Please consider subscribing for $6 a month to support fearless, ad-free media commentary. Thanks!
Stay healthy.
Be kind.
Rushing in to inform readers that in the wake of damning investigation into his history of sexual harassment, New York’s Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo is no longer suited for office, the New York Times editorial page waited barely 24 hours to reach its sweeping conclusion — “Governor Cuomo, You Should Resign.”
“Regardless of what may happen in a court of law, the governor has only one conscionable option left: He should resign,” the Times announced. “If Mr. Cuomo cares for the well-being of the state and its citizens as much as he has said he does over the years, he needs to do the right thing and step down.”
The Times was unequivocal. What made the clarion call so jarring was it came from the same editorial page that refused for four years to demand Trump resign from office — to conclude, as they did regarding Cuomo, that stepping down remained Trump’s “only conscionable option left,” and urging him to do the “right thing.”
Trump ran a criminal enterprise out of the White House, which everyone at the Times understood, and still the paper could not summon the courage to call for his resignation. Yet the Times sprinted into action in order to insist a Democrat step down? The contrast is stunning even if you agree, as so many Democrats do, that Cuomo should leave office.
What explains the radically different standards the Times uses for announcing sitting Republican and Democratic office holders are no longer fit to serve? How does the Times, after refusing to weigh in on Trump’s fitness for office for four years, announce Cuomo must resign less than a day after the results of the New York investigation was announced?
Here’s the larger context: The media love to call for the resignation of Democrats. Republicans though, not so much.
In the 1990’s, dozens of major newspapers loudly demanded a Democratic president step down for the good of the country. That president's sin? He lied about an extramarital affair.
"He should resign because he has resolutely failed — and continues to fail — the most fundamental test of any president: to put his nation's interests first," USA Today announced unequivocally of Bill Clinton in September 1998. "Bill Clinton should resign,'“ echoed the Philadelphia Inquirer. "He should resign because his repeated, reckless deceits have dishonored his presidency beyond repair."
When Republicans tried to drive a Democratic president from office for lying about his personal life, media elites couldn't wait to tell Clinton to get lost. (None of those same papers told Trump to do the same thing.)
To be clear, the Times was not one of the dailies that demanded Clinton resign, so they managed to avoid that glaring hypocrisy. Still, we see a clear pattern in terms of media resignation calls made for Clinton and Cuomo, and crickets for Trump.
It’s not like the Times didn’t have endless, obvious opportunities to demand Trump step down. Most recently, it would have been for the blood-thirsty mob he incited on January 6th after trying to use all levers of the government to overthrow a free and fair election last November. For trying to engineer a coup, plain and simple.
Or last year, when Trump refused to protect America from the Covid-19 virus invasion, and then made America’s pandemic response worse everyday by constantly lying to the public about science.
"Any CEO who was deemed responsible for allowing a massive tragedy to unfold would be immediately called upon to resign or be fired, even if he or she were six months from retirement," noted former Clinton White House spokesman Joe Lockhart in a CNN column last summer, shaming newspapers for remaining silent regarding Trump's much-needed departure.
Or in 2019, when Trump openly colluded with a foreign government to dig up dirt on his political opponent, while offering up the assistance of the Department of Justice. He hid transcripts of presidential calls on secret servers in hopes of covering up the collusion, and publicly threatened to expose the crucial whistleblower, insinuating that he or she should be executed. He's also urged that a Democratic member of Congress be arrested for treason.
Or the Times should have insisted Trump leave office based on his chronically deranged behavior, which made him categorically unfit to serve, such as being a habitual liar who shredded our public discourse. Trump also lined his pockets while serving. He coddled murderous dictators. Spent his day wallowing in racist attacks, lobbed vicious, personal attacks against the press, and regularly inspired white nationalist gunmen to unleash murderous attacks.
By not taking a public stand, newspaper leaders like those at the Times sent a loud, collective message that what Trump was doing to America did not represent a looming crisis; that the country could easily weather the storm and no drastic action was needed. Note that in 2019, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet said he didn’t really view Trump as being an unprecedented figure in American history, and likened him to Edwin Edwards, a controversial Louisiana Democratic governor from the 1970s and 1980s. (The two men have almost nothing in common.)
It's true that calls for resignation certainly would not have forced Trump from office. They would however, have helped change the national debate and more accurately reflect the crisis our country faced with a tyrannical liar at the helm. And quite simply, the calls would been the right thing to do.
The Times is right, Cuomo should resign. Too bad the paper of record failed to make that same obvious demand while Trump was shaming the Oval Office.
💉 GOOD STUFF:
One of the many frustrating aspects of the unfolding vaccine “debate” is how conservatives are allowed in the press to make blanket claims about the supposed evils of forced shots, as if inoculations haven’t been a thing in this country for a very long time.
A helpful new piece arrives via Governing.com, “The Long History of Mandated Vaccines in the United States”:
To this day, most schools and universities require a series of vaccines for students to enroll. For example, for a child to enter kindergarten, the Florida Department of Health requires four doses of Diphtheria-tetanus-acellular pertussis (DTaP), four doses of polio (IPV), two doses of measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), two doses of chickenpox, Hepatitis B, and pneumococcal conjugate (PCV13), and haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib). When attending college, I had to show proof of vaccination for the same vaccines. Similarly, health-care and child-care workers are often required to show proof of vaccination for Hepatitis B, influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, pertussis, pneumococcal disease and varicella.
⛵️ FUN STUFF — BECAUSE WE ALL NEED A BREAK
Old Dominion, “I Was on a Boat That Day”
Happy Friday — that’s it.
Is she gone for the summer, gone for the night?
Gone for the weekend or the rest of my life?
Was she laughing, was she crying
As she walked away?
I can't say
I was on a boat that day
🎙 Click here to listen to the music that’s been featured on PRESS RUN, via a Spotify playlist.
Click here to listen via Apple Music.
New York Times demands Cuomo resign — in four years they never called for Trump to step down