Please Shout Fire. This Theater Is Burning
The United States is being destroyed from within, and mainstream journalism isn't making that clear. When I was a kid, there was a popular phrase--"what if they had a war and no one came?" What if we were in a war and no one noticed? Obviously all the people under direct attack have noticed, along with all the scientists and federal employees who've been fired, the foreign students afraid to come back, the medical professionals who understand what's happening to public health, the economists who see the wrecking ball swinging, the university administrators whose institutions are under attack. I think most of us feel it and see it and know it. But too many of the powerful voices in this country are downplaying the crisis we're in, and that tamps down the reactions that could save us.
All the pieces are being reported on, one way or another, but it's as if someone was just run over by – well let's just say a giant armored vehicle driven by faceless goons in camouflage dress-up and body armor, since there's a lot of goons and vehicles like that out there – but the journalists reported it all in close-up, so we got a report one day that a spleen burst and another that lots of ribs were shattered. It's when you add up all the individual injuries that you see the victim is in critical condition. And when you look around that you see the armored vehicle is revving up for another pass. And another.
If you treat each injury individually, each becomes a distressing and maybe perplexing thing that's happened but you can gloss over motives and consequences. It's when you assemble the whole picture that you have to raise the question if the intention is to destroy this country and whether this country is in fact being destroyed. We know that Steve Bannon, who at various points has had a lot of influence over Trump, wanted or wants "to destroy the administrative state," that an earlier influential far-right ideologue, Grover Norquist, said of the federal government that he wanted "to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub," and that some tech oligarchs want to dismantle nation states and replace with with feudalist-totalitarian "network states." Is that what's going on?
We saw Elon Musk, who while apparently high as a kite onstage waved a chainsaw around to signify what he was doing at DOGE, actually destroy a considerable portion of the federal government, by taking over offices and departments, firing or sidelining their employees and messing with their data. From the Internal Revenue Service to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the foreign service, staff has been slashed, missions undermined, functionality sabotaged. What are the consequences? Is this like sawing halfway through the support beams of a building? How far can you saw before it collapses, and does it maybe just take a high wind to come along?
The mainstream media are overall failing to raise the alarm, failing to connect the dots, failing to show how all the injuries, in the metaphor above, add up to profound danger to the nation's people, its institutions, and its environment. And maybe global stability, economically, ecologically, and politically. I get that under Trump the next outrage eclipses the last, one after another after another – I mean who remembers that we bombed Iran? That was more than two weeks ago. But some of them are ongoing and the impact is building. There are individual news stories and editorials, but they're dispersed and diluted by the overall tone of the media in this moment of crisis.
Two things under attack are the rule of law and the separation of powers, but the impact is largely downplayed. This year we've all heard a lot about the three co-equal branches of government. But Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who, after the Big Brutal Bill (BBB) passed, literally handed his gavel to Trump in a horrifying gesture of surrender, is clearly and openly taking orders from him. Johnson is not interested in defending Congress's powers, and so important powers Congress has, namely the power of the purse, the power to control the allocation and flow of federal funds, have been surrendered.
This was obvious by January 27th, when Trump froze money Congress had already allocated – which was an early sign of a coup, and which the mainstream media largely reported on as a sort of boring reallocation of some boring funds, which is part of what prompted me to start this newsletter). Democratic Congressman Seth Magaziner noted the very real impact: "They are back-tracking because we spoke up. Good. But make no mistake: their OMB memo ordered a freeze of *all* grants. The Medicaid and SNAP portals went dark. Head Start providers couldn't draw funds." They did back down on that one, but they've engaged in a lot of lawless overreach since.
Take the tariffs. The Constitution declares "The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises" and "to regulate Commerce with foreign Nations." Trump has declared a bogus emergency – there is no emergency whatsoever that would justify such a declaration; Trump inherited Biden's robust and stable economy – as a pretext under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977.
