Why Is the New York Times Trying To Make Trump Sound Like a Genius?

I no longer subscribe to that enabler of authoritarianism, but they still manage to piss me off

May 24, 2025

I’m no longer subscribed to the New York Times, but they’re still torturing me with newsletters. This one is a doozy.

The newsletter begins with the headline, “Why Harvard has no way out.”

If you’re not familiar with this particular bit of news, the mad clown disease has been trying to blackmail Harvard into changing its curriculum and hiring teachers the regime considers acceptable.

Legal Beagle Jay Kuo sums it up nicely:1

Harvard is locked in a battle with the White House for refusing the government’s demands to control the school’s administration, faculty hiring, student body composition and university curricula. The Trump administration has yanked research funding in an attempt to starve Harvard out and threatened its nonprofit status, and Harvard earlier responded with a federal lawsuit.

Then, as Jay Kuo puts it in most admirable terms, using the only kind of language the actions of this regime deserve:

Department of Homeland Security Secretary and cosplaying fascist gun freak and puppy killer Kristi Noem issued an order terminating the university’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program.

Harvard, however, struck back immediately with a lawsuit.

Did the New York Times respond to the news of the lawsuit with an article pointing out that you probably don’t want to piss off a law school that has been a training ground for the best lawyers in the nation for about a century?

No, they said this (bold is mine):

There’s been an audacity and creativity to the way that Trump has tried to use his power in the second term, and this is the latest example.

Stop right there. Trump hasn’t done shit. I doubt he has any idea what the hell Susie Wiles, the brains behind the operation, is doing.

Wait, you say. Who the hell is Susie Wiles?????

White House chiefs of staff have been key operators in administrations for the last fifty years. They’re like the CEOs of the West Wing. Typically, they serve as the President's top advisor and the gateway for the rest of the staff. Susie Wiles is the current White House Chief of Staff. Nobody sees the clown without going through Wiles first.

Her deputy chief of staff is the much more infamous Stephen Miller. He works for Wiles. If you want to have a meeting with the mad clown and you can’t get hold of Wiles, you might be able to see him if Stephen Miller gives the okay.

Whether it’s Wiles or Miller hatching various malevolent plans, it is contemptuous of the New York Times to suggest or imply that the mad clown is a creative thinker or the brains behind the regime’s shock and awe attack on this country. He can barely tie his own shoes at this stage of his dementia.

About all he can do is lie about things like white genocide, although I’m not sure that is his fault. Stephen Miller likely handed him some photographs of atrocities in the Congo and said, “Tell ‘em it’s South Africa, boss,” and the clown, Big Mac juices drooling from his lower lip, said, “Brilliant!”

Let’s parse parts of the newsletter I received so that you can see the deceptions the New York Times is perpetrating, shall we?

The newsletter, written by Jess Bidgood and Michael S. Schmidt, begins with this:

The Trump administration’s attempt to block international students from attending Harvard University was a sharp escalation in the showdown between the federal government and one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions.

That is the newsletter’s lead paragraph. If ever a lead paragraph deserved a rewrite, it’s now, so I’ll put on my old Journalism cap from my college days and give it a whack:

The Trump administration’s attempt to block international students from attending Harvard University was a sharp escalation of the federal government’s continued efforts to blackmail one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful institutions.

There. That wasn’t so hard, was it, NY Times?

Your paragraph normalized the regime’s behavior. Mine didn’t. Mine described the behavior for what it is, which is what your very highly paid reporters should do when they’re not sipping cognac at the Hamptons with the people you’re supposed to be reporting on.

Words are important when describing the regime.

Screenshot of definition of blackmail: : extortion or coercion by threats especially of public exposure or criminal prosecution — Screenshot of the Merriam-Webster website

If you think “blackmail” is too strong a word (it isn’t), then use another word to demonstrate the regime’s mendacity. Anything other than “showdown.”

The newsletter then offers some useful information, which is why many of us subscribed when they were a decent newspaper:

To cut off the university’s pipeline of international students — who make up about 27 percent of Harvard’s enrollment — the government has turned to an obscure tactic it usually uses to shut down shoddy diploma mills.
“I was dumbfounded,” Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education, told me. “What’s becoming increasingly clear is that this administration will use any tool that it can.”

