NY Times Posts Amusing 'Correction' to Flawed Paul Krugman Column, Leaves Most Embarrassing Part Out

I reported Tuesday on how self-important New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got owned in a hilariously embarrassing way after a recent column he wrote where he asked “How will Biden deal with Republican sabotage?”

To quickly recap, it was in the below paragraph of the original piece where Krugman reached “pants on fire” territory, asserting that Biden will be the first president ever to face a party that refuses to believe he was legitimately elected, and then claiming that Democrats “never” said Trump was illegitimate:

When Joe Biden is inaugurated, he will immediately be confronted with an unprecedented challenge — and I don’t mean the pandemic, although Covid-19 will almost surely be killing thousands of Americans every day. I mean, instead, that he’ll be the first modern U.S. president trying to govern in the face of an opposition that refuses to accept his legitimacy. And no, Democrats never said Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous.

The big problem was that not only was the claim demonstrably not true of Democrats in general but also that Krugman himself has called Trump an “illegitimate” president on a number of occasions.

Krugman was widely mocked and ridiculed for what he said in his column, which led the NYT to stealth edit the piece to say this instead, as if this lame revision made Krugman’s false claim somehow true (it didn’t):

And no, Democrats by and large were not claiming Donald Trump was illegitimate, just that he was incompetent and dangerous.

At some point after that the paper added a “correction” to the end of the piece (not the beginning of it, where it should have been) to note that Krugman was in error:

An earlier version of this column referred imprecisely to Democratic attitudes toward Donald Trump. Some questioned his legitimacy, not all accepted it.

I preserved it for the record in case they end up revising the piece again:

LOL, here's the NYT's bottom-of-the-page "correction" on Paul Krugman's most recent column, which was widely mocked and ridiculed yesterday after it was discovered that he accidentally debunked himself. pic.twitter.com/13STEd2xyc

— Sister Toldjah 😁 (@sistertoldjah) December 2, 2020

When I read the “correction” I chuckled, not only because it somewhat contradicted the stealth edit (which is still there as of this writing), but also because it didn’t bother to mention the fact that Krugman was one of the many high-profile Democrats questioning Trump’s legitimacy and not accepting it from day one.

There are many examples. He demonstrated it in this tweet, which was posted a couple of weeks before Trump was inaugurated:

Seriously: how will this presidency ever be considered legitimate? And what happens to America when it isn't? pic.twitter.com/dD2tTcIdye

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 7, 2017

This was two months into Trump’s presidency:

And totally justified. At this point we arguably do not have a legitimate president or administration. 1/ https://t.co/SSc6dC9Adi

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) May 10, 2017

I could go on and on, but I think the point has been made.

Democrats and their allies in the mainstream press have been on a mission over the last few weeks to try and conveniently memory hole how Trump was treated as an illegitimate president over the last four years, all while they call for “unity and healing.”

Not only are many of us not interested in playing along, but we should also make sure we call them out every time they try to erase the history of how they treated Trump’s presidency (and Bush’s, too, for that matter).

The left and the mainstream media can run from their history all they want to, but they should never be able to hide from it. Not ever.