Trump Authoritarianism Drags US Democracy Into Darkness
Without independent media we are doomed. Just read the corporate press under Trump to find out why.
The Trump administration has proceeded, and is proceeding, at a furious pace to employ executive power attack and undermine central pillars of American democracy, rendering a system already threadbare and fragile even more weakened.
This past week’s deployment of National Guard troops, and then U.S. Marines, on the streets of Los Angeles, in defiance of California Governor Gavin Newsome and LA Mayor Karen Bass, is but the latest example.
Tomorrow—Saturday, June 14—the administration is planning an enormous military parade on the streets of Washington, D.C., to celebrate “Flag Day,” the U.S. Army, and especially to celebrate Trump and his birthday.
As I argued this week in The Bulwark, the entire spectacle rests on historical fiction, and is designed to celebrate neither the army nor the republic, but Trump himself. It symbolizes an arrogation of authoritarian power that borders on monarchism—which is why activists across the country have billed the day as “No Kings Nationwide Day of Defiance.”
The Washington Post ran a new article Wednesday on Trump’s planned celebration entitled “Trump’s White House opens door to historic military deployment on U.S. soil.” The headline itself immediately gives one pause, because Trump already opened this door earlier this week, not with a parade but with the actual deployment of armed soldiers to quell protests and detain protesters.
But even more concerning is this passage: “’This kind of thing doesn’t happen in democracies, and it’s becoming a routine part of our politics,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, who has long warned that Trump poses a threat to American democracy. (Federal campaign finance records show that a person named Steven Levitsky who works at Harvard has made small campaign donations to Democratic candidates.)”
Two things are remarkable about this passage.
The first is that what Levitsky says is straightforward and incontrovertibly true—and he should know, since he is a renowned expert who has published best-selling books on the topic with co-authors Daniel Ziblatt and Lucan Way, which is presumably why the WaPo reported sought his quote.
The second is the parenthetical insert at the end, which can have only one purpose, and which almost certainly was inserted by editors—to weaken the credibility of the quoted expert, by implying that he is biased, and to bolster the favorability of the newspaper with the White House, by demonstrating that it investigates the tax records of the liberals it quotes and properly reports results if it quotes them.
This is not an isolated instance.
Last week the Post published another article, entitled “The 9-11 presidency: Trump flexes emergency powers in his second term.” Here the reporter quotes Ilya Somin, a prominent libertarian legal scholar: “’What’s notable about Trump is the enormous scale and extent, which is greater than under any modern president,’ said Ilya Somin, who is representing five U.S. businesses who sued the administration . . . “
Read that again.
While in Levitsky’s case the irrelevant and diminishing information is placed in parentheses, in Somin’s case it is included directly in the text, as if it is actually part of the news report.
This sort of thing is a very recent development, and it actually makes Levitsky’s point about the Trumpist assault on liberal democracy. For we have reached a point where the most important legacy newspapers, with WaPo in the lead, are practicing anticipatory compliance, in subtle ways cow-towing to the MAGA agenda by diminishing the credibility of Trump’s critics.
Similar things can be seen in the New York Times, and heard even on NPR. And of course, on cable news channels, especially CNN, such things have been completely normalized.
What we are seeing is FEAR. Fear of an increasingly and unquestionably dictatorial regime. And a kind of cowardice that only serves to further empower the authoritarians.
Without independent media we are doomed. Yes, legacy corporate media are corporate, and they are not really fully independent. But until recently, they were at least independent of the government in power. This is now quickly changing. And it poses enormous challenges for everyone who cares about democracy and seeks to defend it in the face of the MAGA movement’s genuinely authoritarian assault.
It has been said that “democracy dies in darkness.”
The Post these days is surely doing its part to further darken our public life.
