He’s shown the knuckles, where are the numbers?

The NYT isn’t going to acknowledge that it didn’t take DJT seriously or literally in 2016.

Trump v Squad blocked out the sun

And obscured 2 revealing moments: the House passed a min wage bill w scant GOP support + Trump named a corporate lawyer as Labor Sec

So @maggieNYT & I riffed on What Coulda Been.

What if Trump governed as he ran?

Instead, two great minds at the great Grey Lady teamed up to create a post hoc justification for the Paper of Record’s rotten handling of the 2016 election and decided to pretend the paper completely missed one candidate’s campaign.

History will record last week as a moment when President Trump turned to raw racial appeals to attack a group of nonwhite lawmakers, but his attacks also underscored a remarkable fact of his first term: His rhetorical appeals to white working-class voters have not been matched by legislative accomplishments aimed at their economic interests.

It’s only remarkable if one still refuses to admit that he made two distinct appeals to voters and continues to deliver on making life miserable for people who fail to be white cishet Christians. The tacit permission granted to white Republicans to do the same is a nice bonus.

Since he became president, Mr. Trump has largely operated as a conventional Republican, signing taxes that benefit high-end earners and companies, rolling back regulations on corporations and appointing administration officials and judges with deep roots in the conservative movement. His approach has delighted much of the political right.

The replies to Martin’s tweet include a quick trawl of three NYT articles that show these actions are 100% consistent with his campaign.

That’s it. That’s the joke.

Here’s another funny from the article.

It is a question many Democrats still fret over: What would Mr. Trump’s prospects for re-election look like if he pressured Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, into passing bipartisan measures to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure, lower the cost of prescription drugs and increase the minimum wage?

Who the fuck are these “many” morons who waste time fretting over an event that is less likely than the many-angled ones bursting out of Stephen Miller’s dome and consummating their marriage to Stephen Bannon on live TV? The article doesn’t say, perhaps because no one is doing this.

Another question: How did an article that looked like it was going to be about how the Clementine-in-Chief failed to fulfill his promises to the white working-class Republicans transmogrify into an article about how he might still fulfill those promises?

If he turns into a person that the reporters themselves admit he is not?

But Mr. Trump faces internal impediments as well. His impulses are often shaped by news coverage, particularly on Fox News, and the views of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, whose members have no desire to find common cause with Democrats.

The president is also largely detached from the legislative process

Read: Still has no fucking idea how it works.

and has rarely been heard discussing what a second-term agenda could look like or how to tie it to his re-election bid.

The worm-ignorant lazy man is not doing smart things that require effort. Hm, gosh, why could that be? And how long will it take for pundits to decide that running on a platform of KAG! – which requires everyone to buy new hats from the campaign – and being a bigot is really far smarter than whatever the Democratic candidate is up to.

His few bipartisan accomplishments scarcely get mentioned. Mr. Trump, for example, rarely discusses the criminal justice overhaul that he signed into law after his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, made it a personal mission and argued to the president that it could help him with African-American voters.

Good God, are they trying to give him hints? Fine, whatever. As an appeal to black voters signing a bill that is intended to make our assumed-as-certain trips through an increasingly bloated prison industrial complex are slightly less horrible, can’t be any worse than “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58% of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?”

And it will go well with shouting that people who complain about America should go back to where they came from.

And the moderates in the building who do have Mr. Trump’s ear, such as Mr. Kushner, are more interested in measures like overhauling the criminal justice system or trying to strike a bipartisan immigration deal than they are eager to notch populist victories that the president could trumpet in the industrial Midwest.

Moderate has become a synonym for quiet failure, I guess.

This is all to say Mr. Trump has shown no sign of aggressively pursuing the sort of working-class-oriented measures that his one-time adviser Stephen K. Bannon predicted would build an enduring Republican majority.

Wow, it’s almost like a guy too obviously slimy to last a full year in the White House can be wrong about stuff.

The article goes on, as such things do, noting all the reasons Il Dumpster can’t be bothered with legislation that would raise the minimum wage or improve infrastructure and not mentioning things like his intention to deprive a few million people of SNAP benefits. Basically he’d rather be an asshole because that’s what he’s good at. Also Democrats are being mean to him because both sides.

By this point the white working-class voter who was supposedly the focus of the article has been completely forgotten. But I guess the lede was enough to be counted toward the paper’s required 500 Trump Supporter article/week quota.