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authoritarianism
How the US Labor Movement Can Revive Itself and Help Save Democracy
History teaches us that, when unions fight to defend democracy and win, they position themselves for periods of explosive growth and increased worker power.
Jun 07, 2026
The US labor movement, like the nation at large, stands at a crossroads. The next few years might well determine whether the United States fully descends into an era of electoral autocracy, where democracy has withered and authoritarianism becomes the political norm. This period is also likely to set the future trajectory of the union movement’s power and influence, as the state of democracy and organized labor have long been deeply intertwined.
For decades, the right-wing forces set on steadily eroding our democracy have worked in tandem with a pro-corporate movement that has increasingly marginalized organized labor, creating a ballooning crisis for the working class. Yet this politically hazardous moment also represents an opportunity to overcome deep-seated institutional inertia, drawing elements of a cautious labor movement out of their defensive crouch, and helping unions devise forms of struggle that might both revive the labor movement and renew American democracy.
President Donald Trump’s second term has, in a way, broken a spell. For years, the pre-Trump status quo kept labor locked in a pattern of slow decline even as democracy was increasingly stifled and abridged by voter suppression, gerrymandering, filibusters, and the overweening power of organized money. But the decades-old dysfunctional status quo that gave rise to Trumpism is now crumbling under the weight of the most lawless, antidemocratic, rights-trampling administration this country has seen since the 19th century.
History suggests that fighting to defend and revive democracy in its moment of maximum peril can create a window of opportunity for labor. Past experience—in the United States and other nations—teaches us that, when unions fight to defend democracy and win, they position themselves for periods of explosive growth and increased worker power. It is imperative that the US labor movement grasp this lesson and seize the window of opportunity before it’s too late.
Moving Beyond Magical Thinking
It’s clear that the crisis facing US democracy is deepening. Over the past year, immigrants and the neighbors and coworkers who stood in solidarity with them endured murderous paramilitary occupations in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities across the country. The nation has been plunged into war in Iran without prior input from Congress. The president has even suggested the federal government should seize control of the upcoming midterm elections from the states.
This all comes on top of the Supreme Court’s relentless assault on workers’ rights and a worsening affordability crisis that has undermined the stability of working-class families, leading them to wonder whether the system is irretrievably broken.
As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box what power they’ve lost in the workplace.
While our democracy’s crisis deepens, the national labor movement has yet to play a leading role in the resistance against ascendant authoritarianism. By seizing the opportunity to play such a role in the year ahead, labor has the opportunity to reverse its decades-long slide toward irrelevancy by taking up an indispensable role in preserving, expanding, and deepening rights-based democracy.
By fighting to reconstruct our democracy in the face of the mortal threat it now faces, labor could transform itself from a fading force—whose structure and outlook still bear the imprint of the 19th- and 20th-century struggles that birthed it—into a rejuvenated movement ambitious enough to give workers the powerful voice they deserve in the 21st century.
That transformation is only possible, though, if the labor movement moves beyond the magical thinking that if unions can just survive the Trump era then they can help restore a kind of pre-Trump normalcy afterward. The prevailing sentiment among labor’s leaders seems to be that, if they can just help their allies regain control of Congress later this year, they will be able to contain the damage Trump has wrought and coalesce behind an alternative in 2028 that can roll back Trumpism.
As important as the coming elections are, unions should firmly reject the comforting delusion that they can recover through the ballot box what power they’ve lost in the workplace. For if such electoral victories are unaccompanied by a revived, reorganized labor movement, they will leave workers and unions in a situation no different from the one they faced prior to Trump’s rise.
If the labor movement is to have a viable future, unions must not merely survive but capitalize on Trump’s disruption of longstanding norms, assumptions, and institutions, many of which no longer operate to labor’s benefit—if they ever did. That is the path to advance a bold 21st-century vision of inclusive solidarity, equality, rights, and democracy.
