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Opinion
When Trump Targets the Media, the World's Autocrats Are Taking Notes
Trump's words and actions against the news media at home are inspiring copycat behavior by authoritarians and dictators around the world, fueling a growing global crisis of press freedom.
May 21, 2026
Only a day after President Donald Trump spoke of unity following a gunman’s abhorrent attempt to kill him and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents' dinner, the president quickly returned to his regularly scheduled programming of berating members of the press that ask him unwanted questions.
In a "60 Minutes" interview with CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell taped and aired the day following the assassination attempt, Trump repeated many of his now-tired insults about the press, referring to the media in general as “horrible people,” and calling O’Donnell a “disgrace” who should be “ashamed” of herself for raising excerpts of the alleged gunman’s manifesto in a question to the president.
At this point, understandably, many of us have simply begun to tune out Trump’s now-frequent diatribes against the press. Nearly a decade since Trump first tweeted the now-ubiquitous phrase “fake news” and infamously labelled the news media the "enemies of the American people," such insults just don't land like they used to.
Yet Trump's words do in fact matter. While many of Trump’s rhetorical attacks against the press during his first term were dismissed as bluster from a president known for his flair for the dramatic, they laid the groundwork for the broad attack on the media that we’re seeing under Trump 2.0.
Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes.
Under his second presidency, the Trump administration has waged a multifaceted campaign against free speech and independent journalism, characterized by retaliatory lawsuits against major media outlets; legal harassment and intimidation of journalists; slashed budgets for public broadcasting; and regulatory pressure, taking aim at reporting not to the administration’s liking.
Even as the First Amendment comes under unprecedented pressure in the US, the impact of the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media hasn’t stopped at the US border. The linguistic framing Trump popularized to villainize the press (and justify executive action against them) has also contributed to a growing crisis of press freedom worldwide.
Trump’s attacks on the media have inspired copycat behavior from press freedom pariahs around the world. From Hungary to Turkey, authoritarian or illiberal leaders have echoed Trump’s hostile rhetoric against the press, adding their own spin in remarks designed to discredit the news outlets and journalists intent on exposing corruption and holding their leaders accountable to their people.
Autocratic regimes in Russia, China, and Egypt have seized on to Trump’s “fake news” framing with actual legislation barring the spread of “false” or “misleading” news and information. What actually defines fake news usually isn’t clear—the vague, ambiguous wording of many of these laws gives the government wide latitude to decide how they are applied.
Amid a rise in global conflict, governments around the world are increasingly using “national security” as a pretext to censor critical war reporting. Only weeks prior to the Correspondents’ dinner, Trump threatened to jail an unnamed journalist from an unnamed media outlet if they did not reveal the identity of the government source who gave the press information about a US military operation to rescue a pilot whose plane was downed in Iran.
While Trump hasn’t yet followed through on this particular threat, other countries have not hesitated to lock up journalists that report inconvenient truths about the conflict. In early March, the government of Kuwait arrested Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a day after he shared a verified CNN video depicting the downing of a US F-15E fighter jet by the Kuwaiti military during a friendly fire incident. Luckily, after a wave of international pressure on the part of the press freedom community, Shihab-Eldin was released and was able to safely leave Kuwait—at the cost of his citizenship.
Despite the bad news, there are still a few bright spots as journalists and independent media outlets in places like Hungary have demonstrated remarkable resilience and strength in the face of sustained political and economic pressure.
Perhaps no one has better mastered the art of media capture than Hungary’s now-ousted prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Despite Trump’s ill-fated bid to save Orbán’s reelection campaign, the Hungarian people in April proved that government pressure on the media has its limits, and that public interest reporting that holds leaders responsible for corruption and abuses of power cannot be so easily silenced.
At this critical time for democracy around the world, we must not become complacent to rhetorical threats against the media, no matter how banal or flippant they may seem. As history has proven, over and over again, attacks on the press are a harbinger of broader crackdowns on civil liberties and personal freedoms.
The US is not immune to democratic backsliding. Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes. We must not make the mistake of normalizing Trump-style attacks on the press. When the president makes a threat against the media, we should listen to what he says. The world’s autocrats certainly are.
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To Defeat Trump, Be Mindful of the Anti-Democratic Tradition He Sprung From
Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic.