This is where the reporters should have taken the next step. This is where good reporters used to ask questions like, “Who in the administration is finding these tools?” Someone has to be in charge of R&D. We know it’s not the mad king. He can’t read Happy Meal packaging, much less dig into the intricacies of civil service law that allows the regime to master these black arts.

Instead, the article states that the clown king is the genius behind this maneuvering. Call it the black arts of lazy reporting.

Worse, it does this through subterfuge. The writer of the newsletter, Jess Bidgood, pretends to initiate a Q&A with an expert regarding the situation. It’s a newish trick in the Times arsenal. Talk to a fellow reporter like he/she is an expert in the field instead of just another reporter.

In this case, the reporter she’s “interviewing” is Michael S. Schmidt, who, along with Bidgood, receives a byline in the newsletter:

Screenshot of bylines. by Jess Bidgood and Michael S. Schmidt

The “interview,” perhaps over a nice Merlot, starts thusly:

JB: You have long covered the way Trump has used the power of the government to target his perceived enemies. How is this time different?
MS: There’s been an audacity and creativity to the way that Trump has tried to use his power in the second term, and this is the latest example. Coming into this, we concentrated on his threats to lock up his enemies, like Liz Cheney or James Comey. The use of the government’s power for purely political ends has manifested itself in ways that I think go beyond what we had imagined, and even beyond what Project 2025 contemplated.

There are two important adjectives in the first part of the answer. “Audacity” fits. It’s inherent to everything the regime does. “Creativity” fits, too, but assigning the creativity to Trump is willful negligence.

This problem courses throughout all of mainstream media, of course: Giving “credit” to the predator-in-chief for the clever machinations of his regime.

The mainstream media is ignoring the bigger story: the role of Susie Wiles in bringing a sense of order and strategic thinking to the carnival.

Who is Susie Wiles, his chief of staff and the CEO of the regime, and why is the press giving her a free pass?

You can read more about her in the article referred to in the Notes at the end of this essay, but the short version is that Susie Wiles has brought sanity to what would normally be a regime of chaos. You might remember that Mad Clown 1.0 was a circus with a musical chairs of sycophants.

This hasn’t been true with this second iteration. Nobody who has seen Trump splutter his way through a speech or interview thinks this is because he has magically found the gift.

It’s all Susie Wiles and her primary Orc, Stephen Miller.

The newsletter’s next adventure involves what we in the clown show resistance movement call “surrendering in advance.” The best way to illustrate this is to go right to the source again:

JB: Today, a judge temporarily blocked this Trump effort to bar international students from Harvard. Is that good news for Harvard? Is this over?
MS: It’s not over at all. For now, it allows foreign students to continue to attend Harvard. But what it doesn’t remove is the question of what’s going to happen.
If you’re an international student at Harvard, are you going to be like, “OK, cool, I’ll just go to school in the fall, and I’ll be checking the federal docket to see if the restraining order is still in place”?

The “expert” is ignoring that Harvard is the alma mater of a legion of high-powered lawyers, many of whom have presented arguments to the Supreme Court. The regime has chosen to challenge the resources of the richest university on the planet. It’s a university that has thousands of prominent lawyers in its Rolodex who are eager to come to the school’s defense.

International students will be freaked out by these events, but nobody who can attend Harvard will turn down the chance if they can, especially if Harvard prevails in its case against the regime.

As a commenter on Jay Kuo’s Substack article on this said: “My money is on Harvard.”

I’m just glad I’m no longer giving any of that money to the New York Times.

Notes

My primary journalism professor from oh, so long ago would be generally aghast at what passes today for journalism, occasional worthwhile reporting notwithstanding, but he’d be particularly annoyed by what has happened to the New York Times during the mad clown years.

Abraham Bass, you are missed.

Avi was a lifelong subscriber to Mad magazine, so it’s not like he wouldn’t have understood the underlying dark humor of living in the Mad King era and all its sadism.

You can read more about Susie Wiles here: