“Trump is the first New Yorker to be president since FDR, yet city and state Democrats won’t even show basic respect for the office,”
New York Post
columnist Michael Goodwin
lamented
last Sunday.
We haven’t found many journalists – or many New Yorkers, for that matter – who are upset that the president has decided to change his official residence to Florida. But for the
Post
, Trump's decision deserved the “who lost China?” treatment. “New York is paying a high price for the pols’ partisan games, and now the price is going up because Trump has had enough,” Goodwin fumed.
Love for the president is hard to find in this city, but in the pages of the
Post
it abounds.
On Wednesday, after a rough night at the polls for Trump and some damning new testimony by Ambassador Gordon Sondland, the tabloid chose to bypass the unpleasantness in favor of the
news
that Trump will march in next week’s Veterans Day Parade. “He is loved by our veterans for sure,” parade co-producer Bill White told the paper.
The Soviet-style coverage of Trump has been a disappointment for a paper that always managed to stay feisty even when covering the boss’ friends. A mere two years ago, it didn't hide its feelings about about Donald Jr.’s infamous meeting at Trump Tower with Russians promising dirt on the Clinton campaign. “Donald Trump Jr. is an idiot,” it
concluded
.
The previous month, an
editorial
blasted Trump’s Twitter habit in a three-word editorial: "Stop. Just Stop."
But in retrospect that period was just a bump in the road in Rupert Murdoch’s treatment of the president. These days,
the Post
is the first paper Trump reads in the morning, and he’s phone buddies with Goodwin, the paper’s marquee columnist.
“It’s so unfair, just so unfair,” Trump told Goodwin about the New York politicians who disparage him. “They should be holding parades, they should be proud to have someone from the city as president of the United States.”
Goodwin was sympathetic. “I sensed both anger and hurt in his voice,” he wrote.
A skilled columnist, Goodwin is a former
New York Times
bureau chief and
Daily News e
ditorial page editor who has drifted increasingly rightward over the years. Like Rudy Giuliani, another former moderate, he has taken up residence deep in Trumpland. These days he's a Fox News contributor and seems to be competing on a daily basis with Sean Hannity for pejoratives to hurl at Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler are special targets for their
“impeachment jihad.”
“Granted, Trump is not your ordinary president and there are few norms he hasn’t shattered,” Goodwin wrote. “But it remains a fact that his greatest sin was defeating Hillary Clinton and smashing the legacy of Barack Obama. For that, he must be destroyed.
“And if America goes down with him, that’s fine with the far-left crazies,” Goodwin concluded. “They never liked the country anyway.”
The columnist is hardly leading the charge by himself. The paper’s front page
on Halloween
featured Pelosi cast as Freddy Krueger and Jerry Nadler as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from
Ghostbusters
.
There are outliers at the paper.
John Podhoretz, the paper’s estimable editorial section columnist, is as close to a Never Trumper as the
Post
has (though he has
resisted
the label) and hasn't even closed to the door to impeachment.
“To promote the idea that we don’t deserve an answer to the question of his behavior with Ukraine…is to say that it would be illegitimate to investigate the president at all,”
he wrote
recently. “That’s absurd.”
Yesterday, Podhoretz
offered
a spin-free assessment of Tuesday’s election and its meaning for 2020. “As an overall indication of the mood of the national electorate, Democrats have the wind at their backs,” he wrote.
Podhoretz is the paper’s former editorial page editor and a preeminent American neoconservative. Few others at the paper get away with such apostasy.
Like Trump, we dive into the
Post
first thing every morning. We love it not for its politics but for its irreverence, the exuberant abandon with which it goes after people in power. When it comes to Trump, though, it’s become downright boring. There’s no greater sin than that.
