Ann Telnaes, editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post since 2008, quit her job after one of her cartoons was censored by higher-ups. The cartoon at issue depicted tech and media billionaires paying obeisance and money to Donald Trump. The cartoon included portrayals of Mark Zuckerberg (META), Sam Altman (AI), Patrick Soon-Shiong (Los Angeles Times), and Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post. And, of course, Disney, which settled with Trump for $15 million rather than defend George Stephanopoulos in court. Each has given Trump $1 million or more to underwrite his inauguration. If Telnaes had waited a day, she would have added Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to her list of suck-ups and sycophants.
The motto of the Washington Post is: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Conservative (but anti-Trump) lawyer George Conway wrote on BlueSky:
I guess the new slogan for the Washington Post ought to be:
“Newspapers die in cowardice.”
Ann Telnaes’ resignation is an act of courage that should inspire all of us to stand by our principles.
I’ve worked for the Washington Post since 2008 as an editorial cartoonist. I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations—and some differences—about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.
The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump. There have been multiple articles recently about these men with lucrative government contracts and an interest in eliminating regulations making their way to Mar-a-lago. The group in the cartoon included Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook & Meta founder and CEO, Sam Altman/AI CEO, Patrick Soon-Shiong/LA Times publisher, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos/Washington Post owner.
While it isn’t uncommon for editorial page editors to object to visual metaphors within a cartoon if it strikes that editor as unclear or isn’t correctly conveying the message intended by the cartoonist, such editorial criticism was not the case regarding this cartoon. To be clear, there have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary. That’s a game changer…and dangerous for a free press.
(rough of cartoon killed)
Over the years I have watched my overseas colleagues risk their livelihoods and sometimes even their lives to expose injustices and hold their countries’ leaders accountable. As a member of the Advisory board for the Geneva based Freedom Cartoonists Foundation and a former board member of Cartoonists Rights, I believe that editorial cartoonists are vital for civic debate and have an essential role in journalism.
There will be people who say, “Hey, you work for a company and that company has the right to expect employees to adhere to what’s good for the company”. That’s true except we’re talking about news organizations that have public obligations and who are obliged to nurture a free press in a democracy. Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press— and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press.
As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness”.
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times, recently revealed that the newspaper would employ a technology that will tell “both sides” of every story. Journalists are outraged by the implication that their stories are biased. After the publisher’s decision to prohibit an endorsement in the Presidential race, the chief editor of the editorial board resigned, followed by others.
At that time, the published defended
The New York Times reported:
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, said on Thursday that he planned to introduce a “bias meter” next to the paper’s news and opinion coverage as part of his campaign to overhaul the publication.
Dr. Soon-Shiong, who in October quashed a planned presidential endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris from The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board, said in an interview that aired on Scott Jennings’s podcast “Flyover Country” that he had begun to see his newspaper as “an echo chamber and not a trusted source.”
He previously said he planned to remake the paper’s editorial board and add more conservative voices. He has asked Mr. Jennings, a CNN political commentator and a Republican strategist, to join it.
Dr. Soon-Shiong, who bought The Times in 2018, said on the podcast that he had been working with a team to create the so-called bias meter using technology he had been building in his health care businesses.
On news and opinion articles, “you have a bias meter so somebody could understand, as a reader, that the source of the article has some level of bias,” he explained in the interview. “And what we need to do is not have what we call confirmation bias, and then that story automatically — the reader can press a button and get both sides of that exact same story based on that story, and then give comments.”
He said he planned to introduce the tool in January.
Dr. Soon-Shiong’s latest comments set off immediate pushback from the L.A. Times Guild, which represents journalists at the paper.
“Recently, the newspaper’s owner has publicly suggested his staff harbors bias, without offering evidence or examples,” the union’s leadership said in a statement on Thursday. The union said all Times staff members abided by ethics guidelines that call for “fairness, precision, transparency, vigilance against bias and an earnest search to understand all sides of an issue.”
In the comments that followed the article, many ridiculed the idea of the “bias meter.” One imagined an article that reported on an earthquake rated 9.5, which said that people feared that the earthquake would cause massive destruction of lives and property; those seeking a different perspective would press the bias meter to read an article saying that most people were not afraid of a 9.5 earthquake and say it’s no big deal.
Margaret Sullivan is a veteran journalist who served as the last ombudsman for the New York Times. Her blog American Crisis is valuable for its support of a free press and for its criticism of newspapers that sanewash and normalize Trump.
Many of Donald Trump’s choices for Cabinet posts and other positions in his new administration have appalled me. To hit some lowlights: RFK Jr. with his dangerous ideas about vaccines and his history of wildly inappropriate behavior; Tulsi Gabbard, whom Russian state TV is referring to as “girlfriend”; Brendan Carr, one of the authors of the authoritarian playbook known as Project 2025; pure loyalist Pam Bondi, as attorney general, replacing the even more inappropriate Matt Gaetz.
