Why does the New York Times keep normalizing Trump's racism and cruelty?

This is the man who believes he has better genes than everyone else.

Let’s take a stab right here at the beginning and see if we can agree on what is real and what is not.  We have two candidates running for president as major party nominees:  One of them is a former district attorney and U.S. Senator and is the current Vice President of the United States.  The other is a convicted felon who is facing multiple federal indictments for serious crimes involving attempting to overturn the results of the last election and the theft of U.S national security secrets. 

Got that?  It’s quite a stark distinction, isn’t it? 

With only 25 days to go before election day, how many times have you seen the presidential campaign spoken of in those terms in the national media, especially in the New York Times?  How many mentions of Donald Trump’s felony convictions and federal indictments did you read yesterday, just to take one day out of the hundreds that the campaign has been covered over the last couple of years?

We have never had a convicted felon running to become the President of the United States before.  We have never had a candidate running for president who has been adjudged by a court to have committed rape.  We have never had a candidate for president who is known to have had regular contact by telephone with the leader of a foreign nation that is at war with one of our allies and has supplied weapons to at least one terrorist organization that is engaged in open warfare with United States forces, as the Houthis in Yemen are with the U.S. Navy. 

This is brand new.  This is news.  All of it.  And yet you turn on cable news or you pick up the New York Times, and the presidential candidate who is a felon, a rapist, and has engaged in what could be called traitorous contacts with an enemy of this country is treated like he is merely the Republican candidate running against the Democrat.

There is more.  Donald Trump, in speaking about the issue of immigration, has inserted eugenics and his belief in the superiority of the white race into the campaign.  The New York Times published a story on Wednesday about recent speeches Trump gave when he spoke about “good genes” and “bad genes” and called it in the story’s lead paragraph “another old habit” of Trump’s. 

This is what I’m talking about:  What the New York Times did in that story was normalize Trump’s white supremacy and cruelty.  They normalized Trump even as they quoted him saying in a speech to what the Times called “a substantially white crowd” in Minneapolis, Minnesota: “You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”

These are the words of a white supremacist, a believer in the same theories Hitler used to justify the extermination of Jews and others with “undesirable” genes in Germany.  The Times wrote off Trump’s use of Hitler’s phrase, “poisoning the blood of our country” to describe undocumented immigrants by quoting Trump’s claim that he is “not a student of Hitler.”

I’m not a student of Hitler; few of us are.  In fact, the only person I know who is a student of Hitler is my old Voice colleague and friend, Ron Rosenbaum, who wrote the critically acclaimed book, “Explaining Hitler.”  But all of us, every single one of us, including editors and writers for the New York Times, can recognize unreserved racism and eugenics when they hear such horrors coming out of the mouth of a man even the Times recognizes as holding a “long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”

But it’s not a “fascination.”  Trump believes in his own superiority over others, and he has expressed it because of his genetic link to his uncle who was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Same genes, we have the genes,” Trump has claimed. “We’re smart people. We’re like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones doesn’t work out so well, right?”  The Times called those remarks by Trump “the racehorse theory.” 

No.  It’s not the racehorse theory.  It is the race-ism of Donald Trump stated out loud again and again, and he’s using his racist expressions of white superiority and genetic “purity” to crank up his MAGA followers to get himself elected as President of the United States.

There is so much that is not normal about this man and his candidacy.  But let’s take just one more example:  Trump’s reaction to the destruction and loss of life from Hurricanes Helene and Milton over the last two weeks.  We have simply never had a political figure before Donald Trump who made a conscious decision not only to use such tragedy and death for his own political advantage, but to get between the rescue and recovery efforts of the federal government and those injured by these disasters in order to damage his political opponent. 

To use just one example, there was a story this morning about a man in North Carolina who has refused help with food and recovery efforts because he believes lies spread by Trump that if victims accept federal help, FEMA will “take your house from you.”  A relative of the man told a radio call-in show that his uncle had run out of food and water and still wouldn’t accept supplies of both from FEMA.  The relative called into the show to ask listeners if they had any advice about how to deal with his uncle.  “He’s in a cult.  I can’t get through to him,” the man said.

Cults have leaders, and this cult’s leader is Donald Trump, and he is using his hold over his followers to gain political advantage and get elected president.  It is not possible at this point to link the deaths that occurred after Hurricane Helene to the specific lies spread by Donald Trump and his mouthpieces such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has accused the Democratic Party of “controlling the weather” in order to create these hurricanes so they can use them for political advantage.

It’s not necessary to prove the damage caused by the lies of Donald Trump and his Republican allies. All that is necessary is to call attention to the storm of political crimes committed every day by Trump and Vance and Greene and the rest of them.  We already know that women have lost their lives because of the bans on abortion that were passed in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. The names of women who have died because they were denied emergency abortions in states with abortion bans have been called out by Democrats, including Vice President Harris and her running mate Tim Walz.

This is not an alternate reality we’re living in.  These are real people who are suffering in North Carolina and Tennessee and Florida, and their suffering has been made worse by Donald Trump just because he wants votes.  Real women who have been denied the right to abortion because of three justices on the Supreme Court appointed by Trump are suffering because of him. 

Lies such as Trump is spreading about immigrants “polluting the blood” about the supremacy of one race over another, about crimes that are not being committed by immigrants and Blacks and others – all of these lies have real and deleterious effects on real people and on our political life.  That such lies are being spread by a convicted felon and rapist should be in the lead paragraphs of stories on the front pages of papers and on cable news shows every single day.