One thing about the New York Post that should concern Trump is something from his own playbook: It doesn’t hold back when it slams people — even someone like the ex-President whom it once championed. The paper is known for using clear, direct language and powerful framing — and that’s exactly what it deployed in its editorial crushing Trump. The editorial began:
“As his followers stormed the Capitol, calling for his vice president to be hanged, President Donald Trump sat in his private dining room, watching TV, doing nothing.
“For three hours, seven minutes.”
Putting it mildly, “three hours, seven minutes” sounds far longer than 187 minutes — the increment of time that most in the political world and the media use to measure Trump’s inaction — and the Post gets that.
From there, the editorial got worse for Trump. In its stinging rebuke, it emphasized that Trump was the only person who could have stopped his angry supporters, but he only made matters worse.
“To his eternal shame, as appalled aides implored him to publicly call on his followers to go home, he instead further fanned the flames” by tweeting that his vice president, Mike Pence, didn’t have the “courage” to block the congressional certification of Biden’s Electoral College win.
The Post wrote that Trump’s indefensible objective through all of this was “to find any means — damn the consequences — to block the peaceful transfer of power.” Pointing out that the Justice Department must decide about possible criminal behavior, the newspaper’s editorial board concluded that “as a matter of principle, as a matter of character, Trump has proven himself unworthy to be this country’s chief executive again.”
The Journal wrote that, of all the condemnable behavior by Trump presented by the January 6 committee over the past several weeks, “most horrifying” was witnesses describing how “as the riot raged … he sat watching TV, posting inflammatory tweets and refusing to send help.”
No, he watched the attack unfold on television for hours.
One thing is perfectly clear at this point: people either support Donald Trump or they support the United States of America. There’s no overlap. Even the formerly Trump-loving New York Post is telling us that the ex-President’s behavior that day cannot be defended.