May 21, 2026
The notion that the US is an empire in decline has been a recurring theme in international relations literature since the 1980s. Surely, the United States remains the dominant force in the world economy, but it faces daunting challenges from the emergence of China as an economic superpower. And there is no denying the fact that while the US is a military superpower, with the highest defense budget in the world and possessing a range of weapons that other major powers simply do not have, its influence over global politics has been getting weaker. It can bully a country like Venezuela into submission and strangle Cuba to death as part of a strategy of selective hegemony under Trump 2.0, but cannot shape political outcomes across Latin America; holds no monopoly over diplomacy in the Middle East; cannot dictate policy to Europe; cannot force Russia to end the war in Ukraine; and surely lacks the political and economic leverage to contain and isolate China.
Last week’s Trump-Xi summit drove home the reality of shifts in global power. Chinese leader Xi Jinping made US President Donald Trump look weak. Not only did “philosopher-king” Xi concede nothing to the American wannabe emperor but made a subtle threat to the US by invoking the Thucydides trap. In so doing, Xi was letting Trump know that China’s rise is real and that, as such, the world has once again come to a new crossroads. Subsequently, the US should be careful how it handles the new reality of a world no longer dominated by Washington; a strategic miscalculation on its part over Taiwan (the reddest of red lines for China) could lead to war.
Nonetheless, while the debate continues to rage over whether US global hegemony is in decline or not, there should be much less doubt about domestic decline. The over-extension of the empire, characterized by forever wars and endless aggression, an enormously bloated Pentagon budget, and roughly 800 military bases in over 80 countries, has imposed severe pressures on the domestic economy and led to the worsening of social conditions and the unraveling of civil society. The economy has been facing unsustainable economic imbalances (deficits in its fiscal and current account balances) since the late 1990s, and the national debt now exceeds the country’s GDP. In the meantime, the problems of the country as a whole are mounting: crumbling infrastructure, decaying cities, disintegrated education, an unaffordable healthcare system, and a housing crisis that has reached a breaking point make the US resemble a third world country. And the rich are getting richer every day while wages have remained stagnant for most US workers since the late 1970s.
As if this wasn’t bad enough for what is still the wealthiest country in the world, economic alienation and racism are tearing the social fabric apart, thereby offering more opportunities to extend the police operations of the imperial state to the domestic realm as well—increasing the size of the police and building more prisons, as mass incarceration is indeed “big business” in the United States.
Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society.
The rise of Donald Trump to power is a symptom of the decline of the US as a world power and as an advanced industrial society. It is in that context that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan captured the imagination of a large segment of the population, reflecting a desire for a return to some idealized state of American society. But it wasn’t simply economics that drove so many to Trump’s arms. The MAGA movement is dependent on racial resentment and straight-up racism. “Make America Great Again” is a politico-cultural project, not some blueprint for economic restructuring.
Many of followers of the MAGA movement professed an aversion to US imperial ambitions and believed that the system is somehow rigged, although they never explained in whose favor. But like traditional conservatives before them, they opposed the federal government not only because they saw it as an instrument of a globalized elite but because they oppose the expansion of federal programs. Their real frustration was over the direction in which the country was moving socially and culturally, which they felt had major ramifications for the economic status of white Americans. This made them perfect prey for Trump’s demagoguery.
Trump himself did identify some of the real economic problems facing the United States, such as decades of manufacturing decline and a growing trade deficit, and spoke from very early on of a collapsing infrastructure that made the US resemble a third world country. But it’s not just that Trump’s actual diagnosis of the structural problems facing the United States is wrong and that the remedies pursued by his administration (sweeping tariffs and mass deportations) are incoherent and designed to backfire. Trump is using the presidency to enrich himself and his family, enforce a plutocratic agenda, roll back decades of social progress, and get revenge on his political opponents any way that he can.
Trump and his MAGA backers (white supremacists, the Christian right, tech billionaires) are part of the anti-democratic tradition that has existed in the United States literally since the early days of the republic. From the 20th century onward, the enemy for the political tradition that Trump and his billionaire allies stand for is equality, social welfare, and redistribution. It was so for the era of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush and remains so for today’s reactionaries. As Project 2025 perfectly epitomizes, which the Trump administration has been enforcing with great dedication, the enemy is a society that seeks to place the interests of working people ahead of greed, profit making, and the unlimited accumulation of capital by striving to create institutions that strengthen the public good and enforce democratic accountability.
What we have with Trump and the MAGA movement is an updated version of Social Darwinism, a foundational pillar of fascism. Trump and his backers are a real menace to everything that defines a decent society. For decent people everywhere, it can be said that the greatest of a nation can be judged by how it treats its weakest members. For Trump and his ilk, it can be judged by raising plutocratic power to new heights and inflicting as much pain as possible on the poor and the weak. In this manner, the Trump administration’s politics of cruelty and the callousness of its approach to social policy go beyond simply serving the interests of capitalism as they are designed to produce systemic fear and turn brutality into a source of pleasure. Part of the aim is to make the public numb and apathetic to the astonishing accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and how it corrupts politics and the media.
