Dear New York Times,
In honor of Valentine's Day, I have decided to share a breakup letter that I wrote during a period of deep heartbreak not too long ago. Please avert your eyes if unaccustomed to shattering grief.
I never thought it would come to this. I used to peruse your pages all the time — while walking to class, eating dinner, or pedaling half-heartedly on my exercise bike. Whenever our now-President did/said/pantomimed something stupid, I immediately headed to your opinion section, where I was sure to find a veritable cornucopia of op-eds lampooning him to almost orgasmic effect. As a post-pubescent teenager attending an Ivy-League school, why would I need pornography when I had you?
But our blissful, practically codependent relationship shuddered to a halt the day you broke my heart. November 8, 2016. I was sprawled on my couch with a few friends, watching state by state bleed crimson. And on my laptop in front of me, I had out your live Presidential forecast, which had been a reassuring presence in my life for the past few months. But as your needle slowly, inevitably, torturously ticked from >80 percent Clinton to >95 percent Trump, I felt something change between us. Something irreversible. And I knew that from that moment on, I’d never be able to look at your gorgeous black Cheltenham typeface the same way again.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to find out what exactly went wrong. I went back and reread your pre-election op-eds, scouring them for clues of your imminent betrayal. And now, finally, I think I know the answer.
You made me feel safe in a way no one ever had before. With headlines like “The Dangers of Donald Trump,” “Trump, the Bad, Bad, Businessman,” and “Trump is an Existential Threat,” you painted an image of a Trump presidency so terrible, so godforsaken, that I was lulled into believing it would never, ever happen. Brick by marshmallow brick, you built a deliciously enticing bubble around me while simultaneously convincing me that the world outside was a deplorable hellscape called “Rural America.” And when that bubble exploded and left you coated in strands of blue sugar, you pretended you hadn’t constructed one to begin with, publishing op-eds like “How the Obama Coalition Crumbled, Leaving an Opening for Trump,” which included head-scratching lines such as “… the electoral trends that put [Trump] within striking distance of victory were clear long before Mr. Comey sent his letter…before WikiLeaks published hacked emails from [the DNC]…even clear back in early July.”
Really? They were clear? It might just be me (it’s not), but putting someone’s chances at winning the presidency anywhere between 10 to 20 percent in the months preceding the election doesn’t sound like you think he’s within “striking distance” of our nation’s highest office. You can’t just cover your butt once you’ve mooned the entire world from the top of your ivory tower.
Worst of all, this sense of false security often came at the expense of alienating people around us. Six days before the election, Thomas Friedman, one of your op-ed columnists, wrote an article entitled “Donald Trump Voters, Just Hear Me Out.” I’d always found your naïveté charming, even cute, but this was a bit much. We all know that if there’s a class of people Trump voters implicitly trust, it’s Oxford-educated, stylishly-mustachioed journalists. And did you really think that this far into the election season, anyone — Clinton, Trump, or potted plant supporters alike — would change his or her mind? I mean, sure, your pal Friedman admitted that his target audience was “the people least likely to read it,” but I know you knew whom they would end up being: Democrats who needed their fears assuaged (once again) by a guy with a shiny Pulitzer Prize, and liberal-media defenders who could wave the article around as proof of sympathetic outreach to the pro-Trump community.
Not to mention that you forgot all too easily that this was the same guy who, in his op-ed immediately preceding this one, entitled “Donald Trump, Alien to All That’s Great,” stated that Trump supporters “need to be challenged to learn faster and make good choices, because the world is not slowing down for them.” Yes, because the best way to reach out to a group of people is to imply that they learn too slowly, keep making bad decisions, and have a backwards lifestyle. You gave these opinions a respectable platform without providing a host of different perspectives to strike a much-needed balance — you just pretended to. And sometimes, pretense is far worse than outright rejection.
I will never forget our time together. I still smile thinking of those late nights I spent doing your mini-crosswords. And I hope that you find someone perfect for you — maybe a recently-divorced History of English History professor from Kinghamfordshire University.
Maybe it’s time for me to reconnect with my ex — my Facebook news stream.
You’ll always be news to me,
Lou
Lou Chen is a sophomore from San Bernardino, Calif. He can be reached at lychen@princeton.edu.
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