But none have shaken me as much quite as much as Kash Patel, whom Trump wants to name the director of the FBI. Before the election, I wrote in the Guardian about the high stakes for press rights. After reviewing what a foe of the press Trump was the first time around, I sounded the alarm, with a particular focus on Patel:
There is nothing to suggest that Trump would soften his approach in a second term. If anything, we can expect even more aggression. Consider what one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, Kash Patel, has said.
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” Patel threatened during a podcast with Steve Bannon. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.”
If named FBI chief, Patel is sure to help bring Project 2025 into action. Again from the Guardian column:
Under Project 2025, seizing journalists’ emails and phone records would get easier. The editorial independence of Voice of America would be sharply curtailed; in fact, the global organization might be shut down altogether. Former officials who talk to reporters would be punished. Funding for NPR, PBS and public broadcasting would dry up.
“A pretty grim picture,” was the conclusion of Joshua Benton of Harvard University after analyzing Project 2025 from the perspective of press rights. “The first time around, there was at least a modicum of uncertainty about what a Trump administration would actually do,” Benton wrote in Nieman Lab. “The second time, voters knew better, and they rejected it. The third time? Well, no one can say it’ll come as a surprise.”
Kash Patel at a rally for Donald Trump in Arizona on Oct. 13, 2024. Patel, Trump’s pick for the FBI, has expressed an alarming intent to go after the press / Getty Images
Remember, in his first term, Trump wanted then-FBI director James Comey to bring him a “head on a pike” when government insiders leaked to journalists — often providing information that was important for the American public to know. Patel, no doubt, will be eager to do this. And if raids and imprisonment of journalists follow, it’ll be exactly what the boss has wanted all along.
As many have pointed out, when would-be authoritarians take power, one of the first things they want to do is stamp out independent journalism. We can’t let that happen.
So, how can our most important journalism institutions react? With big doses of courage, a refusal to obey in advance and insistence on standing their ground. I hope that top newsroom leaders — the decision-makers at the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Wall Street Journal, the broadcast networks and others — are clearly communicating to their staffs that they’re not going to knuckle under.
American Crisis is a community-supported project where I explore how journalism can help save democracy. Please consider joining us!
For inspiration, they ought to read a post by journalist Paul Horvitz (he worked at the late, great International Herald Tribune, among other papers), who wrote to me last week to share his manifesto. Here’s a section, and you can read the rest on his Substack:
In the United States of Donald Trump, American journalism faces a defining test.
Will it be the sleepwalking servant of a propaganda machine? Or will it reclaim its role as public servant, tenacious watchdog, and guardian of democracy?
Because we are not in normal times, these are not rhetorical questions. The coming year may well see the Department of Homeland Security offer journalists stage-managed tours of migrant jails to create a facade of humane treatment. Should the press participate?
The Trump regime will surely sanitize the language it uses to describe these camps, whose legal basis is questionable. Will a compliant press blindly repeat the euphemism “detention centers?” In 1930s Germany, millions of “asocials” were taken into “protective custody” or “preventive custody.” Words matter.
When an angry U.S. President phones the executive editor of The Washington Post or its billionaire owner to complain about “negative” coverage, will the attempt to intimidate be revealed only years later in a book or immediately placed on the front page?
Our alarming situation — we are on a path to American fascism — demands a far more assertive, scrappy, and resolute press. Some news organizations aren’t ready to be aggressive because they don’t accept their broader responsibility in a free society.They have been fact purveyors, always mindful of their own commercial viability. These news companies will continue to be enablers, justifying their behavior by championing strict impartiality, rigorous objectivity, and fast facts.
Horvitz nails it.
Meanwhile, I’m collecting examples of sanewashing, false equivalence and pussyfooting around the harsh reality of another Trump administration. Here’s a headline that even the satirical social media account New York Times Pitchbot said he couldn’t compete with; it appeared over a prominent Times staff columnist’s offering last week: “Thomas Friedman: Trump’s Path to a Nobel Peace Prize?”
Also in the Times, this euphemistic headline: “Trump’s Choices for Health Agencies Suggest a Shake-up Is Coming.” The sub-headline mentioned “ideas that are outside the medical mainstream.” Y’think? Author and scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat expressed her objection: “Shake-up is hardly appropriate for the engineering of mass sickness by withholding vaccines and reducing insurance coverage so few can get medical help.” Language needs to be much stronger and more direct, especially in headlines and news alerts since that’s as far as many people ever get.
At the same time, I’ve noticed a lot of strong, important reporting in the Times, which remains essential. Here’s a gift link to one such story.
Thanks so much to all subscribers to American Crisis. I truly appreciate your interest and support. The paywall remains down so all may read these posts in full and may participate in the comments. The discussion has been robust and I’m grateful for the thoughtful contributions.
One last item: Greg Sargent of The New Republic invited me on his podcast last week to talk about Trump and the press. We covered everything from why The Times got rid of its public editor role (and why I predict it’s never coming back) to whether the mass cancellations at the Washington Post may motivate decision-makers to recommit to their mission. We also talked about the risk that news organizations may self-censor, given Trump’s threats of retribution against the press — and what to do about it.
