Therefore none of the “historic” public support Presidents had reflexively received in times of conflict and crisis is relevant today. I have to say that Baker’s column makes me angry, even as accustomed as I am to the Times’ perfidy. How dare the Times write about this phenomenon as if it is an objective observer rather than an active accomplice in making President Trump’s use of his Constitutional powers as difficult as possible?

The Times was a cheerleader for Barack Obama’s craven attempt to bribe Iran into temporary peacefulness, when anyone paying attention knew that the regime was untrustworthy and would use Obama’s pallets of cash to spread terrorism and build the weapons to wipe out Israel and make its “Death to America!” motto a reality. And they did.

In the meantime, the nation’s “newspaper of record” worked tirelessly to make certain its readers held nothing but contempt for the current President of the United States. The public support for our Presidents in times of crisis must be based on trust. The New York Times has done everything in its power, including lying during a fake Democratic smear that he colluded with Russia to steal an election, supporting two partisan impeachment efforts and approving the unconscionable efforts by two New York attorneys general to use the courts to take him out of the 2024 Presidential race, to ensure that the public would not trust this President.

In short, the Times itself is significantly responsible for the fact that Trump lacks the traditional support Presidents have received—and need—to deal with international threats, and it has the gall to tut-tut his taking military action without that support.

And guess who the first historian the Times and Baker run to in an appeal to authority! Why, Michael Beschloss, the “Presidential historian” who has morphed into MSNOW’s and CNN’s go-to partisan hack to bash Trump and Republican and bolster Democrats at every turn. Here’s his dossier, and its disgraceful. Historian Doris Kearns is also partisan (after all, she was LBJ’s part-time mistress when she was writing about him at his ranch) but at least she might have reminded the Times that our two greatest Presidents, Washington and Lincoln, pursued wars that the public didn’t want (Washington wasn’t President during the Revolution, but it was his war as much as anyone’s) and her #3, another President Kearns admires, FDR, was secretly fighting WWII against overwhelming public disapproval before Pearl Harbor.

For good measure, the Times added an “expert” whom it also knew in advance would undermine Trump: Peter D. Feaver, a national security aide under President George W. Bush. The entire Bush Family orbit, which includes such bitter NeverTrumpers as Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol and Richard Painter, will never forgive Trump for dissing George and Jeb. Baker ignores that conflict of interests just as he pretends Beschloss and the Times itself don’t have a partisan agenda.

That President Trump took this opportunity to attack Iran after every President since Carter had “kicked the can”—the Iran Can!—down the road without reading the polls is to his great credit, while the Times uses it to imply weakness and looming failure.

Of course it does. It is the “enemy of the people.”