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Make no mistake. Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism of him and his administration constitute another of his attacks on democracy. But there are things we can do to fight back.
Donald Trump has sued the New York Times for, well, reporting on Trump.
Rather than charging the Times with any specific libelous act, Trump’s lawsuit is just another of his angry bloviations.
The lawsuit says he’s moving against "one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party.” And so on.
At least he sued The Wall Street Journal’s parent company for something specific — reporting Trump’s birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein (which Trump continues to deny even though it showed up in the Epstein files).
Last year, Trump sued ABC and its host George Stephanopoulos for having said that Trump was found liable for rape rather than "sexual abuse" in the civil suit brought by E. Jean Carroll. The network settled for $16 million
Trump sued CBS for allegedly editing an interview with Kamala Harris on "60 Minutes" to make her sound more coherent. CBS also agreed to pay $16 million.
Defamation lawsuits are a longstanding part of Trump’s repertoire, which he first learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most notorious legal bullies.
In the 1980s, Trump sued the Pulitzer-winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp for $500 million, for criticizing Trump’s plan to build the world’s tallest building in Manhattan, a 150-story tower that Gapp called "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.”
Trump charged that Gapp had "virtually torpedoed" the project and subjected Trump to "public ridicule and contempt." A judge later dismissed the suit as involving protected opinion.
But such lawsuits are far worse when a president sues. He’s no longer just an individual whose reputation can be harmed. He’s the head of the government of the United States. One of the cardinal responsibilities of the media in our democracy is to report on a president — and often criticize him.
The legal standard for defamation of a public figure, established in a 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, requires that public officials who bring such suits prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth.
That case arose from a libel suit filed by L.B. Sullivan, the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, against the New York Times for an advertisement in the paper that, despite being mostly true, contained factual errors concerning the mistreatment of civil rights demonstrators.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times, finding that the ad was protected speech under the First Amendment and that the higher standard of proof was necessary to protect robust debate on public affairs.
Under this standard, there’s no chance Trump will prevail in his latest lawsuits against the Times or Wall Street Journal. Nor would he have won his lawsuits against ABC and CBS, had they gone to trial.
But Trump hasn’t filed these lawsuits to win in court. He has sought wins in the court of public opinion. These lawsuits are aspects of his performative presidency.
ABC’s and CBS’s settlements are viewed by Trump as vindications of his gripes with the networks.
He’s likewise using his lawsuit against the New York Times to advertise his long standing grievances with the paper.
His lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal is intended to send a message to the Journal’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch, that Trump doesn’t want Murdoch to muck around in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
These lawsuits also put the media on notice that Trump could mess up their businesses.
Not only is it costly to defend against them — requiring attorney’s fees, inordinate time of senior executives, and efforts to defend the media’s brand and reputation.
When a lawsuit comes from the president of the United States who also has the power to damage a business by imposing regulations and prosecuting the corporation for any alleged wrongdoings, the potential costs can be huge.
Which presumably is why CBS caved rather than litigated. Its parent company, Paramount, wanted to be able to sell it for some $8 billion to Skydance, whose CEO is David Ellison (scion of the second-richest person in America, Oracle’s Larry Ellison). But Paramount first needed the approval of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission — which held up the sale until the defamation lawsuit was settled.
Here we come to the central danger of Trump’s wanton use of personal defamation law. The mere possibility of its use — coupled with Trump’s other powers of retribution — have a potential chilling effect on media criticism of Trump.
We don’t know how much criticism has been stifled to date, but it’s suggestive that a CBS News president and the executive producer of “60 Minutes” resigned over CBS’s handling of the lawsuit and settlement, presumably because they felt that management was limiting their ability to fairly and freely cover Trump.
It’s also indicative that CBS ended Stephen Colbert’s contract. Colbert’s show is the highest-rated late night comedy show on television. He’s also one of the most trenchant critics of Trump.
Among the capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration was to hire an “ombudsman” to police the network against so-called bias — and the person they hired was Kenneth R. Weinstein, the former president and chief executive of the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute think tank.