The National Law Review unpacks this authority: "There are many different statutes under which the president can impose tariffs. The following statutes are the most cited sources of authority for a president authority to impose across-the-board tariffs on all imports coming into the U.S. IEEPA empowers the president to address any 'unusual and extraordinary' external threats to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the U.S." The Review noted in its December assessment: "To date, no president has imposed tariffs invoking the authority of IEEPA." That has changed.
Congress could take its powers back if it didn't have a submissive Republican majority in both houses (as CNN noted here). “This is an enormous usurpation of legislative power by the executive and an abuse of emergency powers,” George Mason law professor Ilya Somin told Politico this spring.
Despite this, the tariffs are now routinely treated as his prerogative, rather than an illicit power grab (that we should be hounding Congress to fight or blaming for not fighting). The stories are largely about how and when he'll impose them, not whether he should be able to (the fact that he doesn't understand how they work is pretty wild too). For months, Trump tariffs have been announced, withdrawn, expanded, contracted, delayed, used as threats and punishments (including against Brazil for prosecuting former president Jair Bolsonaro for his coup attempt). This obviously damages the global economy, the domestic economy, the jobs and incomes of countless individuals, and the US's relationship to the rest of the world.
The third hitherto co-equal branch of government is the judiciary, and while judges across the country have been heroic in defending the rule of law and our rights and rendering verdicts that overturn and halt – or should – actions from the Trumpists, there are two huge problems looming ever larger. One is that while most of the judiciary is upholding the rule of law, the rogue six in the Supreme Court are bending and twisting laws and precedents to hand unchecked power to the president.
Another is that the Trumpists are increasingly disregarding the law. The New York Times recently Erez Reuveni, a former Justice Department whistleblower (he was fired in April), declaring, “The Department of Justice is thumbing its nose at the courts, and putting Justice Department attorneys in an impossible position where they have to choose between loyalty to the agenda of the president and their duty to the court.” That's more alarming than almost any of the stories makes it sound.
You break down all the things happening in Los Angeles into specific coverage of specific incidents, and you can avoid writing a story saying that a region of this country has been overrun by masked, unidentified, heavily armored and armed thugs acting like a hostile invading army as they terrorize anyone who is or resembles a Latino immigrant, including children, seniors, people at work, people at home, people in their cars, people in the park, people here legally, people born here. ICE in L.A. has backup from members of the military and national guard, raising the question – or not raising the question nearly enough in public discourse – if a longstanding prohibition against using the military domestically is being violated.
The Los Angeles Times reports, "In a searing ruling against the Trump administration, a federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked federal agents from using racial profiling to carry out indiscriminate immigration arrests that advocates say have terrorized Angelenos, forced people into hiding and damaged the local economy." The report goes on to say, "If adhered to, the ruling would stop immigration agents from roving around Home Depots and car washes, stopping brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking day laborers and others to arrest on immigration charges, as they have been for the past month." If adhered to. Shouldn't it be terrifying that we can no longer trust the federal government to obey the law? But this criminality been normalized, treated blandly, glossed over. ICE director Tom Homan made it clear he intends his secret police to keep breaking the law.
ICE is given a shocking amount of money in the BBB, and the apparent plan is to have an unaccountable, lawless gangster army rove the streets of this country. I have not seen mainstream media stories on what this could look like, but I know authoritarianism comes when the authoritarian sweeps aside all limits on his power, all forms of accountability. We're getting closer. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, "ICE memo outlines plan to deport migrants to countries where they are not citizens. The dramatic shift in policy could result in thousands of people being sent to places where they lack family ties or even a common language. People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any 'diplomatic assurances' that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance — and in “exigent” circumstances, just six." The story also notes they'll be sent "even if officials have not provided any assurances that the new arrivals will be safe from persecution or torture."
It's solid reporting, and it does quote opponents to the policy, but this account of terrifyingly sadistic and unprecedented human rights abuses is delivered blandly. This story needs to be compounded with all the other ways immigrants are under attack, all the other cruelties and violations and unprecedented acts. That and the threats to deport citizens or strip them of their citizenship and the attacks on birthright citizenship underway add up to a major attack on on the very idea of rights that was part of the eighteenth-century revolt against the form of authoritarianism known as monarchy and on the Bill of Rights.
