The New York Times now employs zero opinion columnists who represent the roughly half of American voters who cast ballots for Donald Trump — and that's by design.
Ross Douthat's departure to CBS News, where he'll join former Times colleague Bari Weiss at "60 Minutes," leaves the paper of record with 12 featured columnists. Only two — David French and Bret Stephens — even pretend to be conservative. Both spent the last decade opposing Trump and both declared their support for Kamala Harris in 2024, according to Fox News. That's not a diversity of opinion. That's a curated illusion of one.
The remaining roster — Jamelle Bouie, Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, M. Gessen, Michelle Goldberg, Ezra Klein, Nicholas Kristof, Carlos Lozada, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lydia Polgreen, plus French and Stephens — speaks for itself. The Times' editorial board hasn't endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower, nearly 70 years and 17 straight elections ago.
This is how establishment media manufactures consent — not by banning dissent outright, but by ensuring only the "right kind" of conservative ever gets a column. French and Stephens serve a function: they allow the Times to claim ideological diversity while guaranteeing that diversity never actually challenges the institutional consensus. They're not opposition. They're props.
The pattern is unmistakable. Weiss herself resigned from the Times in 2020 after being ostracized by far-left staffers, famously declaring that "Twitter has become [the Times'] ultimate editor." Her departure followed the Tom Cotton op-ed debacle, where the paper published a sitting senator's argument for using federal troops to quell riots — then caved to a volcanic staff revolt and purged multiple opinion staffers. The mob, not the readers, decides what prints.
The columnists who remain have their own track records. Thomas Friedman said in April he was "torn" about rooting for the Iranian regime's downfall because it would be a victory for what he called the "terrible," "awful human beings" Trump and Netanyahu. Nicholas Kristof reported without skepticism that Palestinian prisoners were being raped by dogs — sparking international outcry. Michelle Goldberg was forced to walk back fawning coverage of a Maine Senate candidate after sexual assault allegations surfaced.
Two days after Trump won the 2024 election, the Times published a somber video featuring ten of its columnists offering predictions of "the worst version of a Trump administration." Polgreen insisted Trump would "fulfill his promise to be a dictator on Day One."
Douthat's exit wasn't a firing. It didn't have to be. When the only conservatives who survive your newsroom are the ones who vote for Democrats, the selection mechanism is working exactly as intended. The question isn't why pro-Trump voices are absent from the Times. It's why anyone still pretends the paper is anything but a house organ for one half of the bipartisan establishment.
