Trumped
The mainstream press is about to suffer its most definitive discrediting yet.
City Journal
For months, the media have issued apocalyptic warnings about a second Donald Trump presidency. Arcane diagrams of nefarious political connections and multipage spreads of damning quotes have laid out how Trump will tear down democratic norms. He will unleash the National Guard on Democratic voters. He will wreak vengeance on his enemies. He will usher in fascism. He will have Liz Cheney shot. He will be a dictator on Day One. He will use the military to round up millions of migrants. He will seek a national abortion ban. He will outlaw in vitro fertilization. He will suppress free speech.
And now that Trump has been elected again, in a historic political comeback, the press continues to lay down a marker against which to measure its own ideological blinders. On Wednesday, November 6, the New York Times issued the same parade of horribles that it has been hawking since Trump declared his 2024 candidacy: Trump will “use military force against his political opponents . . . crush the independence of the Department of Justice, use government to push public health conspiracies and abandon America’s allies abroad.” He will “turn the government into a tool of his own grievances, a way to punish his critics and richly reward his supporters” and rule as a “dictator”—if only on Day One.
According to a Times headline, America has just hired a “strongman.” Its news reporting explains: “America stands on the precipice of an authoritarian style of governance never before seen in its 248-year history.”
Historian Ruth Ben-Chait tells the paper that Trump has prepared for authoritarian government by teaching the public to “see American democracy as a failed experiment.” His victory means the triumph of a style of government that uses “violence as a means of solving political problems.”
A national political correspondent for the Washington Post, Ashley Parker, said on MSNBC that Trump will “take revenge on his enemies” this time around.
None of these things will happen. Trump will not usher in authoritarian government or fascism. He will not shred the rule of law. His administration will not ask Internet platforms to censor information and opinion that opposes administration policies, as did the Biden administration. The press predictions are all on the record and can be consulted for accuracy from this moment onward.
Of course, the press will spin Trump’s use of executive power, say, to pare back the unelected federal bureaucracy as an assault on democratic norms. It will claim that, as the Times put it on November 6, Trump is fostering “culture wars.” (This standard left-wing trope holding that it is the Right that wages a culture war is the most absurd allegation in the mainstream media’s portfolio of deranged distortions of reality. Here is how you wage a culture war: You ban teachers from telling parents that their child has “changed” his gender. You require everyone around that child to adhere to the child’s new counterfactual “pronouns.” You pass regulations making opposition to male athletes competing against female athletes in female sports a civil rights offense. You assign graphic novels depicting sex, in this case, gay sex, to school children. You make celebrations of sexual identity, in this case, “queer” and every other type of “non-heteronormative” sexual identity, a routine part of the school curriculum and calendar. You make race and sex, that is, non-white race and non-male sex, a qualification for scientific hiring and research grants. Opposing those radical changes is not waging a war; it is belatedly trying to play defense.)
The press will continue to flog the Trump-as-dictator theme because it is secure in its ideological bubble. Before the election, the New York Times newsroom had brought in popcorn and cotton candy machines, fake sparklers, and goodie bags in anticipation of the coronation of “Madame President.” On November 6, the popcorn machine stood unceremoniously in a corner behind yellow police tape and an orange rubber traffic cone. Undaunted, executive editor Joseph Kahn and managing editors Marc Lacey and Carolyn Ryan sent a memo to their colleagues on November 6 praising the paper’s election coverage. They singled out for particular commendation a report that outlined Trump’s agenda: “to settle scores and enact a disruptive program on immigration, the economy, the federal bureaucracy and the judicial system.” Many Americans feel “unsettled and afraid,” said the editors. And apparently for good reason: “We are likely entering a period of change and uncertainty beyond anything America has experienced in our lifetimes.” Actually, what initiated a period of disruption beyond anything current generations have seen is enabling millions of Third World illegal aliens to enter the country, enforcing a mass delusion regarding the malleability of biological sex, ending meritocracy in favor of race and gender quotas, and setting up a collapse of the electrical grid through fantastical requirements regarding “green” energy.
The media grandiosity and martyr complex that birthed the Washington Post’s Democracy Dies in Darkness motto has not abated in the face of the media’s electoral defeat. According to Times editors Kahn, Lacey, and Ryan, the “people” need the Times: “They will need us to be unflinching in the face of intimidation.” Something else on the media scorecard to look for: the Trump administration “intimidating” the Times. Might Trump tweet nasty things about the Times? Probably. But it does not take much to “be unflinching” in the face of such alleged intimidation.
Kahn, Lacey, and Ryan end their November 6 memo with another channeling of what the “people” want from the Times: its traditional “sober analysis and guidance.” Some “people” who have followed the Times’s unhinged Trump coverage over the last month might chuckle over that description.
Impotent, blinkered, and unrepentant would be a more accurate motto for the press. Expect another four years of fear-mongering as the Trump administration tries to restore the country’s constitutional architecture. Keep that scorecard in hand. Though the media will never admit it, their credibility, already threadbare, will be definitively decimated.
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