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Bret Stephens: Hi, Gail. It’s fair to say that Nikki Haley has next-to-no chance of beating Donald Trump for the Republican nomination. Give her your best advice: Give up now? Fight a guerrilla campaign right up to the G.O.P. convention? Or join forces with someone like Joe Manchin in a third party?
Gail Collins: Third parties are for people who don’t care who wins the election as long as they’ve got their name on the ballot. I’d like to think she’s better than that.
Bret: A third-party run with her and Manchin might subtract more votes from Trump than from Biden. I hope someone is polling that right now. Sorry, go on ….
Gail: And I’d like her to stay in, if only to spare us nine straight months of nothing but Trump vs. Biden.
You?
Bret: Vive la résistance! She should fight Trump in every state she can, get under his skin, point out his every mental lapse and remind Republicans how they’ve been mostly losing votes and seats in every election since he squeaked into office in 2016. She should also remind them of all the promises Trump never kept: a wall along the southern border, paid for by Mexico, for example. It might be a political kamikaze mission, but if she does it with panache and a Happy Warrior spirit it could serve her reputation well, once conservatives recover their senses — in 10 to 20 years.
Gail: Hey, she’s only 52.
Bret: Also, let’s face it, the longer she stays in, the more it helps Joe Biden. That, plus last week’s strong economic numbers, gives me a glimmer of hope that the end of the world may not be nigh after all.
Gail: We’re in an unnerving amount of accord. Think Congressional Republicans feel the same way? It really looked as if there was going to be an agreement on the border — until Trump made it clear he didn’t want anybody agreeing to any progress on anything while Biden was in office.
Do you think the Republicans will have the spine to march on through?
Bret: Neither the spine nor the brains. The former, because Trump has signaled his opposition, on the cynical view that a continued migration crisis helps his election chances, and Republicans are nothing but invertebrates in the face of their master’s wrath. The latter, because they don’t seem to realize that failing to get an immigration deal when they could have had one for the asking gives Biden the advantage in the immigration debate, because he can rightly put the blame on Republicans for walking away from border security.
Gail: I do love the idea of a campaign in which Biden’s the border security guy.
Bret: If I were Mitch McConnell, I’d push forward with a deal anyway: He doesn’t have a political future so he may as well try to acquire a political legacy. But that still leaves the hopeless, hapless House Republican caucus, where Speaker Mike Johnson says the bill is “dead on arrival.” So consider that another reason I’m rooting for a big Biden win in the fall: It isn’t that I like the Democrats; I just detest the Republicans so much more.
Gail: You haven’t mentioned the Democrats much — anything in particular you’d like to vent about?
Bret: In another age, I’d have plenty to complain about when it comes to Democrats, or at least this administration. Doing it now feels like bemoaning a hemorrhoid when you’ve just been diagnosed with colon cancer.
Gail: Umm … eww. But I get your drift.
Bret: Was that a bit much? Yeah, probably. Sorry.
Gail: Now here’s a different topic. A New York jury has just ruled Trump should pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll, the New York writer who said he raped her in a department store in the 1990s, and then sued him for defamation when he called her a liar.
Trump was ordered to pay $5 million earlier — but this is a new, whopping award that followed his public assaults on the verdict. And it comes not long after a jury ruled Rudy Giuliani should hand over $148 million to Georgia election workers he claimed had fixed the vote count in 2020 to cheat Trump. The poor women were harassed incessantly by MAGA loons, and they deserve the money, but unfortunately Giuliani has filed for bankruptcy. Which isn’t surprising, given that nobody in their right mind would want to pay Rudy to do anything — certainly not give legal advice. Perhaps he might get a modest reward for showing up at a birthday party for someone’s right-wing great-uncle, but that’s about it.
Think Carroll is going to do better? Is Mar-a-Lago going to the auctioneer?
