Maureen Dowd: Election Therapy from My Basket of Deplorables-Authorship Confirmed!
Summary of eRumor:
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd penned a column under the headline, “Election Therapy from My Basket of Deplorables,” after Donald Trump won the 2016 election.
The Truth:
The New York Times published Maureen Down’s “Election Therapy form My Basket of Deplorables” column on Nov. 26, 2016.
The column begins by describing a sit-down between Times reporters and editors and President-elect Trump:
Sitting next to our publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Trump invited everyone around the table to call him if they saw anything “where you feel that I’m wrong.”
“You can call me, Arthur can call me, I would love to hear,” he said. “The only one who can’t call me is Maureen. She treats me too rough.”
Then I had to go home for Thanksgiving and deal with my family scolding me about the media misreading the country. I went cold turkey to eat hot turkey: no therapy dog, no weaving therapy, no yoga, no acupuncture, no meditation, no cry-in.
Dowd describes her conservative family in the column as “my little basked of deplorables,” which gave rise to the “Election Therapy” headline, and describes how the election was a repudiation of President Obama and his “fantasy world” of political correctness:
The country had signaled strongly in the last two midterms that they were not happy. The Dems’ answer was to give them more of the same from a person they did not like or trust.
Preaching — and pandering — with a message of inclusion, the Democrats have instead become a party where incivility and bad manners are taken for granted, rudeness is routine, religion is mocked and there is absolutely no respect for a differing opinion. This did not go down well in the Midwest, where Trump flipped three blue states and 44 electoral votes.
The rudeness reached its peak when Vice President-elect Mike Pence was booed by attendees of “Hamilton” and then pompously lectured by the cast. This may play well with the New York theater crowd but is considered boorish and unacceptable by those of us taught to respect the office of the president and vice president, if not the occupants.
Dowd went on to caution “Trump deniers” that crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm, and “liberal media” has lost all credibility:
The media’s criticism of Trump’s high-level picks as “not diverse enough” or “too white and male” — a day before he named two women and offered a cabinet position to an African-American — magnified this fact.
Here is a final word to my Democratic friends. The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts. And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.
Dowd’s column was widely circulated in the weeks after its publication in both emails and on discussion forums. As an outspoken liberal, her message seemed to resonate with both Republican voters happy over Trump’s victory and Democratic voters mourning their loss.