Turning Crisis Into Opportunity
How labor might take advantage of Trumpism’s authoritarian excesses to advance such a vision was put on display in Minnesota this winter, where local labor organizations drew on years of experience to play a central role in the resistance to Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invasion. Unions of janitors, teachers, healthcare workers, and others helped coalesce a resistance that included workers centers, faith communities and clergy, community organizations, immigrants’ rights groups, small businesses, and caring neighbors.
Protesters turned out by the tens of thousands in subzero temperatures, religious leaders endured arrest in acts of civil disobedience, and witnesses turned their cell phones into tools to document ICE malfeasance and protect their neighbors. That resistance was built on a shared common good analysis of power and a recognition of the increasingly baneful influence of billionaires over our political system and economy. Protesters targeted not only ICE but corporations such as Target and Hilton that have either remained silent or openly abetted and profited from Trump’s authoritarian power grab.
Make no mistake: The formal end of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis scarcely indicates a waning of this administration’s authoritarian ambitions. Unresolved issues regarding the limits of ICE’s legal authority will likely continue to elicit protest and resistance in the streets. In the meantime, new fronts are already opening as the president disregards all restraints on his power to deploy military force abroad and pushes an effort to nationalize the midterm elections at home. As labor movement leaders contemplate the conflicts that might emerge, they should consider lessons from what happened in Minnesota as well as other cities like Chicago and Los Angeles, where local unions played important roles in mobilizing resistance. They should also learn from the experiences of unions in other nations that successfully resisted authoritarian regimes.
Defeating Trump and his allies at the polls will be a Pyrrhic victory if the corporations fueling the right-wing’s anti-worker agenda maintain their influence over our government.
The stories of Brazil, South Korea, and South Africa are cases in point. In these countries, labor movements joined and helped lead the struggles against dictatorship, authoritarianism, and apartheid. In each case, when democracy won out, unions saw massive increases in membership. During Brazil’s transition to democracy in the mid-1980s, work stoppages jumped tenfold, and Brazil’s labor federation, Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT), founded during this period, grew to represent more than 15 million people by 1990.
When South Korea’s dictatorship fell in 1987, a period of militant worker struggle ensued as the number of strikes jumped and union membership surged. In South Africa, the labor movement played a key role in the fight against apartheid, and trade union membership grew dramatically, up from 1.4 million workers and 18% density in 1985 to 3.8 million and 51% by 1998. What’s more, these growth spurts boosted worker power and helped erect union bulwarks to help prevent backsliding into authoritarianism in subsequent years.
In Brazil, labor rallied to defeat President Jair Bolsonaro at the polls in 2022, then opposed his post-defeat coup attempt and supported his successful prosecution. Similarly, South Korean unions played a vital role in defeating an attempted coup in 2024 by threatening a general strike.
As these examples suggest, and as scholars have long noted, labor movements—no matter their national context—tend to expand not in linear fashion but by quantum leaps. The British labor historian Eric J. Hobsbawm described these episodes as “discontinuous” and “explosive” bursts that occur when circumstances force “qualitative innovations in the movement.”
Resisting authoritarians has required such innovations in countries across the globe, which have in turn helped unions to grow. When worker-led movements aligned with pro-democracy forces and succeeded in undermining authoritarian regimes, their victories allowed workers to witness and feel their collective power. Confrontations with authoritarianism in the streets translated into militancy, collective action, and increased organization in the workplace.
The US labor movement’s history also bears out that pattern. While people in the United States have never witnessed a battle with authoritarianism quite like the ones that erupted in South Africa, Brazil, and South Korea, an analogous incubation of explosive growth took place during periods when the US labor movement aligned itself with struggles to defend democracy against what were perceived as existential threats.
The Civil War, waged to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the Union in the 1860s, triggered what W.E.B. Du Bois called a vast “general strike” in which the enslaved transferred their labor “from the Confederate planter to the Northern invader” even as that war fueled the expansion of the national trade unions that would later form the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The effort to make the world “safe for democracy,” as President Woodrow Wilson pledged during World War I, likewise provided the setting for experimentation with industrial unionism that paved the way for the later formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). And the forging of a US “arsenal of democracy” against fascism during World War II helped lead to the high-water mark of US unionism in the 1950s.
