November 19, 2019 --

The New York Times, to borrow a phrase, has locked out the First Amendment for its own political benefit. 

News stories must contain not a hint positive concerning the 45th president of the United States. No minimally pro-Trump columnists or columns are allowed.   A pro-Trump op-ed piece?  No way!  A letter complimenting the president?  No doubt,  shredded (or deleted) on receipt.

What kind of political mindset holds the Grey Lady in its grasp?   Why,  the mindset of the single-party state, the mindset of the dictatorial regime--the mindset of a Lenin, not a John Stuart Mill.

In its latest editorial denouncing  the president, the Times, November 12, declared:  "...we have a president whom top aides saw as a threat to the country."   The aides alluded to are the FORMER secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and the FORMER White House chief of staff, Gen. John Kelly, who, by the account of former ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, sought her help  to "undermine the president."  The editorial quoted from   Amb. Haley's book, "With All Due Respect," that Tillerson and Kelly claimed "'they weren't being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country....'"   

The Times seemed annoyed  that Amb. Haley thought that Tillerson and Kelly should have discussed their views with the president, and then should have quit if they continued to oppose him.   

This comment from the ambassador got no praise from the Times:  "[T]o undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing, and it goes against the Constitution and it goes against what the American people want. And it was offensive."   

For The New York Times, President Trump, while he is in office, should be subordinate to a mid-level aide on the National Security Council, to State Department bureaucrats who are Obama holdovers, and certainly to the demands of a media that has erected an Iron Curtain to keep out the views of the president's supporters.   The Times chooses to ignore or flout the likelihood that to undermine the president is to undermine democracy.

The anti-Trump forces apparently give no thought that the extremism of their denunciations of the president undermine the credibility of the arguments.  President Trump is authoritarian, assaults the Constitution, imperils democracy?  "Give me a break," to quote the  Trump retort Hillary  Clinton's  comment  that he insulted a former  Miss Universe, during the third Clinton-Trump debate, October 19, 2016.

Now that impeachment proceedings are underway, media coverage can be expected to be as one-sided as an edition of Pravda in Soviet Union days.  The spirit of American democracy is now to be tested.  Madison, in Federalist No. 57 wrote that the American people are moved by a spirit that "nourishes freedom, and in return [are] nourished by it."  Those who have rejected the election result of November 8, 2016 have already failed the test. The question is whether the voters of the 30 states that gave their electoral votes to Donald J. Trump will now pass the test.