The Times’s editorial board did, too, although it expressed alarm about “how thinly thought through" many of his opinions on important issues were.
“Thinly thought through" is a good phrase. It applies particularly damningly to mainstream media coverage of the entire 2016 election process.
Take “those damn e-mails.” Beaten to death in print and on the air, yet no serious investigation ever found any criminality. But what about the equally serious concerns over Donald’s possibly criminal business and tax escapades over the year? Virtual silence; the possible criminality in these affairs has yet to be determined.
Donald appeared to back away yesterday from some of the extreme positions he took during the campaign, positions that were never thoroughly enough explored back when they were uttered, when complete vetting might have had an effect on some voters.
He sort of conceded that maybe human activity did contribute to climate change, that maybe torture as official policy in combatting terrorism wasn’t a very good idea and that promises to “lock up crooked Hillary” wouldn’t actually be kept.
But even as these modest concessions emerged, the Times writers and editors in the session largely fulfilled their publisher’s promise at the outset. What would follow, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. told Donald, will be “the easiest questions you’re going to get this administration."
Donald has demonstrated throughout his business career and his campaign that he is a serial liar. He has even contradicted himself in the same sentence, on certain occasions when he actually spoke in lucid, complete sentences. He switches good cop, bad cop roles with the seamless ease of an accomplished television performer, which he is.
The TV performer uttered some mildly flattering words about the Times yesterday even while repeating his claims that it treated him unfairly and reported inaccurately about him during the campaign. More than once he suggested that he could “change” the paper’s reporting on him, but how? by bullying, lying or . . . . . what? We aren’t sure, are we?
That’s his skill. See?, the give-him-a-chance crowd is saying, he has an “open mind.”
In fact, nothing he said at the Times yesterday changes the established record about him. He is still the boastful Pussy-Grabber. He is still the same con man whose phony “university” defrauded thousands of gullible people. He is still the same guy who stiffed laborers and small contractors, who reveled in rubbing well-tailored elbows with gangsters and drug kingpins, who left investors holding the bag in countless bankruptcies (which are still going on), who publicly ridiculed people with physical disabilities and who promised to build a wall along the border and make Mexico pay for it.
The wall nonsense didn’t even come up at the Times yesterday. But the Israel-Palestine conflict did. Apparently sounding sincere, Donald said he’d like to resolve that conflict and at last bring peace to one of the most troubled areas in the world. A noble goal. And who would be his agent to achieve that goal? His son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
C’mon man! Buying that isn’t “giving him a chance.” Buying that is buying a “degree” from Trump University.
