It was very far from being the first time that I had nearly suffered a whiplash injury from reading a New York Times headline early in the morning. “Trump Has a Problem as the Coronavirus Threatens the U.S.: His Credibility.” So read the big type at the head of the paper’s big story on the morning after the President had sought to reassure the nation about the likely severity and extent of the outbreak. His credibility? What about the Times’s credibility? Was there no one up or down the editorial chain of command capable of seeing that headline in the context of two-and-a-half years of relentless media attacks on the President over allegations of Russian “collusion” that, as a matter of fact, never happened? Who was The New York Times to question anybody’s credibility, let alone that of someone who had proven, in this not-insignificant instance, to have been a lot more credible than it had been? How can all this, less than a year after the disappointment of the Mueller report, be so completely forgotten?

But the world begins anew each morning at 242 West Forty-first Street, and the denizens of the paper’s plush headquarters there must expect it to do the same at breakfast tables from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam. Now, according to Annie Kami, Michael Crowley, and Maggie Haberman, writing for the Times, it seems that the loss of Mr. Trump’s credibility dates only