Liberal elites at the New York Times are paving the way for Trump’s endgame in Gaza

Liberal elites and the corporate media paved the way for US president Donald Trump’s ethnic-cleansing policy in Gaza. And as the New York Times (NYT) shows, they’re still doing it as he advances this nakedly settler-colonial agenda. for Israel.

Biden tried to sugarcoat genocide. Trump says it loud and clear.

In his second term, Trump seems bolder. And that’s partly because Liberal political and media elites utterly trashed the empire’s facade of law-abidance and morality with their shameless backing of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Now, Trump is simply incinerating what’s left of that facade.

Joe Biden’s government would allow and fuel the murder of 18,000 Palestinian children, sure, but it wouldn’t advocate illegally moving them to a different country. Trump, on the other hand, just explicitly says “clean out that whole thing… it’s over”. (Whether other countries will play along is another matter, but who truly stands up to the US nowadays?)

The new president is right, of course, that Gaza “is literally a demolition site right now, almost everything is demolished“. Biden helped Israel ensure that. But Trump’s answer isn’t to hypocritically tut at Israel while sending it more weapons. He just describes the endgame bluntly. And that’s more than the establishment NYT can bring itself to do.

Even now, the New York Times refuses to speak clearly

Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich unsurprisingly called Trump’s ethnic-cleansing push “out-of-the-box thinking” and “a great idea”. Israeli newspaper Haaretz has previously insisted that “Smotrich Must Pay the Price for His Repeated Calls for Genocide of Palestinians”. Activists have also been documenting his incitement to genocide.

The Liberal NYT, however, has faced accusations of favouring Israel during the Gaza genocide while downplaying the war crimes that international courts, human rights groups, and other experts have condemned. And it’s not any closer to growing a spine now. Because Smotrich is clearly an advocate of settler-colonial ethnic cleansing. But the NYT described him simply as someone who:

has long advocated for helping Gazans who want to leave to depart and for the Israeli military to remain in the enclave in order to pave the way for eventual Jewish settlement there.

How to say "ethnically cleanse" in NYT speak pic.twitter.com/ukGiOLYoEZ

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) January 26, 2025

As the Canary has previously reported, a new book details how the NYT separates victims of violence or injustice into two groups – ‘worthy’ or ‘unworthy’. And this designation determines how, and how much, it reports on these people’s struggles. Its coverage of the Gaza genocide, meanwhile, shows clearly that it sees Israelis as ‘worthy’ victims and Palestinians as ‘unworthy’ victims – just as the Biden administration and other establishment Liberals around the world did, in unison with their conservative colleagues.

But the NYT hadn’t finished covering for Israel yet. Because it also revealed its hypocrisy by mentioning doubts about the deaths of military and civilian sections of Israeli and Palestinian populations. It said:

Hamas led an attack on Israel that killed more than 1,200 Israelis. Since then, Israel’s military has killed at least 46,000 Palestinians, according to Gazan health officials, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

Analysis shows, however, that the events of 7 October 2023 resulted in “a maximum of 780 dead Israeli civilians”. So while the NYT thinks it’s important to emphasise a distinction between civilians and combatants in Gaza, it apparently doesn’t feel it necessary to do the same with Israelis.

Also apparently only one side conflates military and civilian casualties pic.twitter.com/U2USCSoOaD

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) January 26, 2025

Neither Trump nor the Liberal elites that spawned him

In Britain, the BBC is no better than the NYT or other mainstream US media outlets. It also continues to prefer soft language that doesn’t offend pro-Israel lobbyists too much.

Liberal politicians in the UK, meanwhile, would love to resurrect the pretense that the West cares about human rights or the rule of law. They know Trump is furthering the global reputational collapse of the US that intensified under Biden. And that’s not good for business as usual. But the Liberals in power – like the corporate lackeys in the current British government – won’t challenge Trump, because they need to keep him on side to secure their own grip on power.

If anything good comes from the second Trump administration, it might be a widespread public realisation that democracy shouldn’t be about choosing between diplomatic genocide apologists and undiplomatic ones – it should be about ordinary people working together to build a more humane future.

Featured image via the Canary