Happy Thanksgivjng to you and your family and your friends!
For many of us who had hoped to elect Kamala Harris as President, this is not the best of Thanksgivings.
But we must be thankful for our blessings, count them, and rededicate ourselves to improving our society and the lives of others.
Never forget: We are not going back!
We want a better world, not the fictional world of the past. We want progress, not regress.
I am thankful for all those who dedicate their lives to progress, opportunity, kindness, compassion, justice, education, enlightenment, and equity.
I am thankful for our nation’s teachers. They have devoted themselves to building a better world, one student at a time. They have not been thanked enough.
I am thankful for my family.
I am thankful for health.
Be thankful. Be kind. Be strong. Be good to yourself.
Last week, the House of Representatives passed a dangerous bill–HR 9495– that would allow the Treasury Department to shut down nonprofit organizations that it believes are funding terrorism. Initially, it had strong bipartisan support, but after Trump won the election, most Democrats turned against the bill, realizing that Trump could use it to silence his critics. In a recent vote, 15 Democrats voted for it.
Trump could use this authority to shut down the ACLU or any other organization that criticizes him.
Please contact your Senators and urge them to oppose this horrible bill!
A BILL THAT would give President-elect Donald Trump broad powers to target his political foes has passed a major hurdle toward becoming law.
The House of Representatives on Thursday passed the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act in a 219-184 vote largely along party lines, with 15 Democrats joining the Republican majority.
The bill, also known as H.R. 9495, would empower the Treasury secretary to unilaterally designate any nonprofit as a “terrorist supporting organization” and revoke its tax-exempt status, effectively killing the group. Critics say the proposal would give presidential administrations a tool to crack down on organizations for political ends.
The provision previously enjoyed bipartisan backing but steadily lost Democratic support in the aftermath of Trump’s election earlier this month. On Thursday, a stream of Democrats stood up to argue against the bill in a heated debate with its Republican supporters.
“Authoritarianism is not born overnight — it creeps in,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, said Thursday on the House floor. “A tyrant tightens his grip not just by seizing power, but when he demands new powers and when those who can stop him willingly cede and bend to his will….”
A previous bill with the provision was initially introduced in November 2023, in the early days of Israel’s U.S.-funded devastation of Gaza, with the ostensible goal of blocking U.S.-based nonprofits from supporting terrorist groups like Hamas. Rep. Claudia Tenney, R-N.Y., and other supporters of the bill touted it as a tool to crack down on pro-Palestine groups they claim exploit tax laws to bolster Hamas and fuel antisemitism…
It is already illegal for nonprofits or anyone else in the U.S. to provide material support to terrorist groups, and the federal government has means to enforce it, including prosecution and sanctions. Tenney’s bill, however, would sidestep due process.
The bill includes some guardrails to ensure due process, but much of the language is vague on specifics, and critics fear that even if a group were to successfully appeal their designation, few nonprofit organizations would survive the legal costs and the black mark on their reputation.
Democratic Flips
While a previous version of the bill enjoyed broad bipartisan support and passed 382-11 in a House vote in April, many Democrats have withdrawn their support, citing a fear that the incoming Trump administration could weaponize the bill.
“The road to fascism is paved with a million little votes that slowly erode our democracy and make it easier to go after anyone who disagrees with the government,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., on the House floor Tuesday. “Donald Trump says you’re a terrorist, so you’re a terrorist. My friends on the other side of the aisle know it’s nuts, even if they don’t want to admit it.”
The GOP majority in the House made an initial attempt to pass the bill last week under a suspension of the rules, a parliamentary procedure that requires a two-thirds supermajority to pass. That effort foundered on November 12, when 144 Democrats and one Republican came out against the bill, just barely meeting the threshold to block it…
Despite a majority of Democrats coming out against it in last week’s vote, the bill still received the support of 52 Democrats on November 12. On Thursday, that number dwindledto 15,as Democrats flipped in opposition, including Reps. Angie Craig, D-Minn., and Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., both of whom cited Trump’s increasingly unhinged cabinet selections in their statements prior to the vote.
John Horgan is a widely published science writer. In this article, he expresses his sorrow that Scientific American bowed to pressure to oust its outstanding Chief Editor Laura Helmuth. Right wingers love to attack Democrats for “censorship,” but it is Republicans who forced Helmuth’s ouster and Republicans who ban books.
On election night, Sci Am editor Laura Helmuth called Trump voters “racist and sexist” and “fucking fascists” on the social media platform BlueSky, a haven for Twitter/X refugees. Yeah, she lost her cool, but Helmuth’s labels apply to Trump if not to all who voted for him.
Trump spews insults and wins the election. Helmuth loses her job. Critics of cancel culture cheered Helmuth’s cancellation. I’m guessing we’ll see more of this sickening double standard in coming months and years.