Note also that on Wednesday ABC pulled off the air another popular late-night critic of Trump — Jimmy Kimmel — because Kimmel in a monologue earlier this week charged that Trump’s “MAGA gang” was trying “to score political points” from Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
ABC announced the move after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, appeared to threaten ABC, and its parent company Disney, for airing Kimmel’s monologue —ominously threatening: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and related businesses, has muzzled the editorial page of the Washington Post — prohibiting it from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and imposing a stringent set of criteria on all editorials and opinion columns, which has led to the resignations of its opinion page editor and a slew of its opinion writers.
Trump hasn’t sued the Washington Post for defamation, but Bezos presumably understands Trump’s potential for harming his range of businesses and wants to avoid Trump’s wrath.
Make no mistake. Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism of him and his administration constitute another of his attacks on democracy.
What can be done? Two important steps are warranted.
First, the New York Times v. Sullivan standard should be far stricter when a president of the United States seeks to use defamation law against a newspaper or media platform that criticizes him.
Instead of requiring that he prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth, he should have to prove that the false statement materially impaired his ability to perform his official duties.
Better yet, a president should have no standing to bring defamation suits. He has no need to bring them. Through his office he already possesses sufficient — if not too much — power to suppress criticism.
Second, antitrust authorities should not allow large corporations or ultra-wealthy individuals with many other business interests to buy major newspapers or media platforms. They cannot be trusted to prioritize the public’s right to know over their financial interests in their range of businesses.
The richest person in the world was allowed to buy X, one of the most influential news platforms on earth, and has turned it into a cesspool of rightwing lies and conspiracy theories.
The family of the second-richest person in the world now owns CBS.
The third-richest person now owns the Washington Post.
The Disney corporation — with its wide range of business enterprises — owns ABC.
The problem isn’t concentrated wealth per se. It’s that these business empires are potentially more important to their owners than is the public’s right to know.
If Democrats win back control of Congress next year, they should encode these two initiatives in legislation.
Democracy depends on a fearless press. Trump and the media that have caved in to him are jeopardizing it and thereby undermining our democracy
Having named it a genocide, we must use every ounce of our leverage to demand an immediate ceasefire, a massive surge of humanitarian aid facilitated by the UN, and initial steps to provide Palestinians with a state of their own.
Hamas, a terrorist organization, began this war with its brutal attack on October 7, 2023, which killed 1,200 innocent people and took 250 hostages. Israel, as any other country, had a right to defend itself from Hamas.
But, over the last two years, Israel has not simply defended itself against Hamas. Instead, it has waged an all-out war against the entire Palestinian people. Many legal experts have now concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The International Association of Genocide Scholars concluded that “Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide.” The Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel have reached the same conclusion, as have international groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Just yesterday, an independent commission of experts appointed by the United Nations echoed this finding. These experts concluded that: “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.”
I agree.
If there is no accountability for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals, other demagogues will do the same.
Out of a population of 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has now killed some 65,000 people and wounded roughly 164,000. The full toll is likely much higher, with many thousands of bodies buried under the rubble. A leaked classified Israeli military database indicates that 83% of those killed have been civilians. More than 18,000 children have been killed, including 12,000 aged 12 or younger.
For almost two years, the extremist Netanyahu government has severely limited the amount of humanitarian aid allowed into Gaza and thrown up every possible hurdle to the United Nations and other aid groups trying to provide lifesaving supplies. This includes an 11-week total blockade in which Israel did not permit any food, water, fuel or medical supplies to enter Gaza. As a direct result of these Israeli policies, Gaza is now gripped by manmade famine, with hundreds of thousands of people facing starvation. More than 400 people, including 145 children, have already starved to death. Each day brings new deaths from hunger.
But it is not just the human cost. Israel has systematically destroyed Gaza’s physical infrastructure. Satellite imagery shows that the Israeli bombardment has destroyed 70% of all structures in Gaza. The UN estimates that 92% of housing units have been damaged or destroyed. At this very moment, Israel is demolishing what’s left of Gaza City. Most hospitals have been destroyed, and almost 1,600 healthcare workers have been killed. Almost 90% of water and sanitation facilities are now inoperable. Hundreds of schools have been bombed, as has every single one of Gaza’s 12 universities. There has been no electricity for 23 months.
And that is just what we know from aid workers and local journalists—hundreds of whom have been killed—as Israel bars outside media from Gaza. In fact, Israel has killed more journalists in Gaza than have been killed in any previous conflict. The result: There is likely much we don’t know about the scale of the atrocities.