How Trumpism ends is anyone’s guess. But while it must be defeated if there is to be a future hope for the United States, it must also be understood that a major part of the nation’s history is intrinsically linked to the anti-democratic tradition that made possible Donald Trump’s rise to power. How to uproot it is of vital importance for the realization of a good and just society.
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Greed and Shortsightedness Are Shrinking the Space Where Humans Can Live
Climate change and war are making life in Somalia almost impossible, and now that the US has shut down the US Agency for International Development, the “almost” is disappearing.
May 21, 2026
One way to think about the climate crisis is that we are systematically reducing the margin on which we live on this planet. There were always places where humans couldn’t live: the Antarctic, the centers of the great deserts, the high mountains. But now we’re systematically adding to that list, as places become dangerously combustible, or overrun by rising seas, or just plain too hot. We’re shrinking the board on which we play the sublime game of being human.
I was thinking of this on Monday because I read a truly remarkable piece in The New York Times, the kind of reporting that justifies a subscription despite all the endless disappointments. It was written by Peter Goodman, with powerful photographs from Finbarr O’Reilly.
The two of them traveled widely in recent weeks across Somalia, and what they found—well, you need to read the whole thing. But climate change and war are making life there almost impossible, and now that the US has shut down the US Agency for International Development, the “almost” is disappearing:
For nine days, they trudged across the parched soil of southern Somalia, taking turns carrying their 3-year-old daughter on their shoulders. Abdullahi Abdi Abdirahman, his wife, and their seven children sought escape from a landscape drained of life.
Another drought had killed their goats and sheep, turning their life savings to dust. So they pressed on for 140 miles toward Dollow, a dusty outpost on the Ethiopian border. They were drawn by the same things that had already attracted more than 100,000 other people: International relief organizations were clustered there, offering food, water, and healthcare.
Yet when they arrived in late January at a camp on the fringes of town, they were horrified to learn that aid groups had abandoned the area. President Trump had dismantled the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, eliminating Somalia’s primary source of assistance. From London to Berlin, governments had reduced funding for humanitarian aid. Relief organizations had been forced to choose where to focus their remaining money.
Let me get my anger out of the way first. Elon Musk, in particular, shut down USAID—boasted about “feeding it to the woodchipper” in the first weekend of his DOGE assault on the federal government. That is to say, the richest man in the world did this, under the auspices of our government. His cruelty and his self-regard—and his abject racism—know no bounds.
And then the most piggish and self-involved man in the world, Donald Trump, started a war in Iran, and now the price of fertilizer is through the roof, making life much harder for the people who grow food in Africa (and those who eat it). And an El Niño is now bearing down on the planet, riding on the highest temperatures in human history, which were caused mostly by us in the Western world. All of it taken together is too much
Drought ravaged the most recent harvest. Some 6.5 million people—roughly one-third of the population—were suffering hunger at levels deemed an emergency, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warned in February. That included more than 1.8 million children under 5 facing acute malnutrition.
Those numbers have almost certainly increased given the war. Yet the World Food Program, the largest source of aid in Somalia, has only enough funding to support 300,000 people a month through July, a fraction of the nearly 2 million people a month it was reaching in early 2025.
Humanitarian relief organizations now contemplate a surreal hierarchy of suffering.
“There are different categories of starvation,” said Hameed Nuru, the World Food Program’s Somalia director. “We are only able to reach those who are really on the verge of, if you don’t give them something now, they will not be there tomorrow.”
In some areas, children are still getting food, but not pregnant mothers. “Literally, it’s who dies first,” he said, “and who dies next.”
Somalia is, of course, a particularly apt place to do this reporting. Trump has referred to its citizens as “garbage people,” and he and Stephen Miller dispatched Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Minneapolis to hunt Somalis. As it happens, it’s on the fairly short list of places I’ve never been, but one of my closest colleagues is Somali, and she is as fine a human being as I know, so I thought of her as I read and reread this piece. But as Goodman points out in his reporting, Somalia is by no means unique.
Indeed, the news this week of a new Ebola outbreak elsewhere in Africa reminds us of another way we keep shrinking the world: There are places it’s too dangerous to go because we’ve unleashed diabolical illnesses. As Kat Lay reports:
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) said in a report published on Monday that “as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent they are also becoming more damaging”, warning that pandemic risk is outpacing investments in preparedness and “the world is not yet meaningfully safer”.
