Donald Trump has presented a unique challenge for a newspaper trying to remain a liberal, pluralistic bulwark of truth against revanchism without simultaneously veering too far into left territory

The Times, in turn, chose this print headline to sum up Trump’s address after the Dayton and El Paso shootings: “Trump Urges Unity vs. Racism.” It was properly excoriated

This attention to trivia is not new. Joan Didion flayed insular, vapid political coverage as well as any writer alive in her 1988 New York Review of Books essay, “Insider Baseball.” Rather than die under Didion’s withering gaze, the genre grew: Politico was born in 2007, in part to monetize a certain subset’s addiction to incremental, insider-oriented political coverage. The benefit of such a model is that it allows for a certain degree of remove. If politics are treated as a mere game, and not, for instance, a contest between those who want to deny you health care coverage or give you more, the news organization loses all stake in the matter. The neutral pose can be adopted—and calcified. If a game is being played, the journalist is to referee. And the journalist, in this construct, is made to feel free of all bias. It’s not about who’s right or wrong, what policy works or doesn’t. “Who’s going to win?” is always the easiest, and most pointless, question to ask. “The game changer, the horse race, the Hail Mary—apt, perhaps, for the party politics of the 1990s and 2000s—are painfully inadequate for the movement politics of a new era, with higher stakes, higher passions, and far wider interest,” Ben Smith, the former editor in chief of BuzzFeed and a former Politico staffer, wrote in 2018, disavowing an approach he once celebrated. (Smith has since joined the Times as its top media columnist.) The thing about “who’s going to win?” is that we always find out the answer eventually.