Now, with the Trump administration’s full support, the extremist Netanyahu government is openly pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank. Having made life unlivable through bombing and starvation, they are pushing for “voluntary” migration of Palestinians to neighboring countries to make way for US President Donald Trump’s twisted vision of a “Riviera of the Middle East.”
Genocide is defined as actions taken with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” The actions include killing members of the group or “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The legal question hinges on intent.
Israeli leaders have made their intent clear. Early in the conflict, the defense minister said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” The finance minister vowed that “Gaza will be entirely destroyed.” Another minister declared: “All Gaza will be Jewish… we are wiping out this evil.” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Another minister called for, “Erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth.” Another Israeli lawmaker said, “The Gaza Strip should be flattened, and there should be one sentence for everyone there—death. We have to wipe the Gaza Strip off the map. There are no innocents there.” Yet another Knesset member called for “erasing all of Gaza from the face of the Earth.” And, just recently, a minister in Israel’s high-level security cabinet said: “Gaza City itself should be exactly like Rafah, which we turned into a city of ruins.”
The intent is clear. The conclusion is inescapable: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
I recognize that many people may disagree with this conclusion. The truth is, whether you call it genocide or ethnic cleansing or mass atrocities or war crimes, the path forward is clear. We, as Americans, must end our complicity in the slaughter of the Palestinian people. That is why I have worked with a number of my Senate colleagues to force votes on seven Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to stop offensive arms sales to Israel. The United States must not continue sending many billions of dollars and weapons to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal government.
Having named it a genocide, we must use every ounce of our leverage to demand an immediate ceasefire, a massive surge of humanitarian aid facilitated by the UN, and initial steps to provide Palestinians with a state of their own.
But this issue goes beyond Israel and Palestine.
Around the world, democracy is on the defensive. Hatred, racism, and divisiveness are on the rise. The challenge we now face is to prevent the world from descending into barbarism, where horrific crimes against humanity can take place with impunity. We must say now and forever that, while wars may happen, there are certain basic standards that must be upheld. The starvation of children cannot be tolerated. The flattening of cities must not become the norm. Collective punishment is beyond the pale.
The very term genocide is a reminder of what can happen if we fail. That word emerged from the Holocaust—the murder of 6 million Jews—one of the darkest chapters in human history. Make no mistake. If there is no accountability for Netanyahu and his fellow war criminals, other demagogues will do the same. History demands that the world act with one voice to say: Enough is enough. No more genocide.
The evidence is overwhelming. The American economic system is no longer failing by accident; it is succeeding at its new design: concentrating wealth and power for the few while dismantling the foundations of a dignified life for the many.
Nine days ago, I laid out a draft of a pledge akin to Newt’s Contract for America. First, we must agree on what is broken. If you can’t agree on the scale of a crisis, you can never agree on the scale of a solution.
This is my attempt to lay out the first and most important reality, one that so many of us know in our bones but that the establishment continues to deny.
The people in charge—the politicians in Washington, the economists at Hahvahd, the CEOs in boardrooms—all describe a nation that does not exist for most of us. Strongest economy EVER! Record GDP! Look at the MARKET FOLKS! “Real Wages” are up across the board!
Our greatest economic minds reckon we oughta be in awe of the riches that their management has bestowed upon us.
Every official metric tells us we're richer than our parents and grandparents, and that all who have come before us would look at even the poorest among us green with envy. The story goes that even Kings and Queens could only dream of trading their lives for those of trailer park dwellers or Section 8 residents. We're living the dream.
Alas, it’s a lie. A goddamn lie. It's the big lie.
Why does it matter that we share this understanding of reality? Why can’t you think things are okay but need improving? Because this lie paralyzes us. If the prevailing wisdom is to be believed then there is no problem. No need for fundamental shifts in the foundation of our system.
Also, implicit in this lie is that failure is our fault if we struggle financially or socially. It means that if we’re poor, we’re fuck ups that didn’t heed Dave Ramsey’s advice. After all the fantasy of America and the data tell us the same story. America is the land of opportunity. You fail, you suck.
Politicians, voters and non-voters alike all look at the stats to determine a plan of action. Is the good life out there waiting for us?
