It's a thorough piece of opinion journalism that in 1960 would have helped end Trump's candidacy. But then, if it was 1960 and the country actually valued journalism, Trump would have been disqualified so long ago. In 2024, it probably won't be read by more than a handful of Trump followers, and even they will just sneer at it as confirming their biases about liberal elites.
I'm becoming more and more cynical about November. Swing states are polling way too heavily for Trump - he's leading in most and barely not in just a few. To me the NYT article seems obvious and impossible to dispute, but at this point we've fully partitioned ourselves as a country between those who can spot a con man and those who can't. To those who can't, we let Trump's nihilism metastasize and it's probably too late.
Too much of the country is in the throes of mass delusion, thank you Rupert Murdoch, and I'm pretty sure American democracy has only a few months left to live. I'd love to see a plan, any plan, that realistically leads to a different result. And I am going to vote in November for Biden, or whoever replaces him. But I no longer believe America's ability to do the right thing, even after it's tried everything else (as the saying goes). Now, we've tried Trump and somehow are choosing the vehemently, obviously wrong thing.
Until then, this piece is just a nice epitaph, a "we told you, you should have known" that will remind any MAGA recidivists who eventually experience leopards eating their faces after November, when Trump's next presidency inevitably reveals itself to be an autocratic destruction of American self-rule.