In another Washington Post story, the subhead reads, "Democrats said the facility, dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz' by Republicans, was sanitized for their visit but that they still had concerns." It's been sanitized for our reading; nothing in it conveys the shock and outrage that Florida Congressman Maxwell Frost does when he speaks out on a clip I found on Twitter/X: “Thirty-two bodies crammed per cage, six cages per tent. People screaming ‘Help me, I’m a U.S. citizen.’ Drinking water pumped from the same toilet they’re forced to use. It’s filth, it’s cruelty, it’s America’s name on the door.”
There are two topics in this essay, the destruction wrought by the Trump Administration and the ways the press has played it down. We've seen the mainstream media again and again, in good ways and corrosive ones, dogpile on a story they want the public to jump on. Some of it is in the tone they take, some of it is in the amount of coverage they give, and the placement of the stories. Some of it is reaching from facts to implications. They can blow up a story, hammer it home, hound politicians about it, make it a scandal, make it something everyone is talking about and officials have to answer for. They've done it over and over, most recently with the news that Biden was old, but they're not doing it now.
They're, for example, going light on the dismantling of major parts of our national security. Where's the follow-up to this Reuters piece from earlier this year? "US suspends some efforts to counter Russian sabotage as Trump moves closer to Putin." Or this AP story? "Dismantling of federal efforts to monitor election interference creates opening for foreign meddling." Take this: NBC reported a few months ago, "17 family members of cartel leaders crossed into the U.S. last week as part of a deal between a son of the former head of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Trump administration." How did this gift to the notorious El Chapo's son not blow up, or rather how did the news industry tamp it down?
They're downplaying Trump's massive corruption of his office as he rakes in huge sums through cryptocurrency scams and open bribes in exchange for access. Rolling Stone reports, "crypto now accounts for a majority of Trump’s personal fortune, and his administration has made every effort to deregulate the digital asset economy. The situation has created obvious opportunities for individuals from within the U.S. and abroad to try to get close to the president by backing the Trumps’ digital asset ventures."
Rolling Stone, Wired, The New Republic, and Mother Jones are among the magazines doing really good reporting on the crisis, not least because they lack the fear of calling things by their true names that afflicts legacy media. A lot of independent online journalists, historians, and critics – including Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American, Marisa Kabas's The Handbasket, Anand Giridharadas's The Ink – are also doing really great news-gathering, commentary, and connecting of dots.
But their impact is comparatively limited, and the sedatives and distractions and dilutions delivered by big newspapers and networks are playing as big or bigger a role in the inadequate response to this crisis as are the outright propaganda and lies of rightwing media. I know that good journalists are eager to report the stories at legacy media corporations, but they don't add up into a clear picture of where we are and where we're heading.
This country is a political system, a government, a system of laws that are being broken and corrupted and degraded daily. It's an economy that's maybe heading toward a crash. It is also its people, and more and more of us are enduring one or another or several varieties of direct harm or facing the looming threat of it. This country is also its land and nature, and they too are under attack, from the national parks and forests to environmental regulations and climate programs.
In Texas people drowned in the recent floods because local officials didn't give the alarm soon enough, strongly enough. I fear that we are in the same situation on a national scale, though it's a flood seeking to overwhelm our laws and rights and functioning systems and principles in this case. I want a louder warning. I'm trying to give one myself.
p.s. There are a bunch of screenshots of things people said and cited on social media here. While getting your information from social media is often derided, it's as good or bad as your sources. I get some of mine from the experts, professionals, politicians, journalists, lawyers, scientists, and historians there, and I often find that they speak more boldly and directly than the news stories (and they often lead me to the scientific studies, legal documents, and news stories that round out my understanding). A comment from my friend Brian made me realize that when I browse what these people are saying and sharing on social media, the crisis seems clear and urgent; it's when I go to mainstream news media that it seems somehow muffled and played down.