I’m writing this column, first, to express my admiration for Helmuth. She is not only a fearless, intrepid editor, who is passionate about science (she has a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience). She is also—and I’ve heard this from her colleagues and experienced it first-hand–a kind, considerate person. That’s a heroic feat in this mean-spirited age.
I’d also like to address the complaint that Helmuth’s approach to science was too political and partisan. Yes, under Helmuth, Scientific American has had a clear progressive outlook, ordinarily associated with the Democratic party. The magazine endorsed Joe Biden four years ago, shortly after Helmuth took over, and Kamala Harris this year.
Sci Am presented scientific analyses of and took stands on racism, reproductive rights, trans rights, climate change, gun violence and covid vaccines. Critics deplored the magazine’s “transformation into another progressive mouthpiece,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. Biologist Jerry Coyne says a science magazine should remain “neutral on issues of politics, morals, and ideology.”
What??!! As Coyne knows, science, historically, has never been “neutral.” Powerful groups on the right and left have employed science to promote their interests and propagate lethal ideologies, from eugenics to Marxism. Science journalists can either challenge abuses of science or look the other way.
I became a staff writer at Scientific American in 1986, when Jonathan Piel was editor. The magazine bashed the Reagan administration’s plan to build a space-based shield against nuclear weapons. I wrote articles linking behavioral genetics to eugenics and evolutionary psychology to social Darwinism. I got letters that began: “Dear Unscientific Unamerican.” My point: the magazine has never been “neutral,” it has always had a political edge.
Under Piel, as well as successors John Rennie, Mariette DiChristina and Helmuth, the magazine published plenty of articles with no political ramifications. But if you just stick to uncontroversial science, and you decline to take a position on topics like climate change or reproductive rights, you aren’t “neutral.” You are just looking the other way.
Meanwhile, Trump is vowing to cut federal aid to schools “pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content.” And The Guardian reports that Trump is filing lawsuits against The New York Times and other media “that have been critical of him.”
Using your power to silence your opposition sounds pretty fascist to me. Will the next editor of Scientific American have the guts to challenge Trump and his minions? Will anyone?
Greg Olear is a novelist, journalist, author, and blogger. He has a long memory and thinks clearly. When I read his work, I hear echoes of what I’m thinking.
We are a few days removed from an orange guillotine slicing through the neck of American democracy. The chicken that is our body politic, already dead but in denial, is running around with its head cut off, and will continue to do so until January 20, when Donald the Conqueror picks up that severed head with his tiny hands and holds it up for all the bewildered world to behold, in triumph. Trump and triumph have the same Latin root word, the English major in me is compelled to point out.
(JD Vance—who I’ve been warning for months is an actual fascist—is among the numerous Dark Enlightenment thought leaders who use the word “regime” to mean the Deep State, so it is not without irony that these same Nazis will be replacing the bureaucracy that is the lifeblood of our country with an actual regime—regime, from rex, for king.)
Already the Trump Reich is licking its chops (literally as well as figuratively, one imagines), preparing to implement its ugly mass deportation program. That this idea polled well with Americans, and was supported enthusiastically by Latino men in particular, boggles the mind. Mass deportation is a quaint euphemism for genocide. If the new regime has its way, this will be more of a pogrom than a program. The suffering will be unimaginable; the effect on the economy Trump voters claim to care so much about, devastating.
And the new regime will seek vengeance upon its enemies. The loyalists who will actually be running the country after the professional civil servants are purged—angry, sadistic men like Mike Davis and Stephen Miller and Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon and Kash Patel—have been promising this for months. Trump’s perceived enemies, everyone from Jack Smith to Adam Schiff to Taylor Swift, are potentially in real danger. The generals who tried to warn us about him, the leaders of the intelligence community who know what he really is, his political rivals—these stalwarts of democracy may well end up at the wrong end of a firing squad. I am not exaggerating. Ivan Raiklin, Flynn’s Renfield, fancies himself the Minister of Retribution. Vengeance, more than anything, is what the new king wants, and vengeance he will have.
President Biden, for all the good he’s done, has failed for four years to fully grasp the dire threat we face from the despotic MAGA forces and their allies in Moscow, Beijing, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and legacy and social media. Putin has been openly waging war on the West since 2014, when he invaded and occupied the Crimea—a violation of the international order President Obama essentially chose to ignore. Like Neville Chamberlain, Obama did not want a war, and like Neville Chamberlain, he did not understand the nature of the psychopath he was up against; unlike Neville Chamberlain, he was not leading a country recently removed from four years of brutal war, and unlike Neville Chamberlain, he had the precedent of Neville Chamberlain to learn from. It’s only gotten worse from there.
The real tragedy is: We didn’t need to send in troops to beat the Russians. All we needed to do was treat the information war Moscow was waging on us as an actual front in an actual war, and give Ukraine as many weapons as it needed to do the dirty work for us. Biden did neither, and his entire legacy, all the good work he’s done, may wind up meaningless because of these failures.
