Four Years Ago

When the results of the 2016 presidential election became apparent and it was clear Donald Trump had won the presidency, I was worried for the staff at the NYT. The NYT is well-known for backing any Democratic candidate that comes along, and my fear was with Hillary Clinton losing to a perceived real estate mogul who outlasted 16 other Republican candidates at the outset of the primaries, and who could not even boast of being elected class president, my worry was that any number of coronaries and strokes would take down the staff and threaten the production of the next day's paper.

All you were going to hear were sirens of ambulances taking the stricken to area hospitals from the Eighth Avenue headquarters.

I don't remember how I conveyed it (probably a Tweet, since that has proved to be the primary method of communicating anything in America), but I congratulated the Sulzbergers, et al. for getting the paper out despite what had to be a funeral atmosphere in the newsroom. They did it, those troopers.

Fast forward four years and I had a similar worry that if President Trump were to prevail against Joe Biden, then surely the newsroom would be shaken as if a 767 had flown into it. Maybe two 767s.

I wasn't buying into a certain Biden victory as it was apparent the journalistic posturing was predicting. It is a very large county that if we were Europe, we'd probably be 4-5 separate countries. Professional sport playoffs would be greatly redefined.

As soon as the counting began and it was apparent that President Trump was going to gain Electoral votes, I Tweeted a reporter at the Times and expressed concern for the medical well-being of the staff. My fear that was once again, with another four years of a presidency that many believed was already the straw that was breaking the camel's back, there would be a tsunami of medical emergencies at the paper: strokes and heart attacks would abound, even if the staff was working mostly from home. Would Alec Baldwin be up to doing another four years as a Trump impersonator on SNL? Yikes.

As the counting proceeded and it became apparent that Biden would win, and did win the presidency, I Tweeted the same reporter and said that I understand the wall-mounted defibrillators throughout the building went unused. And that was a good thing, because with the pandemic, hospital beds were scare, and adding newspaper stricken employees to intensive care would surely put an unbearable strain on the health care delivery system.

This time I got a "LOL" reply and word that in the spirit of sharing medical resources, the NYT shipped its defibrillators to Long Island to help the Nassau and Suffolk county registered Republicans recover from the news. There is a grateful population out there.

Now, all is right with the world. The NYT is once again running the country (or at least thinking they do). Because it's never more true than in politics that what goes around, comes around.

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