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THE WORST THING WE READ™

What Does Shame Mean to the New York Times?

Amid the "chaos" of the beginning of Donald Trump's second term, the New York Times Editorial Board wrote over the weekend, it is important not to lose focus on the fact that "he has also waged as direct a campaign against a single, vulnerable minority as we’ve seen in generations." This was both morally and practically correct. Trumpist authoritarianism is spreading with terrifying speed and seemingly in arbitrary directions, but its expansion depends on the interaction between Trump's cruelty and the complacency or complicity of the institutions he is overwhelming. It is vital to understand how this all works. 

And nowhere is it easier to see the process in action, or more urgent to resist it, than in Trump's effort to, as the Editorial Board put it, "order the government to view gender as immutable and discriminate against transgender citizens." While he was running for president, Trump may have lied and concealed his intentions toward most of the Project 2025 agenda, but there was no confusion or misdirection about his intentions toward trans people. He put out nasty, sneering commercials announcing his hostility, and his campaign bragged about how effective the message was. As soon as he took office, he made it clear that on this subject, the old first-term speculation about how seriously or literally to take his words was over. Trump meant what he said, and he meant all of it.

The Editorial Board explained:

Within hours, this language began to be codified in a series of executive orders and actions attempting to exclude transgender people from nearly every aspect of American public life: denying them accurate identification documents such as passports, imposing a nationwide restriction on gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths, investigating schools with gender neutral bathrooms, criminalizing teacher support for transgender students and commanding the Federal Bureau of Prisons to force the estimated 1,500 transgender women in custody to be housed with men.

It was an appalling list of actions—a "Shameful Campaign," as the headline put it. Where did Trump get the idea to target trans people in so many ways? Well, at least two out of those five items, he could have gotten from the New York Times.