Career Opportunities

I wonder if Peter Baker, The New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, ever considers his career—a spear carrier for the Democratic Party—and balances his estimable salary against the reality of his status as an irrelevant hack. Cash is cash (he’s also an author and cable TV guest), I’d guess, and maybe he consoles himself, happily ensconced in an “elite” Beltway bubble, that at least he’s not Jon Meacham, the historian/fabulist who told Joe Biden in 2021, with a minimum of arm-twisting, that he was the modern FDR. That was as grandiose as Donald Trump claiming, many times during his first term, that he was a more significant president than Abraham Lincoln.

Anything goes today—as Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer (now moving on to “new projects”) found out after her “shock” poll days before the election that put Kamala Harris three points ahead of Trump in reliably red Iowa, which made Democrats jubilant, feeling the “vibe” and “joy,” but less so when Selzer was off by 16 points—and if Baker does decide to leave the Times, the first stop after the affluent, modern Betty Ford Center known as The Atlantic, might be a position with the incoming Trump administration as chief stenographer. Throw Baker a million bucks and that might seal the deal—mortgages, upkeep of swimming pools, club memberships to pay for—with the approval of his wife Susan Glasser, a New Yorker anti-Republican stalwart. Bipartisanship now, presumably, has wiggle room for power couples plying slanted “journalism” for decreasing audiences.

(Glasser might be a tough sell, at least right now. She’s kept the TDS intact, writing last week: "Eight years into Trump, none of us can honestly claim to have figured out how to cover Trump. I certainly have not. We’re all worn out, and he hasn’t even been inaugurated, again, yet. At such a time, perhaps moving to Canada is an appropriate response. I haven’t ruled anything out. In the meantime, I’ll keep writing it all down. I don’t need a catchy slogan. It’s another Thursday in the Trump era, and a lot of crazy shit has happened.”)

Baker’s I-wrote-in-my-sleep story that appeared last Friday, headlined “The ‘Landslide’ That Wasn’t: Trump and Allies Pump Up His Narrow Victory," was an exercise in futility—a lot of that going around in the wake of the election—in which the reporter correctly says, that despite Trump Camp rhetoric, the election wasn’t a landslide in the manner of Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972, but that’s not the point. Despite partisan claims to the contrary, Trump’s Electoral College and popular vote victory was the most consequential “changing of the guard” since Reagan stunned the political world by soundly defeating hapless Jimmy Carter in 1980—in what was supposed to be a squeaker—and almost overnight the political and popular culture shifted rightward.

Baker writes that Trump’s narrow popular vote victory was the third smallest since 1888, with the exception of JFK in 1960 and Nixon in ’68. (It’s stupefying, even today, that the reverence for JFK continues, and most Americans—if history’s still taught in high school and colleges—likely assume he won by a landslide.) So what? Aside from right-wing charlatans from, say, Newsmax, I don’t recall on Nov. 3, a single MSM reporter, pundit, “guest columnist” or analyst predicting anything but a “toss-up” election, and no one believed—me included—that Trump would capture the popular vote, however slim the margin. As I wrote last week, that’s why instead of mass demonstrations that surely would’ve occurred had Trump won with 276 EVs, the scope of his victory was so clear that the anger was muted, giving way to acceptance and the reasonable hope that Democrats might have a very pleasing midterm election two years from now, and, presuming a measure of humility, win the White House with a moderate candidate.

Baker’s beef is that Trump, and his allies, claim he has a “mandate” going into his second term. Depending on the pliable definition of “mandate,” it’s not inaccurate, and not uncommon for an incoming president to exaggerate his victory; that the GOP controls all three branches of the government isn’t insignificant. He writes: “[Trump] proved that he is not the historical aberration that many political strategists thought he was, doomed to be repudiated and not re-elected. He demonstrated that more Americans agreed with his view of a dystopian nation in crisis and were willing to accepted a convicted felon as their leader than considered him the unacceptable fascist-leaning threat to democracy that his opponents described.” He slips in “convicted felon” and “fascist-leaning threat to democracy” with the ease of a propagandist; it’s telling that he mentions Kamala Harris just once in a lengthy article, probably because he wants to erase her disastrous campaign from his memory.

A corrective to that nonsense came from David Mamet over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal. He wrote: “Since the ’20 election I have feared a new American revolution, the leftist government proclaiming its intent to destroy parents whom it calls terrorists and citizens whom it deems insurrectionists. During the past four years Mr. Trump—raided, indicted, convicted, sued, slandered and shot—continued to grow in popularity, and attracted the like-minded into a coalition stronger than that of the left.”

That’s “turning the page.”

—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023