes for almost all manner of interaction https://t.co/rcKd1ybEJs Ã¢ÂÂ Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) December 29, 2017

Daniel Dale, Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, of course, also has been one of the finest reporters of the Trump era, and their exchange once again revealed Haberman for the failure she is. But as the Times and its staff and its enablers once again attempt to salvage its devastated reputation, all its excuses are revealed in the very identity of the hack sent to interview Trump: Michael S. Schmidt. Schmidt’s name should be familiar to anyone who remembers how the concocted scandal of Clinton's private email server came to be the dominant, and in the end determinative, story of the 2016 election cycle. Because it was the same Michael S. Schmidt of the same New York Times who first made that non-story a national headline in the first place.

History will not be kind.