Washington Post Editorial Board erases Trump's coup attempt when pondering 'policy' differences between candidates

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

On Sunday, the Washington Post editorial board saw fit to publish one of the most malignantly vapid essays their opinion page has ever mustered. No, really. It was veteran television writer David Slack who best summarized this shambling abomination.

Welp, I have just cancelled my @washingtonpost.com subscription over this absolute trash by their Editorial Board that paints to the differences between the two candidates as subtle shades of grey and conveniently leaves out that one candidate tried to violently overthrow the government.

You might imagine this to be an exaggeration—if we hadn't all been watching both the Post and the New York Times systemically whitewash the the supposed "differences" between the man whose attempted coup caused deaths inside the U.S. Capitol and the Democrats who would challenge him. The efforts of the Times to fluff the adjudicated rapist, tax cheat and seditionist has become nearly self-satirizing; the Post manages to come out slightly better only in comparison with that.

Or they did. As the campaign has worn on, the paper that kept splashing Democracy Dies in Darkness as their top-of-page motto after the horror of Trump's coup attempt was still fresh has spent considerable time and effort dimming the lights themselves. I will never understand how the top supposed news editors in the nation bend themselves so easily into pretend forgetfulness and invented nuance when faced with nation-shaking scandals and crimes. One of the candidates is a criminal who still faces trial for an attempt to use a militia-infused mob to thwart the constitutional transfer of power and whose closest allies have been unapologetic in their declarations that they not only have the right to attempt the same again, they have the right to purge government of their opposition and push through a litany of fascist acts that range from criminalizing opposition viewpoints to undertaking a mass deportation program that would, they vow, expel or intern roughly five percent of the nation's total residence. The other is a Democrat.

This is not a question of ignorance, and one would be hard pressed to blame it on stupidity. It is an act of intent that turns the potential installation of seditious conspirator and felon supported by what experts are now near-universally identifying as the most substantive fascist movement to emerge in this country in a century into this:

Labor Day marks the traditional start of the presidential campaign season — yet, by this point in the calendar, the major candidates have usually been running for months. Not so this election cycle. This race has one new candidate, and both she and the old one are scrambling to define their differences.

What. I mean ... what? That is the most vapid and petty description of the current moment one could possibly devise. Imagine yourself living through Jan. 6, 2021, and recoiling to Trump's act so fully, insisting that your paper would be institution that would stand in the way of that Darkness—only to return to drooling horserace critiques not even four short years later. Imagine yourself doing that and considering yourself savvy. Imagine writing any of this next part and not curling up with a bottle afterwards, ashamed to look your family in the eye:

Following President Joe Biden's exit from the race in July, Vice President Kamala Harris has had to quickly assemble a national campaign. Already, some differences between her and former president Donald Trump are stark. Ms. Harris offers an optimistic view of the country and its future and has largely refused to respond to Mr. Trump's jabs. Mr. Trump has chosen to make "American carnage," the term he coined in his 2017 inaugural address, his guiding theme. Hints of moderation that came after his near-assassination in July seem a thing of the past.
In character, style, tone, outlook, dignity, and, yes, race and gender, the two candidates are distinct.

What a rousingly valueless description of "some differences." What a masterful leap, to reference American carnage as if it were the campaign brand name, utterly meaningless, with nothing at all to do with the spilled blood Trump already stands directly responsible for. Yes indeed, these two candidates are somewhat distinct, we can keenly assert, what with one candidate adopting a style and tone and outlook that mirrors that of nearly any other past presidential candidate you can name, from either party, and with the other stewing in his own shouted conspiracy theories and raving, even in August, that if his opponent wins the election it can only be because our democracy is fraudulent and our elections rigged against him. But we are early yet; surely that is the usual phoned-in opening for editorial wankings printed up in the national wanking pages. It is only an opening act, there to set the tone so that the headliners can thrill us with something far bolder and more substantive in the next paragraph.

The distinctions between them on policy substance, however, are somewhat fuzzier.

Shut. The Fuck. Up.

Really now. Really, that is to be the premise of this high-minded editorial. The one titled "America has two presidential candidates. Let's compare them," which is the most high school book report-ass title anyone could possibly have come up with. The policy distinctions between the Mainstream Political Figure and the venomously misogynistic compulsive liar who attempted a coup against the government and who will likely end up serving a prison term if he cannot manage to capture enough power to issue himself a blanket pardon for everything he's done in the last decade: those policy distinctions are fuzzier, you say.

Well, what's their policies on overthrowing the United States government if not enough Americans are willing to accept white nationalism, mass deportations, and Grandpa Asshole's Delusion-O-Rama, hmm? That seems by far the most consequential policy distinction between them!

