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NYT Still Making Everything About Russia, Russia, Russia

February 28, 2025 ,

As Townhall has been covering, the legacy media and the White House Correspondents' Association (WHCA) have been having a collective meltdown over the Trump White House taking control of the press pool. This is even as a significant portion of demographics that voted for Trump get their news through non-traditional methods. The WHCA may not have even had the most insane reaction, though. Rather, that looks to be coming from The New York Times.

On Wednesday, the outlet published this headline from Peter Baker, "In Trump’s Washington, a Moscow-Like Chill Takes Hold." The subheadline compares Trump's second term even more directly to Russia, "A new administration’s efforts to pressure the news media, punish political opponents and tame the nation’s tycoons evoke the early days of President Vladimir V. Putin’s reign in Russia." The featured image does the same. It's a 2004 image in Moscow, showing Yelena Tregubova, after a blast had gone off in front of her apartment. "Ms. Tregubova had been highly critical of President Vladimir V. Putin," the description read in part. 

The article's opening piece also begins by sharing more about Tregubova's story, before launching right into discussing President Donald Trump and his White House in the third paragraph. There are also paragraphs that mention both Russia under Putin and the United States under Trump:

The decision by President Trump’s team to handpick which news organizations can participate in the White House press pool that questions him in the Oval Office or travels with him on Air Force One is a step in a direction that no modern American president of either party has ever taken. The White House said it was a privilege, not a right, to have such access, and that it wanted to open space for “new media” outlets, including those that just so happen to support Mr. Trump.

But after the White House’s decision to bar the venerable Associated Pressas punishment for its coverage, the message is clear: Any journalist can be expelled from the pool at any time for any reason. There are worse penalties, as Ms. Tregubova would later discover, but in Moscow, at least, her eviction was an early step down a very slippery slope.

From there, he goes on to rant about issues in the United States, even as he supposedly claims that he's not saying the United States is Russia:

The United States is not Russia by any means, and any comparisons risk going too far. Russia barely had any history with democracy then, while American institutions have endured for nearly 250 years. But for those of us who reported there a quarter century ago, Mr. Trump’s Washington is bringing back memories of Mr. Putin’s Moscow in the early days.

The news media is being pressured. Lawmakers have been tamed. Career officials deemed disloyal are being fired. Prosecutors named by a president who promised “retribution” are targeting perceived adversaries and dropping cases against allies or others who do his bidding. Billionaire tycoons who once considered themselves masters of the universe are prostrating themselves before him.

Judges who temporarily block administration decisions that they believe may be illegal are being threatened with impeachment. The uniformed military, which resisted being used as a political instrument in Mr. Trump’s first term, has now been purged of its highest-ranking officers and lawyers. And a president who calls himself “the king,” ostensibly in jest, is teasing that he may try to stay in power beyond the limits of the Constitution.

Some versions of this are not new, of course. Other presidents have taken actions that looked heavy-handed or put pressure on opponents. No president in my experience at the White House, which goes back to 1996, particularly liked news coverage of him, and certainly there have been times when journalists were penalized for their reporting.

Such examples and claims are worth unpacking. It never becomes astounding to hear leftist outlets complain about Trump and "retribution" when we just saw four years under the Biden-Harris administration, in which the Department of Justice was the most politicized and weaponized it has ever been. President Joe Biden himself complained to his attorney general, Merrick Garland, about the speed in going after Trump, his top political opponent for 2024 before he was forced out of the race by his fellow Democrats. As Kaie covered, The New York Times itself reported in April 2022 on that very story. 

Baker also leaves out a key detail when he laments judges ruling against Trump, that these are district court judges and forum shopping is at play here. If there is any such thing as a constitutional crisis that the left likes to rant about, it's over this, as CNN's Scott Jennings has reminded.

He also has some nerve making it seem like the second Trump term is different when it comes to how the military "resisted being used as a political instrument in Mr. Trump's first term, with added emphasis, to complain about this supposed "purg[ing]" that's going on. This shouldn't be a difficult concept, and also has nothing to do with Russia, that a new administration has taken office, and so a new president, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, are picking new officers. 

It's not even worth addressing how Trump refers to himself as "the king," especially because Baker himself recognizes it's in jest.

And, of course, there's a paragraph towards the end that brings it all back to Russia:

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of a major shift in foreign policy as Mr. Trump pivots away from Ukraine and toward Mr. Putin’s Russia. In recent days, he has blamed Ukraine for Russia’s full-scale invasion of it in 2022. He also called its popularly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a “dictator without elections,” while offering no words of reproach for Russia or Mr. Putin. “He’s a very smart guy,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Putin on Wednesday. “He’s a very cunning person.”

This may be one of Baker's most clearly slanted paragraphs, and also shows how everything is about Russia. The framing neglects to mention how Trump is working to negotiate peace when it comes to the Russo-Ukrainian war, a war that as Trump has frequently reminded, began under his predecessor, President Joe Biden, whose administration was marred for the entire four years by a particularly weak foreign policy.

It was under Biden that the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal took place, where Putin also felt emboldened enough to invade Ukraine, with the three year anniversary having just come on Monday. 

Trump also reminded when taking questions at the Wednesday Cabinet meeting that Biden "could have prevented that war," adding Putin "would have never gone in" and that "the war would never have taken place if I were president." Polling conducted not long after Putin's invasion of Ukraine shows that voters agreed with Trump on that assessment. 

Further, Ukraine has suspended elections during the war, allowing Volodymyr Zelenskyy to remain in power, something Newsweek had a curious take onearlier this month. 

And, there's no mention of how Zelenskyy will be at the White House on Fridayto sign an agreement with the United States on rare minerals, even though the piece appears to have been updated since the announcement was made.

A former senior Hill staffer also provided a reaction to such a paragraph from Baker there, pointing out that when it comes to what Trump's actual agenda is, "It's a pivot towards peace and away from endless war!"

From there, the piece goes on to mention more details about Russia, including how Baker and his wife left there, likely to add further credence to this lengthy piece. Its final paragraphs, even if Baker claims he's not saying the United States is completely like Russia, make the comparison significant enough:

Again, America is no Russia. The history there is so fraught and complicated. Certainly, many Russian journalists would still rather live in Washington these days than Moscow, confident that America’s tradition of free press and democratic ideals remains far stronger than what exists back home.

But in decades of reporting in Washington, under Republicans and Democrats, it has never felt quite like this.

Baker posted the story to his own X account, which included sharing a few lines of his article. 

Other leftists, such as RawStory and Brian Stelter, have also jumped at the chance to share the piece.


Despite such excitement shared above, not everyone is on board with the idea of Baker's article. Brent Buchanan, the president of Cygnal, highlighted Baker's piece to fittingly mock in his daily takes for Thursday with a directive to "Get over it." As Buchanan also mentioned, "4.7 million people watch The Five on Fox News. 6.5 million watch NBC's Nightly News 3.9 million read The Wall Street Journal 14 million listen to Joe Rogan. The Trump White House is realigning media access to where Americans are, while the old guard is upset their relevance continues to dwindle."

Keep in mind that this is not the only time recently that Baker has made ridiculous claims about the Trump White House, especially as it pertains to the White House press pool. As Brad Slager covered for Tuesday's edition of "Riffed From the Headlines," Baker was complaining about such changes with, you guessed it, comparisons to Moscow.

He even had a whole thread devoted to his complaints.




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