THE WORST THING WE READ™: Evaluating the atrocities of the atrocity evaluators

THE WORST THING WE READ™:

Rating How 10 New York Times Columnists and Writers Rated What Mattered in Trump’s First Full Month

FOR CENTURIES, THE word enormity has been waiting around in the English language—its original sense of "outrageous wickedness" soaking up stray meaning from the word enormous along the way—for the arrival of the second Trump administration. This new version of the executive branch has sharply departed (ex) from the sphere of laws and standards (norm), but it has also been pursuing its chosen abnormalities on a scale that is abnormally vast. There is too much of it to keep track of, yet it all demands to be comprehended as one huge, terrible thing. 

If the corruption and destruction of the entire federal government seems too complex and intimidating, though, one can distract oneself by carving the catastrophe into slices, slices so narrow they don't really need to be thought about very hard. And so the New York Times opinion section convened a panel of 10 writers to ask them to evaluate, in isolation, 12 aspects or actions of the administration, including "Immigration," "Deregulation," "DEI," and "Eric Adams case." The writers were supposed to score each one on its positive or negative impact, and on whether it was "More Consequential" or "Less Consequential." 

The result was a scatterplot of an institution in moral and intellectual collapse—not the government, but the opinion desk. The panel was weighted toward milquetoast Timesian liberals, milquetoast Timesian conservatives, and a couple of token reactionary outside contributors. Plus the former Obama national security official Ben Rhodes. Most of the section's wiser writers had taken a whiff of the whole exercise and stayed away, save for Tressie McMillan Cottom, who generally kept pinning her scores, accurately if unrevealingly, in the deepest corner of the "Negative Impact / More Consequential" quadrant, while her liberal colleagues tried to convince themselves that this or that thing wasn't really so serious, the polite conservatives tried to decide when they dared venture into positive territory and how far, and the reactionaries kept mashing the approval button for the presidency of their dreams. 

Given those individual inputs, the Times panel ended up collectively deciding that the administration's policy on DEI—which reportedly consists of mass-purging whatever government workers and projects and published research happen to register as "woke" in keyword searches by Elon Musk's unlawful strike team of too-online, extremist-friendly junior programmers—has been slightly positive overall, and only slightly consequential. The campaign to drive trans people out of American life—by outlawing their medical care, refusing them accurate passports, barring them from sports, forcing them out of the armed forces, and throwing trans women into men's prisons—registered with the panel as a little bit bad but somewhat inconsequential.