Unless he’s working behind the scenes with the DOJ to clean up the mess—and nothing the somnambulant Merrick Garland has done, or rather not done, these past four years gives me any confidence that he is—Biden has already waved the white flag.
“Yesterday, I spoke with President-elect Trump to congratulate him on his victory,” Biden said yesterday. “And I assured him that I would direct my entire administration to work with his team to ensure a peaceful and orderly transition. That’s what the American people deserve.” That’s what we deserve, you see—our elected officials to lead us into the abattoir while assuring us, as Biden also did, that “[t]he American experiment endures, and we’re going to be okay” as long as we “keep going” and “keep the faith.”
Even worse is this: “Setbacks are unavoidable, but giving up is unforgivable. We all get knocked down, but the measure of our character, as my dad would say, is how quickly we get back up. Remember, a defeat does not mean we are defeated. We lost this battle.” A transition to permanent Nazi rule looms, and Biden wants us to jam to “Tubthumping.”
Jim Stewartson, who has been shouting from the rooftops about the threat of Trump’s muscle for years now—and who is certainly in the crosshairs of Flynn and Raiklin—articulated this perfectly, in his open letter to Biden:
You had the power to fix this. You should have had the information to understand the threat that we were facing. Instead you treated it like just another Democratic presidency, hoping that if the economy were good enough it would fix the problem with all the “MAGA extremists.”
You were wrong. You didn’t listen to those of us who told you who tried to steal the election from you in 2020. You let your DOJ and FBI drag their feet with the perfect timing to let Donald Trump and his co-conspirators go free. You prosecuted all the foot soldiers and never went after the “generals.” You prioritized “norms” and the “independence” of the DOJ over us. You failed to lead, to demand accountability — from Merrick Garland, Chris Wray and the others who let this happen on your watch.
I hear you talking now about “all that we accomplished” in your “historic administration” as if that will have any impact on the psychopaths who will destroy everything that you have done. You could have been the inflection point to preserve our world and make it better, instead you presided over a transition into an authoritarian global nightmare.
Sadly, Biden did not, as Stewartson laments, understand the threat we were, and are, facing—even though he is old enough that he was alive during World War II, and thus should be able to recognize Nazis when he sees them. What was done to counter Russian propaganda? To stop Elon Musk, Putin’s buddy and an enemy of democracy, from buying and destroying Twitter? From eradicating the cancer that is Fox News from its position of journalistic authority?
The historian Heather Cox Richardson had this to say about the election in her own post-partem piece:
But my own conclusion is that both of those things [inflation and racism/sexism] were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
In the U.S., pervasive right-wing media, from the Fox News Channel through right-wing podcasts and YouTube channels run by influencers, have permitted Trump and right-wing influencers to portray the booming economy as “failing” and to run away from the hugely unpopular Project 2025. They allowed MAGA Republicans to portray a dramatically falling crime rate as a crime wave and immigration as an invasion. They also shielded its audience from the many statements of Trump’s former staff that he is unfit for office, and even that his chief of staff General John Kelly considers him a fascist and noted that he admires German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
Trump admires Hitler, but he’s not Hitler—not even America’s Hitler, as the VP-Elect once called him. He is more Marshal Pétain or Vidkun Quisling: the nominal head of a Nazi puppet regime. As I explained a month before Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin is Hitler. Trump’s return to the White House is, among other things, the end of American exceptionalism, the end of American hegemony, the end of the Pax Americana. You know—setbacks.
Cue up the “U-S-A” chants, we are soon to become a Kremlin vassal state! Maybe the idea that the United States is better than everyone else, that the moral arc of the American universe always bends towards justice, is an obvious myth we choose to believe in despite ample evidence to the contrary—kind of like how the media doesn’t dispute that the woman who went to the polls with Trump on Election Day wearing dark oversized sunglasses was the real Melania.
Are Americans inherently good, freedom-loving, devoted to free speech and free worship, committed to all people being created equal? That’s our founding myth, and isn’t it pretty to think so? But a glance at history shows it’s not true. Bodies in graves and jails across America disprove it. We’re freedom-loving when times are easy, devoted to speech and worship we like with lip service to the rest, and divided about our differences since our inception. That doesn’t make us worse than any other nation. It’s all very human. But faith in the inherent goodness of Americans has failed us. Too many people saw it as a self-evident truth that the despicable rhetoric and policy of Trump and his acolytes was un-American. But to win elections you still have to talk people out of evil things. You can’t just trust them to reject evil. You must persuade. You must work. You have to keep making the same arguments about the same values over and over again, defend the same ground every time. Sometimes, when people are afraid or suffering and more vulnerable to lies, it’s very hard. Trump came wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross (upside down, but still) and too many people assumed their fellow Americans would see how hollow that was. That assumption was fatal.