Pivoting Toward Action
The kind of quantum leaps in union growth that have occurred when the US labor movement has linked its fortunes to the future of democracy can happen again. In the growing resistance to Trumpism, we are already seeing glimmers of how this could happen in our time. Unions and allied labor and community organizations provided the backbone of the resistance in Minnesota; employees in the largest and most influential technology labs are confronting bosses who are selling their technology to the government for domestic surveillance and global war; higher education unions are challenging attacks on free speech on university campuses.
Flashes of resistance like these are multiplying. Yet such sparks will not fuel a major breakthrough unless unions at every level—from locals to internationals—embrace the fight against Trump’s authoritarian, billionaire-serving regime and defend democracy by challenging the corporations and Silicon Valley technofascists that are shaping and profiting from Trump’s policies.
Such opposition must go beyond an electoral strategy for 2026 and 2028. Defeating Trump and his allies at the polls will be a Pyrrhic victory if the corporations fueling the right-wing’s anti-worker agenda maintain their influence over our government. Should Democrats regain control of Congress and the White House, the same corporations that have aligned with Trump will be working to sabotage pro-labor policies while doubling down on their AI-obsessed, job-threatening, antidemocratic campaign of economic destruction.
There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own.
As the experience of other nations and the failure of our own post-Civil War Reconstruction remind us, elites and economic structures that benefit from authoritarian power don’t vanish when antidemocratic regimes crumble; they regroup. We cannot allow such a regrouping to occur post-Trump, for as we have seen over the past 50 years of labor decline under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, a return to the pre-Trump status quo offers no hope for workers or labor.
Naming and challenging the economic actors aligned with Trump is therefore critical if we are to weaken their post-Trump grip on power.
Although their critics have often suggested that US unions have tied their fortunes too closely to politics, in truth, US labor has been reluctant to take up the kind of big political issues that have historically helped push workers into the streets and built workers’ movements in other democracies. We should not be surprised if many national unions hesitate to act decisively. Nor should we expect their leaders to be at the forefront, for despite critics’ endless talk of labor bosses, the movement has never functioned effectively as a top-down, command-and-control institution.
Rather, the national union movement has tended to respond opportunistically to openings that it lacked the institutional will or unity of purpose to create. In the present crisis, local unions in cities around the country—through the common good alliances they’re building to fight ICE, support beleaguered federal workers, and demand billionaires begin paying their fair share—are beginning to create the kind of openings that could conceivably pull the larger movement into the fight.
Evidence on the ground in places like Minnesota already suggests that well-conceived actions by forward-leaning coalitions of the willing can open windows of opportunity and create permission structures capable of drawing more cautious mainstream organizations into the fight. The Minnesota AFL-CIO did not initiate the remarkable “Day of Truth & Freedom,” which triggered a virtual economic shutdown of Minneapolis on January 23, as tens of thousands of residents stayed away from work, school,and shopping. Yet the organizing and alignment-building that preceded that event won the state federation’s support in the days before the action, generating a much larger impact than its initial organizers had expected.
Forward-thinking unions and their allies can replicate this effect in other settings by constructing campaigns that unmask the corporations colluding with the Trump administration’s authoritarian push. Focusing on key sectors and geographies, and engaging in calculated acts of disruption and nonviolent resistance, can not only erect defenses against the administration’s aggression but set the stage for a post-Trump organizing surge.
As longtime veterans of the labor movement, we see three elements as crucial to this strategy. The first is defining our targets expansively and attacking the financial roots of their power. We need a shared analysis of who has power in our communities and nationally, including the key Big Tech titans who openly advocate rolling back democracy and expanding an all-seeing surveillance state.
