THE NEW YORK TIMES ED BOARD DROPS ITS OWN LOAD OF FECES ON THE NO KINGS CROWDS

I'm sure you know how Donald Trump responded to the No Kings rallies: by posting an AI video depicting him as a crown-wearing fighter pilot dropping feces on protesters.

Trump posts AI video showing him literally dumping shit on America

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) October 18, 2025 at 10:36 PM

The editorial board of The New York Times would never be quite so gauche. Its response to the No Kings rallies, posted this morning, is an editorial titled "America Still Has a Political Center, and It’s the Key to Winning."

There's nothing in this editorial that directly references Saturday's protests, but I'm certain that the ed board made a calculated decision to publish the editorial today. I don't agree with many of you that the Times is Trumpist -- I believe the Times's ideal political candidate is moderately liberal on social issues (pro-choice but no trans athletes, please) and right-centrist economically. The Times ed board represents urbane but greedy plutocrats whose ideal president would be Mike Bloomberg, Joe Manchin, or Larry Hogan.

Or, apparently, candidate Donald Trump, at least in the ed board's telling:

Extreme as he is in many ways, he moved the Republican Party toward the center on several key issues. He won the party’s nomination and the general election in 2016 partly by rejecting unpopular conservative positions on Social Security, Medicare and global trade. Last year he broke with prominent Republicans and said he would veto a national abortion ban. He also focused his 2024 campaign on areas in which the Democratic Party had moved left over the previous decade and was out of step with public opinion, such as immigration, transgender issues and parts of education policy. Voters noticed. Polls in 2024 showed that most voters considered their policy views to be closer to Mr. Trump’s than to Kamala Harris’s.

Is that the guy who won the last presidential election? I seem to recall him being much less moderate -- and, in fact, some observers noticed his immoderation during the 2024 campaign. This is from a July 2024 editorial called "Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead":

Mr. Trump has shown a character unworthy of the responsibilities of the presidency. He has demonstrated an utter lack of respect for the Constitution, the rule of law and the American people. Instead of a cogent vision for the country’s future, Mr. Trump is animated by a thirst for political power: to use the levers of government to advance his interests, satisfy his impulses and exact retribution against those who he thinks have wronged him.

... his words and promises ... have little to do with unity and healing and a lot to do with making the divisions and anger in our society wider and more intense than they already are.

That piece appeared on ... the editorial page of The New York Times. In other words, the same editorial board that saw Trump as a danger to America during his 2024 campaign now recalls him as a centrist on the stump.

In the new editorial, it's acknowledged that, gosh, Trump really isn't very moderate:

Despite Mr. Trump’s rhetorical nods to the center, he is governing as a radical who rejects longstanding governing constraints and uses the power of the presidency to enrich his family, protect his allies and punish people he dislikes. He threatens American democracy, and congressional Republicans have been complicit.

Well, duh. Millions of us could see that last year. The Times ed board could see that last year. I question the extent to which voters really thought he was a fine, even-tempered, middle-of-the-road guy. And yet nearly half of them voted for him anyway.

And there's the problem with the editorial. It argues that voters prefer moderates to extremists, but it ignores the fact that Republican extremists seem to do just fine. It begins with an image of

16 candidates ... Democrats who won in places that backed Trump and Republicans who won in places that backed Harris.

It treats them as shining examples for both parties. But there's one problem: Only 3 of the 16 are from the GOP. And yet the GOP controls both houses of Congress. So how necessary is moderation to electoral success, really? Apparently it isn't -- if you're a Republican.

We're told:

Candidates closer to the political center, from both parties, continue to fare better in most elections than those farther to the right or left....

On the Democratic side, there are no progressives in the mold of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Bernie Sanders who represent a swing district or state. Instead, the Democrats who win tough races work hard to signal to voters that they are less progressive than their party.

But on the Republican side, there are quite a few states that are purple or near-purple but have elected very right-wing senators: Wisconsin (Ron Johnson), Texas (Ted Cruz), Ohio (Bennie Moreno and, before him, J.D. Vance).

The editorial says that both parties should recognize the appeal of centrism, but can't point to any electoral consequences the Republicans have faced for failing to be centrist. The editorial tells us that

many Americans see the Democratic Party as too liberal, too judgmental and too focused on cultural issues to be credible, and voters are moving away from it. “Of the 30 states that track voter registration by political party, Democrats lost ground to Republicans in every single one between the 2020 and 2024 elections — and often by a lot,” The Times reported this summer.

But if both parties are ignoring the appeal of centrism, why are only the Democrats losing voters?

You know my answer. Democrats don't try hard enough to paint the entire GOP as radical. Democrats don't remind voters that they're the party that wants a higher minimum wage, legal abortion, higher taxes on the obscenely rich, universal background checks, and an assault weapons ban, and the Republican Party unalterably opposes all of these things. Democrats avoid proudly taking any position at all on most issues -- mustn't upset the Baileys! -- preferring instead to mutter generalities about healthcare. Democrats praise bipartisanship and attack fellow Democrats as extreme, suggesting that they agree with Republicans that their own party is badly falwed and the GOP is the better party.

But Establishment Democrats' lack of basic political skills is of no interest to the ed board, which is determined to send the message "Democrats should be neoliberal on economics and throw trans athletes under the bus."

(We're told that voters "think that corporations and the wealthy have too much power," but also that "most voters prefer capitalism to socialism and worry that the government is too big" -- just what Bill Ackman wants to hear. We're also told that "Most support job protections for trans people and believe that trans girls should not play girls’ sports" -- and yet Democrat Andy Beshear, who vetoed a bill banning trans athletes from competing in school sports, won reelection as governor of Kentucky a year after that veto.)

The ed board does some funny things with numbers to arrive at its conclusions. We're told:

... in Wisconsin, Mandela Barnes, a progressive Democrat with a history of supporting cuts to immigration enforcement and police funding, lost his 2022 Senate race, while Ms. Baldwin and Gov. Tony Evers have won by running to the middle.

We're not told that Barnes was trying to beat an incumbent (Ron Johnson) and lost that race by only one point, while Baldwin and Evers were incumbents and won by less than a point and by three and a half points, respectively. (We're also not told that Barnes was a Black candidate in a very white state.)

The editorial also tells us this about Bernie Sanders:

Mr. Sanders’s arc is instructive. Earlier in his career — when he took just as feisty a stance on the economy but spoke more about his concerns about immigration and support of hunting — he received more votes than the Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket. He no longer does. His story is a microcosm.

Do you know what Kamala Harris's victory margin was in Vermont last year? It was 63.83% to 32.32%. Do you what Sanders's victory margin was? It was 63.16% to 32.07%. It's practically the same margin.

It's true that in his only other Senate race that coincided with a presidential election, Sanders outpolled the presidential candidate. But that was 2012. Sanders got 71% of the vote and Barack Obama got 66.57%. But Obama's opponent was Mitt Romney, whom many Vermonters undoubtedly recalled as the former moderate governor of neighboring Massachusetts. (Remember, Vermont currently has a moderate Republican governor.)

This is a flawed editorial that scolds Democrats and lets Republicans off the hook. It was published now because the Democratic Establishment doesn't want all those No Kings protesters to get crazy notions in their heads about progressivism. What if those radicals win? Billionaires might not be able to afford that fifth yacht.

The Times ed board thinks Trump is dangerous, but so is progressivism. That's why it dropped this load of feces on the post-No Kings Democratic Party today.