If you’re looking for a cool, dispassionate assessment of Donald Trump’s political career, The New York Times has got you covered … in the worst, most cynical possible way.

The author of a major new op-ed soberly weighs Trump’s 2024 prospects, writing not at all generically, “Mr. Trump has both political assets to carry him forward and political baggage holding him back. For Mr. Trump to succeed, it means fewer insults and more insights; a campaign that centers on the future, not the past, and that channels the people’s grievances and not his own; and a reclamation of the forgotten Americans, who ushered him into the White House the first time and who are suffering economically under Mr. Biden.”

The author of this profundity? Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and White House adviser. In an op-ed headlined “Kellyanne Conway: The Case for and Against Trump.”

When I want to hear the case for and against someone, I turn to a loyalist who spent years working to promote them. Don’t you?

The whole thing is studiously bland. The Times did not get the Kellyanne Conway who would blurt out a lie about the fictive "Bowling Green Massacre." It got something one or two steps removed from the argument that Trump “must move forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!"

But Conway’s doing that for a reason. She didn’t just happen to jot down a few thoughts and decide they should have a larger audience. She’s engaging in a project of trying to rescue Trump from his absolute flop of a campaign launch and ensuing months. Pretending to take a step back and weigh his strengths and weaknesses and where he would stand in a Republican presidential primary field is a strategic move to reframe Trump from a wounded loser sulking at Mar-a-Lago to an imperfect but enormously powerful figure ready to reemerge. 

And the Times gave her a venue for this rehabilitation project.

Naturally, Conway spends some key early real estate in her piece attacking Trump’s critics. “Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. There is no vaccine and no booster for it,” she writes. “Cosseted in their social media bubbles and comforted within self-selected communities suffering from sameness, the afflicted disguise their hatred for Mr. Trump as a righteous call for justice or a solemn love of democracy and country. So desperate is the incessant cry to ‘get Trump!’ that millions of otherwise pleasant and productive citizens have become naggingly less so.”

Oh, no, not becoming naggingly less pleasant and productive by calling for consequences for someone who attempted to overturn an election and incited a violent insurrection. But that’s the strategy here. This is all just a difference of opinion; why are people being so rude and uncivil about it?

The Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol gets a glancing mention two sentences later: Sufferers of Trump Derangement Syndrome have “also done precious little to learn and understand what drives the 74 million fellow Americans who were Trump-Pence voters in 2020 and not in the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.” Dear heavens, lady, who do you think bought all those copies of Hillbilly Elegy? In the wake of 2016, earnest efforts to explain or understand Trump voters were inescapable. That’s why we Trump critics spend so much time joking about having talked to three Trump supporters in an Ohio diner.

And it’s why it’s not so surprising that it’s the Times giving Conway this platform to write, maybe even with a straight face, “The case against Trump 2024 rests in some combination of fatigue with self-inflicted sabotage; fear that he cannot outrun the mountain of legal woes; the call to ‘move on’; a feeling that he is to blame for underwhelming Republican candidates in 2022; and the perception that other Republicans are less to blame for 2022 and have more recent records as conservative reformers.”

Not to be too naggingly unpleasant, but the case against Trump 2024 also rests on the idea that people who attempt to overthrow the government should not be eligible for future office.

That Kellyanne Conway is dishonest in service of Donald Trump is nothing new. This op-ed seems like a desperation move, implicit recognition that things are not going well for him. What’s really noteworthy is that it didn’t appear on Fox News or in The Wall Street Journal. No, The New York Times made very prominent space for this, a clear indication that the paper is continuing its insistence on normalizing Trump and downplaying the historic nature of his lies, his incitement, and the way he has mainstreamed racism and bigotry in U.S. politics. That’s not surprising, after the past eight years or so of abysmal political coverage from the Times. But it’s a marker that we should not miss.

Republished with permission from Daily Kos.