Not a setback, you see. Fatal. Fatal. Nazis are destroyers, and the new regime is here to destroy, just like their Uncle Ted wanted:
It will be objected that the French and Russian Revolutions were failures. But most revolutions have two goals. One is to destroy an old form of society and the other is to set up the new form of society envisioned by the revolutionaries. The French and Russian revolutionaries failed (fortunately!) to create the new kind of society of which they dreamed, but they were quite successful in destroying the old society.
That’s Ted as in Ted Kaczynski. These people worship at the altar of the Unabomber!
The best time to defeat Nazis is before they gain any power, as any cursory glance at the history of 20th century Europe makes clear. From Warsaw, in a country that was ravaged by the Third Reich like no other, Dustin Du Cane points out an awful truth in his piece today, “Four Wasted Years”: “Hitler wasn’t defeated by voting, ground roots campaigning, sanctions or sending Poland a tank a week,” he writes. “He was defeated by propaganda, curtailing the free speech of Nazis, by a war machine and by millions of men in boots with rifles, tanks and bombers.”
And as I’m not the first to point out—someone else tweeted this, and I can’t remember who—the Germans at least had the good sense to put Hitler in jail after his failed coup attempt, before handing him the keys to the kingdom. Us? We threw the book at some Proud Boys and let Trump, Flynn, Roger Stone, Alex Jones, and the rest of the coup plotters continue to strut around broadcasting their hate, rubbing our noses in their stinky MAGA shit. As documented indefatigably by Stewartson, my friend Gal Suburban, and very few members of the legacy media, the coup plotters spent four years telling us what they planned to do, like the bad Bond villains they are, while the DOJ basically ignored them. But hey, at least Merrick Garland went after Ticketmaster.
In terms of analyzing why Kamala Harris lost, Noah Berlatsky wrote the best post-mortem piece I came across, for Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice. There was a lot in his piece to be optimistic about—if not for the fact that we are capitulating to a vengeful sexual predator who has been granted full immunity by his fellow fascists on the Supreme Court for any “official act,” up to and including siccing the military on civilians and executing his perceived enemies. Berlatsky says:
Democrats hoped to stave off fascism in the Trump era by never losing elections. That was never feasible, and now that it has failed, we are all facing the miserable consequences of not prosecuting Trump immediately, and vigorously, after January 6.
Those consequences will be real, devastating, and long lasting. But it’s important to realize that the Republicans have not established a permanent or even solid mandate for all of Trump’s ugly orange dreams. As they won, so they can lose — which is why one of MAGA’s core goals going forward will be to subvert free and fair elections. Fighting for democracy, as well as helping each other survive the coming fascist assault, will be key in the years ahead.
To have a free election, candidates have to be free to run without fear of reprisal from the ruling party. Even if the Orange Grover Cleveland vouchsafes us midterm elections in 2026—and we cannot assume that he will—how comfortable will the opposition party be in exercising its free speech as it campaigns against him?
If we continue on this path, and Biden sits back and watches as Trump dismantles the federal regulatory agencies, and the FBI, and the CIA, we do have a few things working in our favor:
First, unlike Russia and other states where dictatorships have arisen, the United States has a long history of democratic rule (aspirational democratic rule, but still). We have that to fall back on.
Second, Trump is old and uninterested in governance and unlikely to last long in office, because of retirement, death, or the 25th Amendment. Vance is worse, because he’s younger and smarter and more ideological, but he lacks the political “rizz” necessary to maintain a cult of personality. This is a guy who plausibly fucks couches. Even when enabled by Peter Thiel and Musk, can he really hold onto power?
Third, most Americans—not many; most—will hate the stuff the new regime will roll out, including the mass deportations they once cheered on. As my friend Nina Burleigh, whom no one ever accused of peddling “hopium,” wrote on Wednesday, we Americans
are also fickle. After four more years of the right running amok, when Trump 2.0 kleptocrats have not delivered the fantasies Orange has peddled of prosperity for all, it will dawn on enough Americans that this regime will never fill the deep and endless yearning for our birthright—HAPPINESS. Because: Who can? And then, angry again, we will give this claque of oafs, orcs, rapists, misogynists, fake Christians, racists, neo-Nazis, and liars the boot they deserved last night.
The question is whether enough Americans will rise up to do so, or if they will just blame all the failures on Biden, as Fox News and Facebook will instruct them to do, and go back to watching football. Me, I like to think even the gun-toting MAGA won’t like it when the jackboots come for their friends and family members.
For me, the real glimmer of hope is that the leaders of the Blue States seem prepared for the fight ahead, and, unlike Biden, willing to take it on. Kathy Hochul and Leticia James, the governor and attorney general of my state of New York, were particularly reassuring about this. The latter, no fan of Trump, said this:
As Attorney General, I will always stand up to protect New Yorkers and fight for our rights and values. My office has been preparing for a potential second Trump Administration, and I am ready to do everything in my power to ensure our state and nation do not go backwards. During his first term, we stood up for the rule of law and defended against abuses of power and federal efforts to harm New Yorkers. Together with Governor Hochul, our partners in state and local government, and my colleague attorneys general from throughout the nation, we will work each and every day to defend Americans, no matter what this new administration throws at us. We are ready to fight back again.”
