At the end of the movie "Casablanca," after Rick hands Viktor the letters of transit for him and Ilse, Victor tells Rick, "Welcome back to the fight.  This time I know our side will win."  I thought of this 13-second moment in the movie upon noticing  a New York Times story, November 19, on page 5 of the Business Section (media) with this headline: "New York Post Tears Down 'Florida Man' That It Had Supported."

(I hasten to add that I am not usually a Business Section reader; this is where the skimpier-by-the-day Sports Section happened to appear on November 19.)

The lead sentence of the story, by Katie Robertson, makes the headline perfectly clear:  "Since Election Day last week, The New York Post [sic — should be the New York Post] front pages have been merciless to Former President Donald J. Trump."  Ms. Robertson suggests that the Post became disenchanted with the former president because he did not accept defeat in 2020, also citing his (alleged) silence at the January 6 Capitol Hill disturbance.

Ms. Robertson also indicated that the former president may believe that the Post's hostility toward him may reflect the change in editor — Keith Poole replacing Col Allan as editor-in-chief.  More likely, the editor-in-chief takes instruction from the publisher — which is to say that Rupert Murdoch (or the Murdoch son in charge of the Post) is convinced Mr. Trump will not be re-elected U.S. president.

And so the question becomes, how far will the New York Post go in its newly found hostility to Donald J. Trump?  Will the paper apologize to its newly discovered progressive readers for having accused Hunter Biden specifically and President Biden generally of being corrupt?  Will the Post assert, now, that the complaints it previously hurled at Hunter are clearly the work of Russian instigators and that the Post realizes, if a bit late, the error of its ways in that Trump has always been a Putin agent , and is far worse than Benedict Arnold ever was?  Will the Post now support congressional legislation, to be  enacted before January 3, 2023, making Mr. Trump ineligible for any governmental post —  notwithstanding that such  a law is probably a bill of attainder banned by the Constitution?

There is, however, another possibility.  Could the article by Ms. Robertson, clearly indicating schadenfreude that the N.Y. Post has turned on Donald J. Trump, be a harbinger of a forthcoming announcement by Mr. Murdoch  (père or fils) — that The New York Times will, as of January 1, 2023, be the flagship of the Murdoch Media Empire, and that it will carry a new name: The New York Post-Times?  (Not to be confused, mind you, with providing "post times" for racetracks around the homeland...)

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.