February 24, 2026

A WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE ARE ANGLING TO BE THE EDITOR OF HARPER’S: New York Times ‘Fact-Checks’ Trump’s State of the Union—Before He Delivers the Address.

Before the State of the Union address, politicians and interest groups from the party opposite the president sometimes offer “prebuttals,” denunciations of the president’s remarks even before they’ve been released or spoken. These anticipatory denunciations of unseen, undelivered remarks are the stuff of speculative, spin-cycle political talking points, not news.

Yet this year, the New York Times broke with precedent and ran a print article headlined “Wobbly Claims on Jobs, Inflation and Crime,” assailing President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech before he even delivered it.

The “fact check” carries the byline of the factually challenged New York Times “fact-check” reporter Linda Qiu. The New York Times uses her pedantically against Trump but not against New York City’s truth-stretching mayor Zohran Mamdani. This latest column is entirely off base when it comes to the substance, attempting to undermine Trump’s claims of progress on inflation, jobs, crime, and immigration. On immigration, the Times rolled out fact-checking terminology—”slightly exaggerated”—that is comical in its demonstration of Times bias. When the Times fact-checkers discover Democrats saying things slightly exaggerated, they call them “mostly true.”

What’s more than slightly exaggerated is any pretension remaining at the Times that the newspaper is nonpartisan rather than totally in the tank for the Democrats.

Time traveling starts at a young age among the left:

Flashback: Media ‘Con Game:’ Predetermined Storylines.

Harper‘s magazine editor Lewis Lapham is being appropriately mocked for a major pre-GOP-convention boner. In the September issue of his magazine, which has been on newsstands for over a week, Lapham writes about the “Republican propaganda mill” and the GOP convention:

“The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal — government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden’s prayer — and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn’t stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?”

That’s right, Lapham wrote about the GOP convention speeches before anyone even stepped to the podium. Lapham has apologized for what he’s calling a “rhetorical invention,” use of “poetic license,” and a “mistake.”

But the only “mistake” Lapham made is in revealing for all to see what has long been known by anyone who pays attention to the news: the major media routinely bring to their coverage of significant political events a predetermined storyline — you might want to call it a “Lapham”. Facts that undermine the storyline are ignored or explained away as aberrations to The Truth. For the editor of Harper‘s and other establishment press figures, it really makes no difference to them what will be said at Madison Square Garden because the Laphams are already set, loaded in the scribblers’ word processors and television anchor tele-prompters and ready to go.

Maybe Lapham employed Joy Reid’s time traveling hackers to pull it off?

Posted at 8:30 pm by Ed Driscoll