It took 3 days, lots of mockery, and being scooped by Colbert, but the New York Times finally got there

Finally talking about Trump's speeches.

Just to review, Saturday and Sunday Donald Trump gave a couple of speeches which draw all pretense of being a short of a cry for fascism. We talked about this Monday. Paul Campos also had an excellent post which included an appropriately outraged video commentary from former Republican operative Tim Miller. It also quotes Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

If you go back to our previous post and watch the clips we included, or watch the Tim Miller video, or review any reasonably comprehensive article on the speeches, I think you will see that every single one of Paxton's boxes has been checked here and in other recent statements by Trump and Vance.

I have great respect for reporters, editors, and publishers who are doing their best pushing back against the torrent of misinformation coming from Donald Trump. Still, when a candidate’s policy on crime calls for a day of violence, it should always be front page news. https://t.co/UvdJqtka8Q

— Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) October 1, 2024

These speeches have generated a great deal of attention – – even Stephen Colbert's Monday night monologue included clips from the Sunday speech arguing for a "day of violence" where police would have free reign to deal with an imaginary wave of looters – – but one place you didn't see any significant coverage was in the New York Times, either the online or print edition.

Finally (and I strongly suspect the criticism the paper was receiving on this was a factor), Trump's speech was finally deemed newsworthy by the New York Times, at least in the online edition. The story itself left a a lot to be desired. There was considerable sane washing, downplaying of language, and the complete omission of the most disturbing parts, but with the paper of record, I suppose we have to take what we can get.


Queued up to the part about Trump's speech.