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called lawmakers on Thursday into a legislative special session next month “to safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.”
In Illinois, Gov. JB Pritzker said on Thursday he would ask his state’s legislators, possibly as soon as next week, to address potential threats from a second Trump term. “You come for my people,” Mr. Pritzker said at a news conference, “you come through me.”
That is the kind of leadership we need—not platitudes about setbacks and “we’ll get ‘em next time.”
The time to take on the Kremlin was four years ago. Unless Biden does something unexpected in the next 70-whatever days—a Jayden Daniels “Hail Maryland” completion to save democracy—that moment has passed. Putin will soon have his puppet back in the White House, this time with the backing of the Supreme Court, the Senate, probably the House, and a staff of bloodthirsty fascist true believers; that is a far bigger victory for Moscow than the U.S. making like the USSR and disbanding. Sorry, Abe Lincoln, but I would rather live in a smaller democracy than a Trump dictatorship.
And as much as I’d like to think otherwise—and I assure you, I’ve spent the last few days trying—it’s foolhardy to believe that the immediate future will be anything but a Trump-branded sneaker stomping on a human face. Nazis don’t stop being Nazis because you show them decency and respect, as Biden and Harris have both stupidly chosen to do. We cannot expect that Trump or anyone in his regime will be anything other than what they are, or will do anything other than what they’ve told us they plan to do.
Again this week, I quote the German poet Kurt Tucholsky: “My life is too precious to put myself under an apple tree and ask it to produce pears.”
Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark, executive director of Republican Voters Against Trump, and host of “The Focus Group” podcast.
In this article, she appeals to fellow Republicans to stand up and speak out about Trump. I hope her article is read by George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and Lamar Alexander. They know how dangerous Trump is. They know he is destroying the Republican Party.
She writes:
I HAVE A QUESTION FOR FORMER Trump administration officials, Republican electeds (and former electeds), business leaders, and conservative writers and pundits who recognize Donald Trump for the threat he is. Actually, it’s a question for anyone on the right who knows what Trump’s re-election could mean for the country, for liberal democracy, and for the world—and, who, in the face of this threat, has decided to maintain either a posture of silence or both-sides-are-bad neutrality.
My question is this:
How are you going to feel if Trump wins on Tuesday by an extremely narrow margin?
I suspect you’ll spend the next four years holding your breath.
Because if Donald Trump does a tenth of what he has promised—pulls the United States out of NATO, abandons Ukraine and sides with Vladimir Putin, puts RFK Jr. and Elon Musk in charge of serious parts of the American government, rounds up 15 million undocumented immigrants into camps and deports them, seeks political retribution against those who opposed his candidacy—I suspect you’ll come to regret your silence when you could have made a difference.
I can see you holding up your hands to show us how clean they are. Saying, “But I said Donald Trump was a threat! I said I wouldn’t vote for him! What more do you want from me?”
And I get that. I do. The problem is that this moment demands more from all of us.
It demands clarity. And it demands your leadership.
Over the course of your career you’ve asked people to trust you. Either by voting for you, or listening to your advice, or relying on your judgment and analysis.
So why is it suddenly a bridge too far for you to tell everyone what you really believe?
I understand that this moment is hard. Trump could win. Even if he doesn’t win, coming off the sidelines could alienate you from career networks, business opportunities, or even friends and family.
But being a leader means standing up and telling the truth even when it’s hard, or costly, or scary. Especially when it’s hard, or costly, or scary.
It’s still not too late. Every day, more people are speaking out—people with reputations, and reservations, but whose consciences won’t let them sit this one out.
You shouldn’t sit this one out, either. You should not decide, after a career in leadership, that this time you’d rather just be a spectator.
Maybe you think that adding your voice wouldn’t matter to voters. After all, so few things seem to move the needle. Well, I’m here to tell you that it matters. It all matters. Every little bit. You do not know who’s listening as the moment approaches to cast their vote. You do not know who you might persuade at the eleventh hour. And you do not know what the margin will be. If this election is decided by 9,000 votes in Pennsylvania—which is absolutely a real thing that could happen—then every single input could be the tipping point.
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I can’t see the future. I don’t know if your endorsement would be the difference maker. Just like I don’t know what price you would pay for speaking out more clearly.
What I do know is this: If you abdicate the obligations of leadership in this moment and the thing you fear comes to pass, you will regret having stood down when the country needed you to stand up. You will regret it for all of your days.
MAYBE YOU ARE A RETIRED FOUR-STAR GENERAL, or cabinet secretary, or someone who took a job as a political appointee in the Trump administration and saw things that shocked your conscience. And maybe you’ve told reporters about what you saw, or written about it in a book. That’s not enough because books have a relatively small reach, and your words are mediated through paper. What’s needed is for you to look voters in the eye and give them a direct warning about what a second Trump term might mean. Especially now that you won’t be on the inside to try to protect the country from him.