Unless we share this reality we have no chance in mobilizing the strength to overturn a system that constantly fails us. To overcome the corporations, the billionaires and the yes men in our government that have their boots on our throats economically it’ll take a lot of political will. A lot of political fights. Brave people, terrified people, but united people.
The odds of a child earning more than their parents have fallen from 90% for those born in 1940 to 50% for those born in the 1980s.
People that agree in this simple truth: We are not failing. The system is failing us.
Let's start with what we know in our bones.
Our parents and grandparents could afford a home on one income. Now we struggle on two. Our grandparents raised a family on a factory wage. Today even with a college degree many can't afford daycare. That degree once cost a summer job. Now it's a lifetime of debt.
They want to tell you about personal responsibility, bootstraps, or about the choices you've made. The elite, academics, and CEOs want us to believe that if we’d worked a little harder, gotten a different degree, made a different decision, we’d have risen above it all.
But when an entire generation is locked out of the stability their parents took for granted, the problem isn't the generation—it's the system.
According to a 2017 study we’ve long lost social mobility. We're not better off than our parents. Our kids probably won't be better off than us.
We need to understand that the people telling you otherwise are invested in not seeing the truth. They are tracking the portfolios of the rich instead of the lives of the working. They are celebrating the health of the parasite while the host, you and me, get sicker every year.
You don't need an economics degree to see the crime scene. You just need basic arithmetic.
Housing: In 1950, the median household income was about $3,073 and the median home cost around $7,500. 2.8 times a household’s yearly pay. In 2023, the median household income was $80,610 and the median home cost $430,000 or 5.3 times a household income. No inflation though. Just ask experts.
Keep in mind that more and more homes had two people working full-time. So what once took 2.8 years of income for one worker now requires 5.3 years from TWO. The one-income household is DOA.
Education: In 1973, you could pay for a year of public university tuition (about $400) by working roughly 250 hours at the federal minimum wage ($1.60). Today, with average public university tuition at $11,610, you'd need to work over 1,600 hours at the current minimum wage—most of a full-time job just for tuition. Forget food, rent, or books.
The game has been fundamentally changed. The cost of entry into the middle class now requires a lifetime of debt and labor that was unimaginable two generations ago.
So where did all the prosperity go? It didn't vanish. It was taken. Housing, healthcare, education, transportation, and food make up the bulk of our spending. And corporations have gobbled it up.
A landmark study from the RAND Corporation calculated the scale of the heist. If income had been distributed as equitably as it was from 1945-1975, the bottom 90% of Americans would have earned $79 trillion more over the past 50 years.
That's not a typo. Trillion. With a T.
In 2023 alone, the transfer was $3.9 trillion. That's enough to have given every single worker in America an additional $32,000.
Stop and think about that number. Every American worker in a single year, 2023, was robbed of 32 grand. What would an extra $32,000 have meant for your family last year? A down payment? An end to credit card debt? The ability to see a doctor without checking your bank account first?
That money is our money. It was earned by our labor, our infrastructure, our markets. Then stolen with interest, inflation, and policy choices.
CEO pay exploded from 30-to-1 in 1978 to 290-to-1 today. The top 1% now owns 31% of all wealth—up from 23% in 1989.
Why are people so pissed? Why is xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, on the rise in the West? This is one of the reasons. We’ve spent the last 50 years being mugged with policy. Blaming immigrants or leftists or right wingers and Trump and everyone in between is simpler than acknowledging the truth. They are easier fixes too. Walls, bombs, bullets, and deportations. Much easier than rebuilding an entire economy and society.
How do they hide a crime this massive in plain sight? They build a gaslighting machine “experts say” or “the News” or "economic data."
They use sophisticated, elegant-sounding mathematical formulas to tell us it's raining while they piss all over us.
The official inflation number is their primary weapon, engineered to hide the affordability crisis. Here's exactly how they do it:
"Substitution": When steak gets too expensive, the statisticians quietly assume you now buy hamburger. When hamburger gets too expensive, they assume you switch to chicken. When chicken gets too expensive, it's beans. They are not measuring the cost of living; they are measuring the cost of surviving. By constantly moving the goalposts downward, they report that prices are stable while you are eating worse for more money.
