The October 23 New York Times ran a Donald Trump headline on the top-right corner of the paper, and a Kamala Harris headline just underneath it. The headline contrast is so cartoonish you might blink twice and think this is a Babylon Bee prank.
First, the Trump headline, from reporter Peter Baker:
A Scandal-Plagued Career Nears a Decisive Moment
Trump Has Been Accused of Wrongdoing at Scale Unseen at Presidential Level
Underneath that, a Kamala story by reporters Tim Arango and Heather Knight:
Harris, Crime Fighter by Day, Courted High Society at Night
This has the Bat-Girl vibes, she's a masked superhero in the daylight, then she's unassuming Barbara Gordon in the evening. Arango and Knight sounded like they were writing a screenplay:
OAKLAND, Calif. -- In August 1996, a jury in an Oakland, Calif., courtroom convicted a man of slicing off a portion of his girlfriend’s scalp. The prosecutor was Kamala Harris, and the gruesome case was one of the few that made news early in her career.
“It was a vicious crime,” Ms. Harris told The Oakland Tribune. She was in her seventh year as a rank-and-file prosecutor in Alameda County, doing battle with suspected drug lords and murderers in Oakland, which was still contending with the crack epidemic.
Weeks later, Ms. Harris was back in the news, this time across the bay in San Francisco as a boldface name in the society pages, among the young and fashionable who had gathered for a martini party at a Polo Ralph Lauren store ahead of the Fall Antiques Show….
By day, she developed the courtroom skills that have shaped her methodical approach as a candidate. By night, she moved through San Francisco high society, nurturing the financial and political connections that became instrumental in her national rise.
And this is how Peter Baker began the Trump take-down:
WASHINGTON -- When the history of the 2024 election is written, one of the iconic images illustrating it will surely be the mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump after one of his four indictments, staring into the camera with his signature glare. It is an image not of shame but of defiance, the image of a man who would be a convicted felon before Election Day and yet possibly president of the United States again afterward.
Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to “retribution.”
....His persecution defense, the notion that he gets in so much trouble only because everyone is out to get him, resonates at his rallies where he says “they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” But that of course belies a record of scandal stretching across his 78 years starting long before politics. Whether in his personal life or his public life, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.
Accusation = Guilt. This is one of many exhibits in the Museum of Liberal Tilt!
