Peter Baker: In an Era of Deep Polarization, Unity is Not Trump's Mission

About half of this is typical NYT/blue-team bullshit.

But, sadly, about half of it is right.

And that's more than bad enough.

   I'll note again that, even when Trump has tried to bring the country together--as in his first statements after Charlottesville--his comments have basically been slapped out of his hands by Democrats, who refuse to believe there is an ounce of good in the man. He's Hitler, after all... The "very fine people" hoax is still being perpetrated by the left. That lie was repeated by both Biden and Harris in the Presidential debates. Snopes finally admitted it was bullshit...seven years late...

   And of course this is front-page stuff for the NYT...

   BUT and unfortunately: a whole lot of what Baker says is true. And it's dangerous. Very, very dangerous. This is just the kind of thing many of us who held our noses and voted for President Lesser Evil feared. This is the kind of crisis Trump simply can't be trusted to handle. In fact, he's--predictably--making it worse.

   And, not to both-sides this overmuch, but: this is the same general kind of horrifying stuff those of us outside the left have faced from our elite institutions for 10ish years: the partisan capture of institutions built and maintained to be objective and nonpartisan. Universities, public schools, the media, the bureaucracy, the CDC, the FBI, the AMA, the APA, and on and on, relentlessly taking the left's side, insisting that we hillbilly Nazi idiots do as we're told... Also Biden, of course. Even if you've forgotten everything else, I hope you haven't forgotten his horrifying Red Speech. That set looked like something Guillermo del Toro would put together for a Leni Riefenstahl flick about Hitler rising from the grave. That was at least as divisive as anything Trump has done--and without any immediate provocation. Apparently Biden's handlers just decided that it was a good idea to tell half the country that we were a bunch of Nazi Klansmen.

   Trump, at least, has been speaking from anger and sadness.

   Not that that's such a great excuse--the President is supposed to be able to remain cool under pressure, to transcend such feelings. Trump, of course, can't do that.

  I advocate speaking truth as we see it in virtually all cases. And Trump is basically right about the intellectual and political rot on the left. But there's saying it and there's saying it. It's important not to let Democrats off the hook for what they have wrought...but...that can be done more or less calmly, more or less effectively, at better or worse times.

   See what Trump's saying? Yeah...that's the wrong way. The right way, whatever it is, is different than that.

  It should, I think, be possible to urge unity and understanding while still forcing the faction most responsible for this train wreck to look in the mirror and stare its own sins in the face.