Having identified these present-day “malefactors of great wealth,” as they were called in the Progressive Era, we need to demand that worker pension funds (state and local government workers’ pension assets alone top $6 trillion) cease investing in these corporations and their anti-worker, antidemocratic agenda. We also need to articulate a platform and visionary policy agenda that focuses on breaking up and limiting their economic and political power. We must find ways to tax their hoarded wealth, reinvesting the revenues in our struggling austerity-starved communities.
A second element involves moving the labor movement into a fighting posture. The past half-century has taken a debilitating toll on the movement’s willingness and capacity to engage in collective action. In 1955, the year the AFL-CIO was formed, the equivalent of 12.1% of union members engaged in a major work stoppage. That level of union militancy vanished long ago in the United States. During the past 25 years, the annual average of participants in major work stoppages has been equal to only 1% of US union members. (The high point of militancy in that period came during the 2018 #RedForEd teacher walkout upheaval, when the equivalent of 3.3% of union members went on strike, a mere fraction of 1950s-level militancy.)
If it’s difficult to imagine a revival of organized labor without a revival of worker militancy, it’s even harder to envision an effective opposition to authoritarianism without it. Political scientist Erica Chenoweth, of Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, has theorized that, to succeed, a civil resistance movement requires 3.5% of a population to actively join it. If we are to reach that threshold, then labor will need to massively overperform. Labor can play this role only if it begins to rebuild its badly atrophied capacity for collective action. Unions can begin to recover that capacity by aligning contract dates and strikes; crafting common good bargaining demands that enlist public support for those struggles; and planning national “no work, no school, no shopping” efforts like the one Minnesotans pulled off January 23, and as the May Day Strong campaign recently promoted.
Finally, we need community-labor organizing committees, like those that emerged in Minnesota, to lead large-scale drives in crucial sectors while linking these efforts to the goal of breaking up the big companies that are increasingly dominating our economy and politics alike. As we confront the most aggressive consolidation of capital and economic power this nation has ever seen, our goal cannot be only to unionize the behemoths that are reorganizing our society; we must demand their vast monopoly power be diminished and made accountable to the public good.
There is no doubt that democracy and workers’ rights are facing down an existential threat. Yet that very threat and the sense of urgency it has spawned have created an opportunity we could not have engineered on our own. It has roused growing numbers to the defense of democracy, glaringly exposed the dangers of unchecked corporate power, and catalyzed actions within pockets of the labor movement that have a potential to spread and become transformative.
In the years ahead, if more unions begin to follow the example set by organizers in Minnesota to seize this moment by embracing social movement unionism, they will not only play an indispensable role in defeating Trumpist authoritarianism.
They could also help trigger a 21st-century revival of the US labor movement.
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Lessons in Resistance From Scott Pelley
We can gain courage from our heroes of this moment: Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump.
Jun 05, 2026
I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.
The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of Michigan State University Students for a Democratic Society.
I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news—accurate, factual, honest information—was sacred.
It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
We did this—and embraced the Fairness Doctrine—because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for eight years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.
Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.
Then-President Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now President Donald Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.
Over the past year and a half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the Federal Communications Commission, go to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel—again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.
And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s No. 1 news magazine show, "60 Minutes."
Storied journalist and "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.
Trump, David Ellison, Bari Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, and Francisco Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: Sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.
Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government.
“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the Western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”
He added:
Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.
Thus, this is now the Putin-Orbán-Trump formula:
- Manufacture a crisis.
- Declare an “emergency.”
- Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
- Bypass Congress.
- Bully or ignore the courts.
- Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
- Send people to foreign concentration camps.
- Build concentration camps within the United States.
- Prosecute lawyers and judges.
- Assert control over universities.
- Merge corporate and state interests.
- Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
- Then call it all “law and order.”
Trump is 18 months into his project, and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump and his billionaire enablers’ goal.
Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.
The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula—violence as entertainment—will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.
Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fouth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”
We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.
The courts are packed with Trump toadies; thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is now weaponized against Americans; Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist defense secretary; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.
And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible—the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine—but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.
But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.
This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), now owns, controls, or soon will control:
TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.
Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission, FCC, and Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).
Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.
We all must become truth tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.
We are all Scott Pelley.
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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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