Aside from certain specifics — such as building the border wall, conducting mass deportations and raising tariffs — Mr. Trump has never detailed much of an agenda. (His supporters at Project 2025 have prepared a pointedly conservative plan for his second term, though Mr. Trump distanced himself from it after it became a political liability.) As for Ms. Harris, the charitable view is that she has had little time to develop detailed proposals. The less generous take is that she wants to avoid revealing many specifics, lest she alienate one constituency or another. Coasting on "vibes" has worked well for her so far; she has taken a slim lead in national polling, and surveys suggest she has become competitive in all the battleground states.

Oh here we go, here's the actual editorial page complaint. On one hand, Seditionist Felonboy vows he'll deport up to "20 million" undocumented residents (there aren't that many), and his advisers are clarifying that they don't consider birthright citizenship to be valid no matter what the Constitution has to say about it so the number is quite likely to include many American citizens as well, and all of it amounts to no more than "pointedly conservative." On the other hand, the preening day drinkers running the Democracy Dies in Darkness page are miffed that his opponent hasn't detailed a 25 point plan on government beet subsidies.

But the novelty of Ms. Harris's campaign is wearing thin as an excuse for releasing only the schematics of a platform. She promises "a new way forward," pitching herself as a change agent, even though she is the sitting vice president and takes credit for the elements of the Biden agenda with which she wants to be associated, such as a cap on seniors' insulin costs and the administration's climate plan. As the recent spike in her favorability ratings indicates, voters' impressions of her are malleable, and focus groups suggest that many have questions about what she stands for.

Oh no, we've reached wearing thin territory. Harris not running the precise campaign the nation's editorial pages want her to run is, to be fair, so frustrating to our nation's top-of-top editorial deciders that you can almost see why it would have blotted out the policy fuzziness of "The other candidate staged an actual real-world attempt to nullify an American election by spreading a fully invented propagandistic hoax claiming his loss was invalid, working with co-conspirators to present "alternate" electoral slates to the U.S. Congress, and bullying his vice president to SWITCH THEM OUT at the official counting, relying on the implied-and-then-real violence of his purposefully assembled militia-steeped mob to intimidate lawmakers into going on with it."

Go on, go on and tell us what's got your fingernails so chewed down that attempted insurrection is no longer even worth mentioning.

What do we know so far? Sparse as they are, the plans the candidates have released share some common elements, reflecting the populist turn in the country's politics. Mr. Trump pandered to Nevada workers by proposing to waive taxes on tips. Ms. Harris copied him. Neither candidate has a plan to right the country's escalating debt trajectory. Though on this score, Mr. Trump presents a more troubling agenda; the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Wharton Budget Model reckons that he would add $5.8 trillion to the primary deficit over a decade, while Ms. Harris would add only $1.2 trillion.

Shut up shut up shut up shut up oh my God there is no level of shutting up that could possibly make up for this esteemed group of professional knowledge-havers searing our eyeballs with a take like "setting the attempted overthrow of the government aside, what are the candidates' positions on the national debt?"

That may be the must f--king Editorial Page thing ever written. Sweet Jeebus, a descent into fascism is one thing and sure we do know that Trump and Republicans blew a giant blood-spurting hole in the national pocketbooks the last time he was in office, and they laughed about doing it, and sure this business-collapsing wealth-born failson's new plan would set $6 trillion dollars on fire because he's yet to grasp even the basics of finance, but his opponent's unequivocally less shitty plan to not do that feels a bit sparse!

Though specifics are light, Ms. Harris is plotting a wiser course. She is right to emphasize boosting housing supply, the key to lowering housing costs, and to propose enhancing effective anti-poverty programs such as the child tax credit and the earned-income tax credit. Unlike Mr. Trump, she acknowledges the fact of climate change, does not threaten Justice Department independence and seeks robust protections for reproductive rights.

Yeah, whatever, I'm done with this. Blah blah compare-and-contrast oh sure gotta make a slight four-word nod to Trump insisting over and over that the next time he's in office he's going to order the Justice Department to come up with reasons to jail his enemies because he's a deluded possibly dementia-addled fascist sack of hippopotamus crap but we're going to be super coy about it and use our editorial page weasel words to kinda just slide it to the side here. There's nothing else of value here so we'll just skip it, though the word "neo-isolationist" is used at one point, cryptic and pompous, and paired only with vague reference to Trump's regular promises to give Russian mob boss Putin an unending list of little gifts in the hopes that Heartthrob Vlad will invite him to the kleptocrat prom.

The whole post is written in this vein-shriveling mostly-indifferent style. It is genuinely and sincerely a vague and hand-waving comparison of the presidential candidates that

Completely

And

Utterly

Avoids

Mentioning

that Donald Trump left office 3.5 years ago only after attempting to nullify an election and topple our federal government, which in nearly any other country you can name would have resulted in him being very extremely dead right now, either after an accompanying trial or without even the pretense. It just doesn't come up. In this comparison of the candidates and their "policy substance," the policy of attempting to erase elections rather than abide by results his party finds displeasing just doesn't come up. Not even once.

