Are you ... are you kidding me? From the New York Times.
With that in mind, we’re looking for a few positive words about the president, and we’re asking for your help. This is not about Trump the family man. It’s not another forum for debating the issues. It is a place to point out positive things Mr. Trump has said or done from the viewpoint of The New York Times and its readers.
That would be the New York Times' Michael Kinsley, who last week announced he was looking for a few good words about Donald Trump to wedge into the paper every once in a while—and given that his Oval Office residency has been up until now been a Dumpster fire, that's so far been a nearly impossible job to do with a straight face. So the Times is going to crowdsource it. Finding any one positive, non-stupid thing Trump has ever said or done is such a tremendous potential undertaking that it can only be done by teams of citizens working nonstop to dream something up.
Kinsley then attempts to show us how it's done with an example: He tweets! Yes, those tweets are themselves a Dumpster fire, but he tweets! You like that, right?
And he apparently writes his tweets himself.
Mind you, if we're counting Trump's apparently uncontrollable need to insult people on Twitter in the wee hours of the morning as him doing a Good Thing, our bar is already very low indeed. Under that logic Donald Trump could pull down his pants and expose himself in front of his next rally crowd and the Times would begrudgingly praise his commitment to transparency.
Turn the clock forward a week, to yesterday, and we see the first instance of this new feature in action. It is a celebration of Donald J. Trump's decision to abandon the White House Correspondents Dinner. You and I and Trump’s racist butler all know that Trump did it because he could not stomach being in any room in which his fellow humans were not required to be nice to him, but never mind that; at least the Dumpster fire of Trump did a little damage to the tire fire of the Dinner, so let's all celebrate Trump's ego maneuvering him into doing some small amount of accidental good for somebody.
And then we get to our tagline. Our premise. Our goal.
The president’s flaws are well known to readers of many mainstream media outlets. Our purpose with this feature, which will appear regularly in Sunday Review, is to present things the president has said or done that are praiseworthy. Any suggestions? Tell us at saysomethingnice@nytimes.com
What a fun game this will be. Well, the catastrophe of his election galvanized anti-fascists in France, so that's a good thing, right? Oh, and Trump's rampant corruption has taught all of America some words they didn't know before, words like emoluments. And he has single-handedly demonstrated the abject inability of our nation's journalists to truly hold a public figure to account, which we don't appreciate right now but will make for a fine chapter in some irradiated future history book.
Dear New York Times: Today the Palm Beach ambulance taking my uncle to the hospital was delayed by the Trump motorcade shuttling him off to Mar-A-Lago for another weekend of golf and chocolate cake. My uncle died, but nobody liked him very much anyway and now all his relatives get to divvy up his classic baseball card collection. If it hadn’t been for Trump’s decision to spend every last weekend at one of his own businesses this would never have happened, so thanks, Donald!
In response to the installation of the most clearly incompetent and corrupt set of public officials since the days of Teapot Dome, the paper of record will be launching an Everybody Gets A Trophy Day for Donald Trump, and effort to try to balance out the incompetence and lack of ethics with, ya know, the good side of having a barely intelligible malignant narcissist in charge of our nuclear arsenal
Sure, why not. Give them your suggestions.