New York Times’ columnist Michelle Goldberg threw a hissy fit in the January 30 paper bluntly entitled, “Please Don’t Call Him Presidential,” referring to President Trump’s impending State of the Union speech, tonight. The op-ed contributor blasted the media for daring to call Trump presidential after last year’s joint speech before Congress, and “begged” her fellow journalists to tone down any overt praise they would have for the speech because Trump just simply didn’t deserve it.
“I’m begging my fellow pundits not to get too excited should Trump manage to read from a teleprompter without foaming at the mouth or saying anything overtly racist,” Goldberg crassly gushed. In fact, the absolute only thing Trump could do at this point to deserve praise, she wrote, would be “apologize” and “resign” today:
The president can surprise those who think the worst of him, and prove that he’s been underestimated. All he has to do is apologize to his fellow Americans for the shame he’s brought upon this country, and resign effective immediately.
“No matter” what he does, Goldberg declared, “He will not become presidential.”
Clearly uncomfortable with the president getting any sort of tepid acknowledgement from the media when he does something right, she complained:
There will be no turning of corners or uniting the country. At best, Trump will succeed in impersonating a minimally competent leader for roughly the length of an episode of “The Apprentice.” And if he does, recent history suggests that he will be praised as the second coming of Lincoln.
That led the op-ed columnist to whine that this speech wouldn’t be any different than last year. Nothing could please Goldberg. The moment when he honored a fallen Navy SEAL and his widow with praise and applause? “Grossly presumptuous,” she griped, bashing the liberals in the media who dared to call the gesture, “presidential.”
“Of course, it wasn’t!” Goldberg gushed. It just “proved” that Trump’s “showmanship” could exceed the “low expectations” placed on him by the media.
She continued ranting that anything “remotely dignified” Trump said or did tonight would be treated as a “turning point” for the president, by her clueless peers in the media. “By now, everyone should know there’s no new Trump,” Goldberg wrote.
The NYT columnist ends her diatribe by claiming that Trump’s 2017 address was “full of lies,” linking to a FactCheck.org which listed only a handful of figures Trump gave in the speech as spin, not outright “lies.”
But Goldberg’s Trump Derangement Syndrome didn’t start here. On Hardball, October 10, Goldberg bashed Congress, saying that if they had been “sane, rational and decent” they would’ve impeached Trump already. “Even Nixon in his darkest days was not as erratic, unstable and didn't pose as much as a danger to his country as Trump poses,” she said breathlessly.
If that wasn’t nutty enough, last February, she claimed Trump wanted to “force childbirth” on women, and she has made a number of other ridiculous claims about the GOP and President Trump in the past few years that NewsBusters has documented.