"Hedonic Adjustments": When a new car includes a backup camera that used to be an option, they count that as a price decrease because you're "getting more car for your money." But you can't buy the old, cheaper car anymore. You are forced to pay the full sticker price, while the government reports that your cost of living went down.
"Averaging the Absurd": TVs got 94% cheaper while healthcare costs have tripled since 2000—from $4,900 per person to $14,570. They call it a wash. But you need healthcare to live. A TV is optional. It's like saying "Sure, chemotherapy will bankrupt you, but have you seen the deal on flatscreens?"
The lies, the blatant lies that we're told about our economy, our living situations, are just enraging and offensive.
The $79 trillion heist was never just about cash. They didn't just steal our money; they stole our capacity. They stole our ability to do things, to build, to create, and to care for our own.
We can't build infrastructure projects anymore. We can't complete a high-speed rail system. The road on I-40 between Asheville and my home is still down to two lanes because part of it collapsed into a river, and God knows how many years that'll take to fix.
They've got us in a situation where 54 percent of this country can't read beyond a sixth-grade level, and 20 percent of us are functionally illiterate. At the same time, they tell us we have a 99 percent literacy rate because people can read a sentence.
We are the only developed nation where mothers are three times more likely to die in childbirth than 25 years ago. Our life expectancy is falling.
We are literally sick from the stress, the debt, and the garbage food that's all many can afford. Over 130 million Americans have multiple chronic conditions.
The average family now spends $13,174 annually on transportation—more than double what most people think. Childcare costs average $11,582 per year, often exceeding college tuition. We're spending more on basic necessities than we earn.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' own data shows that families in the bottom 80% spend more than they earn just on necessities—before accounting for anything else. This isn't overconsumption; it's mathematical impossibility sustained only through debt.
They haven't just taken the fruit; they've poisoned the tree. They've left us a nation rich on paper but poor in the real capacity to provide decent lives for our people.
The evidence is overwhelming. The American economic system is no longer failing by accident; it is succeeding at its new design: concentrating wealth and power for the few while dismantling the foundations of a dignified life for the many.
This is the rot beneath the floorboards of our democracy. This is the economic carnage that fuels the political chaos. January 6th, Minnesota, Kirk, Pelosi...
Trump’s election victories were outlandish. They were the predictable consequences of telling a drowning country that it's not even wet. When you gaslight people about their own lives for long enough, they will eventually burn the whole thing down. Blame anyone they can find—an immigrant from Guatemala, some trans kid, whomever—because the people who actually robbed us live in walled-off communities or a yacht in the Mediterranean. We're not running into them at the grocery store.
We have a choice. We can keep pretending. We can keep tweaking the machine that's grinding us into dust. Or we can admit the truth. The experiment failed. The system is broken. It's time to build something new.
We have a choice. We can keep pretending. We can keep tweaking the machine that's grinding us into dust. Or we can admit the truth. The experiment failed. The system is broken. It's time to build something new. An economy where we build things again. An economy where one job is enough to raise a family. An economy where the goal is the prosperity of our people, not the fiction of our spreadsheets.
We did this before, from 1933 to 1975. We can do it again. But first, we gotta stop lying about where we are and how we got here.
Our eyes aren’t lying to us. The spreadsheets are.
Help spread a shared reality. Share this. Post it on social media. Restack it. Forward it. And comment on the thoughts below.
Did any of these numbers or comparisons surprise you? Which ones stood out most? If you were explaining this to a friend, which example would you start with? What’s the best way to show people that the system is failing us—not that we’re failing as individuals? If you could put just one chart, story, or fact on a billboard in your town, what would it be?
For the economists reading this: The data supporting these claims comes from Carter C. Price's extension of the RAND wage divergence study (WR-A516-2, 2025), Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts (WFRBST01134), Census Historical Income Tables (P-60 series), NCES Digest of Education Statistics, BLS Consumer Expenditure Surveys via FRED (CXUTRANSLB0101M), CDC National Vital Statistics Reports, Commonwealth Fund maternal mortality analyses, NAEP Reading Assessment data, and Chetty et al.'s work on intergenerational mobility (Science, 2017). The productivity-compensation gap documented by EPI, the PCE deflator biases analyzed by the Boskin Commission, and the hedonic adjustment critiques from Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi all support the core thesis: our measurement systems systematically obscure declining affordability and eroding living standards for the bottom 90% of Americans.