Disease outbreaks are becoming more likely due to the climate crisis and armed conflict, while collective action is being undermined by geopolitical fragmentation and commercial self-interest, the report said.
In fact, it’s more or less Musk again—he made a joke at a presidential cabinet meeting about “accidentally” cutting Ebola funding, but insisted it had been restored, something that—and this will shock you—seems not to be entirely true:
In Geneva, Prof Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, said aid cuts may have played a role in leaving the world “playing catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen”.
He said: “Because early tests looked for the wrong strain of Ebola, we got false negatives and lost weeks of response time. By the time the alarm was raised, the virus had already moved along major transport routes and crossed borders.
“This crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline USAID programmes, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early. We are seeing the direct, deadly consequences of treating global health security as an optional expense.”
That margin is thinner all the time. Consider this report from Laura Paddison about the heatwave that shook India last week: There was a day when all the 50 hottest cities on our planet were in that country:
On April 27, average peak temperatures across all 50 Indian cities on the list hit 112.5°F.
Top of AQI’s list was the city of Banda in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a harsh, sub-tropical climate which often delivers brutal summers.
Even before what are typically hottest summer months, the heat has ratcheted up. On April 27, temperatures in Banda reached 115.16°F, according to AQI, the highest temperature recorded anywhere on the planet that day. The coolest Banda got, in the early hours of that morning, was 94.5°F…
Experts have warned heat in India is becoming so extreme, it may “cross the survivability limit” for healthy humans by 2050.
Across the border in Pakistan, as Asad Mumtaz Rid reports, it’s at least as bad:
In southern Pakistan throughout April and May, temperatures have risen far above seasonal norms. In Sindh, daytime temperatures have frequently crossed 44°C to 46°C, forcing residents indoors during peak afternoon hours and severely affecting outdoor labourers, transport workers, and farming communities.
The impact has been particularly severe in Karachi’s coastal settlements, where prolonged electricity outages and water shortages have compounded the effects of extreme heat. In Ibrahim Hyderi, one of the city’s largest fishing communities, residents say survival is becoming increasingly difficult.
Abdul Sattar, a fisherman with more than three decades of experience, recalled how one of his colleagues collapsed from heat exhaustion during the recent heatwave. “We gave him lemon water and rushed him to a doctor,” he said. “He regained consciousness after receiving intravenous fluids.”
There are things we can and must do to make a short-term difference. One is to provide cooling—air-conditioning—to much of the planet. As a study last week from the Rocky Mountain Institute described:
Between now and 2030, the increase in electricity demand for air conditioning systems alone will exceed that for data centers, one of the fastest-growing energy uses globally. By 2050, cooling electricity demand is expected to match the combined annual electricity consumption of the United States, China, India, Germany, and Japan today.
That’s not optional—at this point, it’s medicine. In those kinds of heatwaves cool air is as important to the human body as water, or food. But, obviously it will drive up demand for energy, which is why, as the RMI experts point out, we need to
Reduce energy use and emissions through super-efficient technologies, improved system design, and better refrigerant management, while scaling next-gen, innovative solutions that lower life-cycle costs and emissions.
All of this is possible—new heat pumps are far far more efficient at cooling air than old AC units, and we can paint roofs, plant trees, and do lots more.
But at the most basic level we have no more important task than converting absolutely everything we can, right away, to sun and wind and batteries, so that we stop pouring carbon into the air and making the problem ever worse. And the horrible part is that we can do this, which makes the fact that we’re not doing it as fast as we can deeply and profoundly immoral. Hell, no one is even asking Americans to do with less, because that is clearly impossible. We’re just asking them to do with slightly different, and save money in the process. Here, for instance, is the latest update from former President Joe Biden’s key energy deployment expert, Jigar Shah, talking about a new method for coaxing more juice through existing transmission lines, which experts call
reconductoring with advanced conductors. Reconductoring replaces the wire on an existing line with advanced conductor technology that carries 50 -110% more current through the same towers, on the same right-of-way, in 18 to 36 months. No new permitting. No land acquisition. Montana-Dakota Utilities reconductored a 15-mile 230 kV line, increased ampacity by 77%, finished a full year ahead of schedule, and came in 40% under cost estimate. The Berkeley and GridLab 2035 study found a national reconductoring program could quadruple the rate of transmission capacity expansion at only 20% higher total system cost—saving $85 billion by 2035 and $180 billion by 2050.
But we have to do it. We have to force our leaders, state by state at the moment since DC is such a disaster area, to actually make these relatively small changes.
