‘Trumpism Has Failed’: Ross Douthat Rips Trump’s ‘Corrupt and Bullying and Destabilizing’ Second Term in NY Times Farewell

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Right-leaning columnist Ross Douthat bid farewell to The New York Times Saturday after 17 years — but not before taking a heavy swipe at President Donald Trump.

Douthat — who has been with the Times since 2009 but is departing to become a correspondent for 60 Minutes — went after the president and his administration in a scathing column in which he admitting trouble identifying “where the good guys and bad guys are” on both sides.

“[I]n Donald Trump’s second term populism has displayed most of the vices that its critics anticipated,” Douthat wrote. “It has been corrupt and bullying and destabilizing. It has rewarded hacks and cronies. And it stumbled into a Middle Eastern war with even less preparation than its establishment predecessors.”

Douthat went on to argue that Trump has not made lasting changes that would justify an extreme response in the opposite direction.

“For many liberal readers, these sins make populism the maximum danger, the singular emergency,” Douthat wrote. “But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back. The president himself might still be a dangerous figure, there might be darker forces waiting in the wings — but I don’t think that justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.”

Douthat proceeded to make his case against both Democratic establishment politics and what he billed as “Wokeness 2.0, Hasan Piker Thought and Democratic Socialists of America.”

“After 2020 we tried putting this establishment back in charge, but the Biden era just gave us a more left-wing version of meritocratic hubris, replacing experts with interest groups, maxxing out on social liberalism and illegal immigration and then unraveling completely in the end,” Douthat said. He added, “There is no evidence that the old elite has a blueprint suited to contemporary governance, no reason to expect that it won’t just cycle through the same mistakes and backlash.”

And of the far-left, Douthat wrote, “I lived through the years of peak woke, and it was a McCarthyite experience. I lived with the blue-state governance that doctrinaire progressivism encouraged, and it yielded civic and educational collapse. And I would prefer not to give the far left the power to regulate and prosecute and rewrite the federal budget.”

The departing Times columnist wrapped up his essay by saying, “this [is] a very important time for the kind of journalism that asks a lot of questions before it leaps to opinionated claims. For the past two years, I’ve been fortunate that The Times has let me pursue that kind of questioning as a podcast host. And this month, I accepted a position with CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” where the asking of questions will be central to my professional work.”

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