Maybe you’re a former Republican president or presidential nominee. Maybe you were once the leader of the party Donald Trump has destroyed. I am sorry, but the unpleasant fact is that you cannot preserve your influence for some future GOP. This is actually the last moment in which you have a chance to influence it. Your party, every bit as much as your country, needs you. Right now.
Maybe you’ve led venerable conservative publications. You’ve acted as a thought leader. Someone shaping our political culture. But today you want to keep your hands clean by writing in Edmund Burke on your ballot or some other nonsense protest candidate—as a sign that youkept your purity. I understand this impulse. But it’s wrong. You know that if yours was the single deciding vote, you’d vote for Harris. So just say so. This isn’t an academic exercise, and it’s not about you.
Maybe you’re a billionaire to whom this country has given everything. Your wealth insulates you from the consequences of the worst-case Trump scenarios. And yet, you see Trump’s transactional nature, his willingness to provide favor if you provide obedience, and instead of standing up to Trump, you cower. This might seem like wisdom, but it’s not actual safety. There will be more demands. The only way to actually protect your business is for the rule of law to be victorious and democracy to be stable.
FOR MONTHS, YOUR COUNTRYMEN have been waiting for you to tell them the full, unvarnished truth about the danger you believe Donald Trump presents. To tell everyday Americans the same words you say in green rooms, at dinners, and in off-the-record conversations. You haven’t gotten there yet, but you still can. Before you make your final decision, think about Liz Cheney’s warning that some day Donald Trump will be gone, but the choices we make today will be with us forever.
Choose honor. It’s the choice you’ve made again and again in your professional lives. It would be a sin to stop choosing it because of a mountebank like Donald Trump.
I want to tell you about some Republicans who are already putting themselves on the line for democracy. They don’t have security details, or staff, or budgets. They’re just regular people who voted for Trump before, but refuse to support him again. They joined Republican Voters Against Trump to get the word out to their friends and neighbors. A few of them have lost jobs. Some of them have lost family. All of them have lost friends. None of them regrets it.
They’ve put their faces on billboards across the country. They’ve appeared in millions of dollars’ worth of paid ads running in their own communities. They’ve taken part in text campaigns, spoken to the media, knocked on doors, and traveled to swing states in the hopes of making a difference.
THE REASON I BELIEVE THAT every little bit counts is because conservative-leaning voters say that to me all the time.
In Republican focus groups, one thing I hear again and again is that voters are open to hearing from the leaders who served under Trump, who were in the room with him. The messenger is as important as the message, and these people are ready to believe the words of a lifelong Republican or flag officer much more readily than they’ll believe a Democrat telling them the same things.
So if you’re one of the small number of people who can make a difference in this moment, the question is: What are you going to do?
Courage is contagious. And I have one last piece of advice: No one ever regrets doing the right thing.
You won’t regret it, either. So stand up and join us. It’s our last chance.
Past and present journalists at the newspaper urged readers not to cancel. Loss of revenue means future layoffs.
Even with the cancellation of the endorsement, the Post remains the most forthright and persistent critic of Trump and his racism, misogyny, xenophobia, as well as his all-around unfitness for office.
Those who look for a future with a stable, functioning two-party system–post-MAGA–should resubscribe.
Jonathan V. Last writes at The Bulwark, the always interesting gathering spot for Never Trumpers. He wrote that he has been stewing about the intervention of Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of The Washington Post, to stop the editorial board from endorsing Kamala. after Bezos locked the editorial, three of the 10-member editorial board stepped down.
He wrote:
ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.
Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.
What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.
This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.
When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.
Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.
Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.
So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.
What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.
But as bad as that sounds, it isn’t the worst part.
The worst part is the underlying failures that made this arrangement possible.
My friend Kristofer Harrison is a Russia expert who runsthe Dekleptocracy Project. This morning he emailed,
America’s oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe. Political scientists can and will debate what comes first: oligarchs or flaccid politicians. 1990s Russia had that in spades. So do we. That combination corroded the rule of law there, and it’s doing so here.
Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the Post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution. And on and on. The corrosive effect on the rule of law is cumulative.
The Bezos surrender is our warning bell about entering early-stage 1990s Russia. No legal system is able to survive when it there’s a class not subject to it because politicians are too cowardly to enforce the law.
And that’s the foundational point. The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.
So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.
Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.
Yesterday, Timothy Snyder issued a call to Americans to not obey in advance. He is correct, of course. We should continue to resist fascism as best we can. The stakes have not changed.
If Trump wins? Well, I suppose we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.
What should change is our understanding of where our democracy currently sits on the continuum. We are not teetering at the precipice of a slide into autocracy. We are already partway down the slope. And that’s even if Harris wins.
But Bezos and Trump have just taught America’s remaining small-d democratic leaders: The time for normal politics, where you try to win bipartisan majorities by focusing on “kitchen-table” issues is past. The task in front of us will require aggressive, systemic changes if we are to escape terminal decline.
Diane Ravitch's blog 