In a unique interactive column titled “What have we lost?” the Times features, and links to, all its 15 columnists’ essays that explain “what the past four years have cost America, and what’s at stake in this election.”
The essence of each essay is captured by a few words representing “what we have lost.”
For example, Nicholas Kristof’s “’Persuasion’ Trump has exploited and betrayed my friends.” In it Kristof describes “The Friendships Trump Pulled Apart.”
In “Naïveté How could we have been so blind?” Charles Blow explains how “America Shocked Itself and the World.”
Frank Bruni writes in “Innocence, “I can’t look at America the same way.”
In “Imagination, Michelle Goldberg laments “Four years of cultural impoverishment.”
Paul Krugman, in “Pax Americana,” writes about “Trump’s long international legacy.”
Jennifer Senior describes how “Trump has normalized selfishness” in “Generosity.”
Roger Cohen decries in “Our Word” how “No democracy takes Trump’s America seriously.”
In an attempt to depict the essays as “a collective nervous breakdown, full of self-absorbed handwringing and wild-eyed proclamations about the future of the republic,” “shameful caterwauling…a pure example of the obscene privilege of the elite [an] appallingly self-indulgent collaboration by the New York Times,” the Examiner quotes what are in fact the most veracious, damnatory passages. Such as:
From Frank Bruni’s” Innocence,” The Examiner quotes “I’d seen us err. I’d watched us stray. Still I didn’t think that enough of us would indulge a would-be leader as proudly hateful, patently fraudulent and flamboyantly dishonest as Donald Trump…”
And from Roger Cohen’s “Our Word,” the Examiner quotes “The Oval Office was once the focal point of the respect the United States commanded around the world; no longer. It has become impossible for democracies today to believe it is in their national interest to take Trump’s America seriously. With this president, there are simply too many petulant reversals of course.”
Curiously, the Examiner omits, “The presidency and dishonesty have become synonymous. Alliances are founded on trust. When that goes, they begin to dissolve.”
It also conveniently ignores in Nicholas Kristof’s “The Friendships Trump Pulled Apart,” Kristof calling Trump “a charlatan who preys on my friends who trust him” and asking, “How can a president be called ‘pro-life’ when he has presided over the deaths of more than 225,000 Americans from Covid-19 and still doesn’t have a strategy to fight it?”
The Examiner also skips over Thomas Friedman’s essay on how “Trump Has Made the Whole World Darker,” which carries a good news-bad news message focusing on the upcoming elections:
The good news is that we’ve survived four years of Donald Trump’s abusive presidency with most of our core values still intact. To be sure, the damage has been profound, but, I’d argue, the cancer has not yet metastasized into the bones and lymph nodes of our nation. The harm is still reversible.
The bad news is that if we have to endure four more years of Donald Trump, with him unrestrained by the need to be re-elected, our country will not be the America we grew up with, whose values, norms and institutions we had come to take for granted.
Friedman adds, “Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America.”
Friedman warns, “if we re-elect him, knowing what a norm-destroying, divisive, corrupt liar he is, then the world will not treat the last four years as an aberration. It will treat them as an affirmation that we’ve changed.
“If America goes dark, if the message broadcast by the Statue of Liberty shifts from ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ to ‘get the hell off my lawn,’” Friedman writes, and if “foreigners stop believing that there is somewhere over the rainbow where truth is still held sacred in news reporting and where justice is the norm in most of the courts, then the whole world will get darker”.
The Examiner concludes, “Trump’s [2016] victory was not just a political win. It was a repudiation of an entire worldview, the rejection of routine, tradition, and so-called expertise” and opines that the New York Times “project looks more like a psychotic break than the pooled wisdom of professional columnists whose shared experiences span generations.”
A more objective and realistic view of the last four years would conclude that Trump’s 2016 “victory” was in fact the repudiation — rejection — of honesty, decency, civility, of what used to be Republican “family values” and that the pooled wisdom of these 15 professionalsaccurately reflects What We Have Lost during the last four years: Persuasion, Innocence, Imagination, Pax Americana, Faith, Generosity, Our Allies, Our Pride, Our Word, Our Illusions — Our America.
A recurring and damning theme throughout the essays is Trump’s abominable dishonesty.
Today, two days before the most important election in our lifetime, the New York Times puts a bow on this ugly aspect of Trump’s character.
In “Dishonesty Has Defined the Trump Presidency…” the Times points out the sheer volume, depth and seriousness of Trumps’s lies and their lasting impact and tragic consequences:
Dishonesty has been a defining hallmark of the Trump presidency. The sheer volume of untruths, both petty and profound, has been cataloged and quantified time and again, the subject of a shelf full of books and endless hand-wringing over the “post-truth” world.
[::]
Mr. Trump’s successor, whether next year or in five years, could face a broader crisis in faith, challenged to re-establish credibility with overseas allies and adversaries, while presiding over a country where truth has been broken down into tribes and much of the public has been conditioned to distrust institutions of all sorts.
With this in mind, if you haven’t yet done so and knowing what is at stake, please go out and VOTE!
