It seems as if the New York Times operates from a simple rubric: If President Trump is for something, then the newspaper is against it, regardless of person, place, or thing.
On Tuesday, after Trump announced he would sign a posthumous pardon for Susan B. Anthony, the paper of record rolled out a report accusing the noted women’s rights advocate of having a problematic history.
And on the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment no less!
“I will be signing a full and complete pardon for Susan B. Anthony,” Trump announced Tuesday in the White House. “She was never pardoned. What took so long? And you know that she got a pardon for a lot of other women, and she didn’t put her name on the list. So she was never pardoned, and we’re for voting. That’s right.”
He added, “She was guilty for voting. And we are going to be signing a full and complete pardon. And I think that’s really fantastic. Right? She deserves it.”
The New York Times wasted no time publishing a report questioning the president’s motives while also casting a long, problematic shadow over the legacy of the women’s rights pioneer.
“The pardon appeared to be an effort to distract from the Democratic National Convention,” the report reads, “and narrow the historically large gender gap that has him trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the White House race.”
Or maybe, just hear me out, the pardon could also be a nod to the conservative Susan B. Anthony List group. But, ah, it is so much more than that, according to the New York Times’s anonymous sources. There is election-year trickery afoot!
“People close to the president said that Mr. Trump was seeking to create a news story during the Democrats’ convention, where Mr. Biden will be nominated,” the report reads. “Advisers believed that unlike some of Mr. Trump’s other pardons or grants of clemency, it will be harder to criticize an action benefiting a woman whose actions helped lead to women’s right to vote.”
The New York Times is here to disabuse those anonymous advisers of the notion that a pardon of a women’s rights advocate will “be harder to criticize.”
“Unlike other pardons that the president has given,” the New York Times report reads, “Ms. Anthony is not someone whose work Mr. Trump has spoken of either in his campaign or during his presidency.”
This is where the article takes an especially wild turn: “She is also an increasingly divisive figure, adopted by anti-abortion forces and criticized for relegating Black suffragists to the sidelines. On Tuesday, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion political group, and Cleta Mitchell, an attorney who represents conservative groups, were in attendance as Mr. Trump made his announcement.”
Sorry, Susan. Trump has nice things to say about you, so you are now guilty of extreme problematics, including your association with pro-life groups 114 years after your death and your insistence on taking a pragmatic (as opposed to an all-or-nothing) approach to securing women in the United States the right to vote.
Never mind that you were arrested when you tried to vote. Never mind that you refused to pay your fine in an act of civil disobedience. Never mind everything else you did for the suffragist movement. Trump is going to give you a posthumous pardon, so you are now in the problematic camp.
