Even NY Times’ Columnists Had Some Praise for Trump (and Criticism of Dems)

I just came across this in the afternoon even though it was published earlier. It’s titled “‘It Was 90-Plus Minutes of Bad Moments’: 9 Opinion Writers on Trump’s Address to Congress.” Despite the headline and the graphic which suggests everyone hated Trump’s speech, he actually did get some praise from NY Times’ columnists. It’s grudging to be sure but it’s there.

Josh Barro Trump boasted of the sharp drop in migrant encounters at the southern border and mocked President Joe Biden’s insistence that better enforcement would require new laws, declaring, “It turned out that all we really needed was a new president.” An effective line on his strongest issue.

Frank Bruni Trump is on solid political ground — and in his comfort zone — when he talks about cracking down on illegal immigration. Among many lies, he truthfully said that fewer migrants were unlawfully crossing the border: “They heard my words, and they chose not to come.” Hard to dispute that.

Michelle Cottle When Trump had the director of the Secret Service make a 13-year-old boy diagnosed with brain cancer an honorary agent. It was a heartwarming plug for the president’s Make America Healthy Again agenda — and a clever way to gloss over the problematic views of his health and human services chief…

Daniel McCarthy The State of the Union and presidential addresses to Congress like Tuesday night’s have become ritualized partisan performances, so when Trump said there was nothing he could do to get Democrats to stand, applaud or smile, he exposed the theatricality of their opposition. 

And there’s more. Matthew Schmitz said Trump’s laundry list of DOGE cuts was funny and Farah Stockman cited several of the personal moments in the last half hour of the speech.

The article also contains a bunch of “worst moments” from these same authors. Binyamin Applebaum is the standout Trump hater who spoke the line in the headline about it being 90-minutes of bad moments. He also said the highlight was Al Green interrupting the president and shaking his cane which he labeled “civil disobedience.” As I said last night, I remember when one Republican shouting “You lie!” at the president was a major breach of decorum. What Green did was a lot worse and nothing to be proud of. He was also offended by Republicans’ “frat boy glee” but not by Democrats who glowered through a nice moment with a cancer victim and tearful thank yous from the families of a crime victims. Applebaum is clearly as much of a kook as Al Green.

Daniel McCarthy actually gave the worst moment to the Democrats and he is not wrong.

McCarthy The Democrats set themselves up to have the worst moment of the night with their jeering and heckling, especially since it reached full fury as Trump was recounting his popular-vote victory. That made it sound as though the opposition was angry at the American public.

McCarthy continued along that theme in the final section of the piece, “Trump has become a master of drawing battle lines that put Democrats at a disadvantage, which he did here by weaving guests’ stories of suffering and injustice into his calls for border controls, stronger policing and children’s safety.” 

Exactly right. Ad Ed pointed out this morning, all Trump had to do was pick the winning side of a bunch of 80-20 issues and Democrats couldn’t help but sit on their hands to confirm they were on the other side of all of them. They made fools of themselves to the point that even the NY Times, a reliably pro-Democratic group if ever there was one, struggles to come up with anything positive to say about their behavior last night.