The best the Democracy Dies in Darkness editors can muster is that, in conclusion,

In other words, the substantive contrasts Ms. Harris draws with Mr. Trump generally make her look better. But should Americans settle? Campaigns have been defining policy downward. The 2012 election cycle, when President Barack Obama ran against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, was the last time a presidential race turned on substantive debate. Ms. Harris says she wants to elevate American politics, an imperative that Mr. Trump has again shown little interest in. She therefore has an opportunity to lift up her campaign by going deep on substance.

Oh go eat an entire bucket of four-inch carriage bolts you insufferable preening airheads. Generally the other candidate looks better than the violence-provoking seditionist felon, if America is willing to settle? Give us all a moment to sit down, after hitting us with a red-hot take like that one. Here's your substance: Not gonna try to overthrow the fking government while in obviously in the throes of extreme narcissistic decompensation. Put that one down as bullet point one, please, and I assure you "Ms Harris" is willing to go into a lot more detail on that one than the guy already thumbing out all-caps messages about how this new election's rigged against him.

I really can think of no better example of how vacuously indifferent our supposed national "news" media is to whether our democracy continues or it doesn't, or whether the nation embarks on a purge of Undesirables that would, even if not a grotesquery planned out by white nationalists with logic often indistinguishable from that of Nazi Germany's claims, by itself so sabotage the national economy as to likely result in food rationing or worse, or whether we hand the presidency over to a felon who explicitly wants the position so that he can use governmental authority to fend off state and federal authorities who've now indicted him for All The Things.

The people who run the political "news" coverage in each of the nation's top media outlets appear to imagine themselves above such petty possible futures. They have somehow convinced themselves that even attempting to overthrow the government is, now, a reasonable stance for a political party and candidate, and it is considered reasonable because it's the Republican Party doing it and they're also promising that they'll give tax cuts to the class of people that writes these things and, more importantly, to the class of people who own the class of people who write these things—so it's just part of a complex policy melange, apparently. It's not something for (checks notes) "journalists" to express alarm over, because that wouldn't be Bothsides, and if you're not Bothsides on things like violent insurrection than you are not being balanced, according to a bevy of malignant talking heads whose important careers depend on being able to get quotes from anyone with enough power to possibly nudge that and other atrocities along.

"I recommend that everyone who still has a @washingtonpost.com subscription cancel theirs immediately as well," write David Slack in a follow up message, but at this particular moment I'm guessing that if Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos wants the paper to be Bothsides on whether the architects of an attempted coup ought to get the second try they're boasting of, he'll make sure it keeps happening no matter how many subscriptions the paper sheds. You cannot piss away your moral clarity about whether insurrection is disqualifying or merely gauche without a very, very concerted effort to do the pissing; the paper's owners and editors will scoff at the outrage even as they keep slapping Democracy Dies in Darkness on every page.

But it's self-evident at this point that our glorious media betters do not see themselves as parties who ought to weigh in on whether a seditionist felon who lies about everything, all the time, is a dangerous national threat or merely the best of all American things, a celebrity to grovel for quotes from. That is not a Journalism, apparently. And the conspicuousness of our media's efforts to erase Trump's crimes, his convictions, his videotaped past stances, and his brazenly fascist hate mongering—none of that is neutral. It is an intentional manipulation. It's bending the truth, over and over and over again, to hide the truths we all used to know, and it can only happen because the same insufferable media wags that brought us to the brink of fascism still proclaim themselves truly convinced that the details of the earned income tax credit or making sure the non-fascist candidate books the right number of interviews with their own groomed industry celebrities is surely, surely no less consequential than a blood-spilling insurrection.

I said before that the performative incompetence of our national press may be even more responsible for the decay of our democracy than the fascist shudders of the Republican Party itself, because the whole point of having a free press is to act as the watchdogs who dispense the appropriate amount of public disgust to corrupt acts even if their perpetrators would rather that not happen. There's nothing here to dispute my premise. There is no rising to the moment; if anything, the press has managed to become more vapid, more indifferent, and more willing to coddle extremism and oligarchic corruption than they were during Trump's initial campaign.

Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through discussion among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
Members of the Editorial Board: Opinion Editor David Shipley, Deputy Opinion Editor Charles Lane and Deputy Opinion Editor Stephen Stromberg, as well as writers Mary Duenwald,Shadi Hamid, David E. Hoffman, James Hohmann, Heather Long, Mili Mitra, Eduardo Porter, Keith B. Richburg and Molly Roberts.

Good to know. So a dozen people collectively had a "discussion" on this thing and apparently not one of them was able to convince their peers that mounting an attempted coup amounted to a "policy difference" that perhaps should be mentioned, somewhere, even if the paper could not muster an argument that fomenting such acts is more consequential than the other candidate being insufficiently specific in her debt reduction proposals.

Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right.