Journalists aren’t supposed to make things up.

Unless, of course, you’re the New York Times Editorial Board.

The other day the “Paper of Record” ran an editorial titled: 

There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab

This jewel of distortion says, among other things, this, bold print for emphasis supplied: 

The first 100 days of President Trump’s second term have done more damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction. Mr. Trump is attempting to create a presidency unconstrained by Congress or the courts, in which he and his appointees can override written law when they want to. It is precisely the autocratic approach that this nation’s founders sought to prevent when writing the Constitution.

Obviously, the Times has no historical memory of a president named Franklin D. Roosevelt. Perhaps because liberal Democrat FDR is to this day the left-wing ideal of how to run the presidency – and that ideal is, yes indeed, remarkably Trumpian. 

In fact, you could call the FDR presidency what it has effectively become for all FDR successors since: precedent.

Over there at Chapman University is a lengthy look at FDR’s presidency by the distinguished USC Berkeley Professor of Law John Yoo. Among other things, Professor Yoo writes the following, bold print for emphasis supplied:

….FDR made management of the economy by a bureaucracy of experts a permanent feature of American life. While the Republican presidents who had dominated elections since the Civil War had left economic decisions to the market, FDR pushed the federal government to provide for economic as well as national security.  The New Deal did not just produce a federal government of broad power—it gave birth to a president whose influence over domestic affairs would expand to match his role in foreign affairs. 

When the Supreme Court stood in the way of the new administrative state, FDR launched a campaign to increase the membership of the Court to change the meaning of the Constitution. When political parties challenged the New Deal, FDR concentrated power in the executive branch, which undermined their ability to channel benefits to their members. The New Deal produced a presidency that was more institutionally independent of Congress and more politically free of the parties than ever before.

In short? In short, FDR took it upon himself to have  “concentrated power in the executive branch” and “produced a presidency that was more institutionally independent of Congress and more politically free of the parties than ever before.”

In other words? What FDR accomplished was to set a new precedent. Precedent for successor presidents to go about conducting a presidency that has “concentrated power in the executive branch” – something Donald Trump has, in decided FDR style- and that of other predecessors – indeed done.

The opposition to Trump on this score would be laughable except for the Times staunch support of the Biden-era use of lawfare – weaponizing the government to target President Biden’s political opponent of the day — Donald Trump. But when Trump asked the leader of Ukraine to look into the fishy influence-peddling there of Joe Biden’s son, the Democrats impeached him.

What the Times editorial reminds is that, along with its left-wing allies, the paper had no problem with making what effectively could be called its own “War on Democracy” when power in the Justice Department, not to mention the White House, was in the hands of Presidents Biden and Obama and their left-wing lawyers staffing the DOJ.

But there is no such thing as a Trump “War on Democracy.”

That is the authoritarian stuff of left-wing Presidents decidedly cheered on by the Times and others in the left-wing media. It is Biden and Obama who, to borrow from the Times, had inflicted more “damage to American democracy than anything else since the demise of Reconstruction.” And, again, the Times cheered them on.

Running editorials now trying to pretend the opposite is true simply – laughably – doesn’t come close to passing muster.

As the old comedic TV character Gomer Pyle use to say with unintentional irony: “Sur….prise,  Sur….prise, Sur..prise.”