Bret: So defending Trump is the last thing I want to do, but here goes: I think the Carroll suit is outrageous, and the award she’s been granted even more so. I hope it’s overturned on appeal.
Leave Trump out of it for a moment. We now have a situation in which a socially unpopular figure can be accused — in the jurisdiction where he is hated the most — of a heinous crime without having any realistic means of defending himself, because the alleged crime dates back for decades and any kind of forensic evidence is long gone. Even though the case is not criminal, the “preponderance of evidence” standard of proof in a civil trial is much lower than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which makes it even harder to defend. If the person continues to defend himself — or denounce his accuser — he can be subject to ruinous financial penalties.
Point being: I want Trump defeated. But not like this. Where am I wrong?
Gail: Think present. Even if you have questions about the original verdict, here’s a man who’s undoubtedly been urged by his legal counsel not to say anything about this woman. And yet he keeps howling. That’s a lack of control you absolutely cannot afford to have in a president.
Bret: On this, we agree. But the precedent will eventually come to haunt someone who doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment.
Gail: Let’s take a rest from politics. Anything else going on that interests you? I probably can’t ask you about Taylor Swift and football since you don’t watch sports. Your pick.
Bret: How can I not listen to Taylor? She’s nearly the last unifying force in America, bringing together country and pop, young and old, left and right, dads and, in my case, my two Swiftie daughters. (My son is more of a Steely Dan guy.)
Gail: This is something I admire about you, Bret. Taylor Swift is politically pretty clearly to the left, and she’s making non-music headlines dating a football superstar. You hate sports yet you still have the independence to make her an icon. Of course, her incredible talent helps.
Bret: Well, that plus the fact that one of my girls wouldn’t speak to me again if I ever said a negative word about her.
But the nonpolitical story that really interests me revolves around the struggles of the news business. Big layoffs and buyouts at the L.A. Times and The Washington Post and Sports Illustrated, among other places. Any theories for the decline of our business?
Gail: Sure, it’s the internet. Classic media like the ones you mentioned are having a hard time keeping subscribers. The people who used to buy newspapers and magazines found they could get a ton of information online. The veteran publications still have lots of loyal readers, but not enough to pay for high-quality teams of reporters and editors.
Bret: True, though at least a few publications learned to ride the digital wave.
Gail: I have total faith that stuff like sports will be covered diligently on TV and the internet. But I am so, so worried about how citizens are going to be getting reliable reports on their local communities. The number of weekly newspapers is just falling through the floor.
Tell me your thoughts.
Bret: I worry that we — the news media in general — let ourselves off the hook a little too easily in explaining why the floor is falling out from under our business. Yes, the internet is part of the story. So is a general decline in public literacy.
But there’s also the issue of trust and credibility. Even my liberal friends complain that some of the coverage they encounter, especially about culture, tilts so far left that it manages to leave them simultaneously bored and outraged. The plague of ideologically loaded adjectives is another big problem, as is reporting that too often is just opinion-writing masked in quotes from experts. I can’t remember the last time I read a sympathetic story about, say, what it means to run a small business in the teeth of well-meaning but foolish regulations (though I’m sure someone will be able to dig up a few examples). The news business will recover when it makes a much greater effort to understand and empathize with the lives and attitudes of people whose political and cultural outlook we rarely share.
Gail: I remember watching plenty of newspapers with right-wing editorial boards falling into hopeless economic holes. The problem is that tons of people feel they can just get the news they need these days by going online. That’s often true when it comes to national and international stories — they can find high-quality media with aggressive reporters any time on their computers.
But in most parts of the country you’re not going to be able to call up local coverage of board of education meetings or town council elections. It makes so much difference. Long, long ago I made my living covering the Connecticut State Legislature for 30-odd weeklies and small dailies. Once I started, all the lawmakers who represented those towns got more nervous about missing votes or getting caught delivering the goods for a special interest.
Bret: Gail, I’ll leave the last word on the news biz to you — in the hopes of preserving my own future in it!
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