A way to look at the work we’re doing together is that we’re trying to build some margin back in. Every gas car that becomes an EV buys us back an inch or two, every furnace that becomes a heat pump, every solar panel and wind turbine that sprouts takes the tiniest bit of pressure off the system.
We were born onto a world with lots of margin, especially those of us who are older. The size of the game board was expanding back then, as we learned new ways to grow and store food and the like. But through shortsightedness and greed we began to shrink that buffer, and now greed and short-sightedness have become the cornerstones of government policy, along with pure and undiluted racism. It’s not like anyone is fooled. Goodman again:
As he sat beneath the shade of a mango tree, its branches sloping toward the river dividing Somalia from Ethiopia, Adan Bare Ali, deputy mayor of Dollow, said his community was suffering from troubles that had been concocted far away. The drought was worsened by climate change—primarily the result of industrial polluters in larger, more powerful nations. The war was the handiwork of foreign actors.
“The situation has become unbearable,” he said. “The American regime is led by a person who really doesn’t care about anything happening outside his gates. The Americans are not honoring their commitment to the world.”
He is right, and we are very very wrong.
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When GOP Cowardice Governs, Everyone Suffers
Republican US House members from Colorado act as if they are trained to dodge questions and avoid accountability for stripping healthcare from their constituents.
May 21, 2026
Just this week, I saw a video that captured one of Colorado’s elected US representatives, Republican Rep. Gabe Evans, happily dodging questions about the huge Medicaid cuts he supported with his vote for President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” I found it especially offensive because I’ve always thought of the US House of Representatives and the people elected to serve there as having a constitutional duty to actually represent. Running away from questions about your vote that will injure one-third of the people you are elected to represent is cowardice.
While Gabe Evans described his vote for Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (and the Medicaid cuts it included) as “cost saving” during another video, the lives in his district damaged by horrific Medicaid cuts have value far beyond the bottom line. They are his constituents, his neighbors, his friends—the disabled, children, seniors, pregnant women, veterans. Evans’ disregard for the suffering caused by his actions—his vote—is cowardly.
Then I started to wonder if Republican US House members from Colorado are trained to dodge questions and avoid accountability. Some will remember a decade ago when Rep. Mike Coffman ducked out of a town meeting at the local library because 150 of his constituents showed up to ask questions about—guess what?—healthcare and losing coverage. Coffman is now the mayor of Aurora, Colorado—the third largest city in Colorado. It seems cowardice runs in his Republican extended family as hurting people in your own community—town, city, county, state, nation—is not in any oath of office he has taken in a long political career.
Wondering what happened to some of our leaders to create this sense of power devoid of compassion toward the most vulnerable people in our communities? I wonder. How does a person divorce themselves from the reality that a vote that cuts healthcare access is barbaric and people will suffer? Maintaining program integrity would surely have included keeping people covered who need the healthcare social safety net the most. When fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program is uncovered, it is almost always for-profit providers at the core of greedy schemes, yet it is the Medicaid-covered individuals whose integrity is sullied, not the profit takers. It is fascinating and sickening that as a society brainwashing is so pervasive that we label our Medicaid program as something bad rather than the program that has saved millions of lives from descending into illness, isolation, and despair.
Gabe Evans governs from his own cowardice. He’s afraid of rocking the Republican power boat more than he is afraid to hurt tens of thousands of his constituents.
Both men asked us to celebrate their military service to the country. Yet, I find myself angered by that. The men and women I know who served in the military forces are not apt to allow community members to suffer and die as some badge of honor. Most I know who have served hold themselves to a sometimes impossibly high standard of being. They are courageous in ways it is hard to define. It does not involve inflicting pain and calling it something else—or worse. A person of honor would face people with differing views as still worthy of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Gabe Evans governs from his own cowardice. He’s afraid of rocking the Republican power boat more than he is afraid to hurt tens of thousands of his constituents. When tough questions come his way, he ducks and runs. He learned his lesson well from other Republican leaders around him about ignoring his constituents when his boss says so. And though the Constitution says his constituents are his bosses, cowardice makes that impossible.
Problems in the healthcare industry have only grown in post-pandemic America, and it will take a very long time to right a ship that was already sinking. Taking access from people who most need it is so wrong, and Gabe Evans knows it. When cowardice governs, there is no room for reason or for explanation. When cowardice governs, we all lose trust in one another. And we must not stand for that. While some run from painful problems, governance must be courageous and protective of those who have given their trust and vote to make sure that it always will be governance for us all.
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