I know it’s crazy, but I continue to get the print edition of the New York Times delivered to my front door every day. It’s part of my mission to keep up with what the other side is thinking. I read it (less and less) so that you don’t have to. But even an occasional skim makes it obvious that with every passing year and day they retreat ever more from serious news, and descend ever further into crazed partisan zealotry.

So imagine my surprise this morning when the entire central portion of page 1, covering three of six column on the top half of the front page, contains what appears to be a huge free ad for Trump for President. Here is a picture of what that looks like, with a format quite unlike all their other news columns, including much larger type than the norm, double spacing between lines, and plenty of boldface:

The headline is “If Donald J. Trump wins, he is ready to radically reshape American government from the moment he regains the White House.” (The online version of this piece has a different headline (“If Trump Wins”) and does not include the summary in the photograph above.)

And then this massive ad continues into four full pages of the interior of the paper, pages A10 to A13.

OK, I’m sure that the brilliant editors at the Times were not thinking that this huge article would be viewed as an effective campaign ad for Trump. They clearly have intended it as a harsh, definitive and irrefutable take down — the final driving of the stake through the heart of this nocturnal monster. They have spun every argument to be as damning as possible to their adversary, at least in the view from inside their bubble.

But to my reading, it sure looks like they are making a lot of effective arguments to vote for Trump. I’ll start at the beginning.

He has said he intends to expand presidential power by bringing independent agencies under his direction . . . .

That’s just saying that Trump intends to operate the federal government in accordance with the Constitution, notably the principle that “The executive Power [of the U.S. government] shall be vested in a President of the United States of America”? That quote is the first line of Article II of the Constitution. The Constitution contains no other grant of executive power. If the so-called “independent” agencies (examples include the SEC, FTC, FCC, CFTC, and many others) decline to follow the direction of the elected President, then they are acting contrary to the Constitution and undermining democracy. (For more background on how the “independent” agencies slipped the bounds of the Constitution, see my post on the subject from way back in 2016 here.)

. . . stripping employment protection from civil servants and purging officials from security agencies . . .

Civil servants who decline to follow the direction of the elected President are equally acting in defiance of Article II Section 1 of the Constitution, and of their oath to uphold the Constitution. The violation of oaths was particularly egregious within the security agencies during the first Trump term. Whichever candidate a voter may be favoring, I would hope the voter would expect the civil servants to honor the wishes of the voters and follow the directions of whoever gets elected. Of course civil servants who violate their oaths of office should be fired. So-called “civil service” protections date from a more innocent era (1880s) when naive good government types thought that the government could just be staffed by neutral and non-political “experts.” Today that has morphed into a system of a huge bureaucracy of 90+% Democrats who think they are entitled to work full-time to undermine all efforts of an elected Republican to change direction of the ship of state. I have confidence that today’s Supreme Court will uphold the ability of the President to fire civil servants who are actively working to undermine him. But while that issue gets litigated, I endorse this proposal of Steven Hayward:

Trump ought to have his cabinet officials determine who is useless or obstructive and order them to work from home. Then cut off their email and access to department computer servers the next day.

. . . He has said he would direct the Justice Department to prosecute his political adversaries, including President Biden and others he perceives as his enemies. . . .

The Times seems to think that such prosecutions would be a huge break from norms and are a signal reason to hate Trump. In the real world, of which the Times seems completely unaware, the norm has already been broken by Biden’s multiple prosecutions of none other than Trump. Harris would with 100% certainty continue those prosecutions should she win. Meanwhile, Trump is unlikely to prosecute Biden, both because it would be a distraction, and because his own recent Supreme Court victory undermines the basis for any such prosecution. And Trump did not prosecute Hillary Clinton after defeating her, despite ample basis to do so. So, if you think that prosecutions of political adversaries are a bad idea, clearly Trump is your candidate.

. . . He plans a drastic crackdown on immigration . . .

Thank you for making that clear. As far as I am aware, polls seem to indicate that out-of-control illegal immigration is among the top issues of concern to the voters.

And those are just from the first few lines of the front page summary of this big article. The farther you read, the more reasons come up to vote for Trump. Here are just a handful of further examples from the rest of the article:

• “Push for other countries to take would-be asylum seekers from the United States.”

• “[H]e has pledged to rein in regulatory agencies.”

• “If he retakes the White House, Mr. Trump would be in a far better position to dismantle environmental and climate rules.”

• “Mr. Trump . . . is offering his audiences bespoke tax cuts. For restaurant and hotel employees in Nevada . . . Mr. Trump offered ‘no taxes on tips.’ For the retired Americans who vote in great numbers, he said he would end taxes on Social Security benefits. . . .”

I’ll await the Times’s comparable write-up of the contrary campaign positions of Kamala Harris. They can try to spin Harris’s positions favorably to her, but first they’ll have to figure out what they are. Probably they have a team of 20 or so reporters out there right now trying to figure that out. Good luck coming up with anything prior to the election.