How the New York Times uses weasel words to normalize authoritarianism

It’s an abandonment of the Times’s obligation to responsibly use its bully pulpit in a time of crisis

The evidence, by this point, is overwhelming.

Donald Trump is an authoritarian leader who regularly violates the law and the constitution while accreting personal power in a way that is inimical to democracy.

And yet the New York Times, our national news source of record, routinely resorts to weasel words, euphemisms and third-party critiques to avoid saying so in its own institutional voice.

Trump’s actions are not dangerously illegal, per Times journalists. Rather they "raise questions" and "stretch bounds". Trump is not an authoritarian, he is a “maximalist.” Blisteringly obvious conclusions about his seizure of dictatorial powers are kept at arm’s length, ascribed to “critics” or sometimes “experts”.

The Times, in its institutional voice, writes that Trump is “pushing boundaries” but never declares that he has pushed well past them -- which of course he has, time and time again.

Yes, on the one hand, the Times is doing a decent enough job of chronicling the day-to-day of the Trump regime. If you read those articles – and particularly the news analyses – you get a pretty good sense of what he’s doing.

But by using timid language to characterize the significance of those actions, the Times effectively downplays the country’s steep decline into authoritarianism.

Even when the Times, in its sweeping news analyses, collects and presents incredibly damning evidence that demonstrates Trump’s actions to be patently illegal and dictatorial, it shies away from reaching the obvious conclusion in its own words.

This undermines its own reporting. It makes inarguable conclusions seem arguable. By not sounding the alarm, the Times normalizes the profoundly abnormal.

And given the Times’s enormous influence on the rest of the media, this is a terrible disservice not just to its own readers but to the country and the world. It’s an abandonment of the Times’s obligation to responsibly use its bully pulpit in a time of crisis.

Look Closely

Let’s consider Thursday’s article by Charlie Savage, headlined “Trump Claims the Power to Summarily Kill Suspected Drug Smugglers.”

First of all, yes, kudos to the Times for a straightforward headline and for playing the story prominently, both online and in Friday's paper. The story, which broke on Wednesday, had gotten insufficient media attention until then.

But the impact of the article’s headline was undone by a shockingly weak subhead: “The move to treat criminals as if they were wartime combatants escalated an administration pattern of using military force for law enforcement tasks at home and abroad.”

What Trump did – order the execution of suspected drug-runners off the coast of Venezuela – was an egregious abuse of power, a violation of domestic and international law, and a war crime. The suspects, even if they were actually running drugs, posed no imminent threat to the country and could easily have been interdicted.

But Savage’s first paragraph only indicates that there was “no clear legal precedent or basis” for the act – and attributes even that analysis to “specialists”:

By ordering the U.S. military to summarily kill a group of people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat, President Trump used the military in a way that had no clear legal precedent or basis, according to specialists in the laws of war and executive power.

Savage’s conclusion?

Mr. Trump is claiming the power to shift maritime counterdrug efforts from law enforcement rules to wartime rules.

But that is the most timid conclusion imaginable.

The real conclusion is that Trump has seized the dictatorial power to summarily execute people abroad without any due process or warning.

You get at least some sense of this if you keep reading. The 9^th paragraph is stunning both for its content and for its understatement:

Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.

Some 15 paragraphs in, Savage quotes Jeh Johnson, a former homeland security secretary in the Obama administration, explaining:

“Here the president appears to be invoking his amorphous constitutional authority to kill low-level drug couriers on the high seas, with no due process, arrest or trial,” he said, adding: “Viewed in isolation, labeling drug cartels ‘terrorists’ and invoking the ‘national interests’ to use the U.S. military to summarily kill low-level drug couriers is pretty extreme.”

In the 23^rd paragraph, Savage introduces the possibility that the victims might have been misidentified. He then notes the nation’s longstanding ban on assassinations and unlawful killings.

And finally, in his penultimate paragraphs, he writes:

It is a war crime for troops to deliberately kill civilians — even criminals — who are not directly participating in hostilities.

Whether Mr. Trump is directing service members to commit war crimes, then, turns on whether he has legitimate power to unilaterally redefine drug smugglers as combatants.

In effect, he buried the lead.

Here’s what the top of the story should have said:

Donald Trump’s execution of 11 people aboard what he said was a drug-smuggling boat off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday had no legal basis and therefore appears to have been a clear violation of domestic and international law. His unilateral assessment that the victims were “terrorists” with no due process rights represents yet another move toward dictatorship.

More Examples

Sunday’s article by William Broad headlined “Historians See Autocratic Playbook in Trump’s Attacks on Science” provides a great example of how the Times delegates obvious conclusions to third parties.

Similarly, on August 3, Peter Baker wrote a pretty tough article headlined “Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook.” Trump’s “efforts since reclaiming the White House to make the rest of government adopt his versions of the truth… increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries have sought to control information,” Baker wrote.

But why attribute that conclusion to “scholars” instead of just saying it in the institutional voice? It’s clearly true. Why keep the truth at arm’s length?

And then there are the euphemisms.

An August 26 story by Charlie Savage headlined “Trump Again Escalates Power Grabs in Bid to Fire Fed Member” refers to “stretched bounds” and “pushing limits” instead of breaking bounds and ignoring limits.

Similarly, on August 29, the Times ran a story by Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Maggie Haberman headlined “How the Trump-Kennedy Alliance Is Pushing the Boundaries of Public Health.”

Kennedy is an unhinged conspiracy theorist who is undermining confidence in known cures and firing anyone who opposes him. He is breaking the public health system, not “pushing its boundaries.”

This, I thought to myself as I read that article, is how the Times normalizes the abhorrent.

Also consider the August 28 article by Luke Broadwater, headlined “Trump Targets Agencies Long Seen as Above Politics. Critics See Big Risks.”

“Big risks” is a laughable euphemism for “grave, long-lasting damage” -- and attributing that obvious conclusion to “critics” is cowardice.

Here’s an August 26 article by Chris Cameron about Trump musing about people calling him a dictator. Cameron calls it Trump’s “latest assertion of his maximalist view of presidential power”.

In fact, the word “maximalist” has become the Times’s euphemism of choice for “authoritarian.” The Times’s use of the word dates back to an April article by Charlie Savage, headlined “Trump’s Maximalist Assertion of Presidential Power Tests the Rule of Law.”

As it happens, that was a strong piece and a great opportunity to call Trump out as an authoritarian -- and Savage came pretty close:

[T]he sheer volume and intensity of the power grab President Trump has undertaken in the first 100 days of his second term — an assault on legal constraints untethered to any equivalent catastrophe — is unlike anything the United States has experienced.

He also wrote:

[T]he maximalist cascade in the early days of Mr. Trump’s second term is testing the fundamental structures of American democracy in a way that has never been seen before.

But “maximalist” is ultimately a poor substitute for the word authoritarian. And the “fundamental structures” of democracy aren’t being tested, they have cracked under pressure.

Savage, who as the Times says in his bio “has been writing about presidential power for more than two decades,” is the closest thing the news organization has to a truth-teller when it comes to Trump.

But in the end, his word choice -- or perhaps the word choice of his editors -- minimizes the significance of what he is reporting. It makes it sound like we’re getting close to something alarming, but aren’t quite there yet.

One of the most direct piece Savage wrote actually dates back to February. It was headlined: “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab.”

Here are the top three paragraphs:

In his first term, President Trump seemed to relish ripping through the norms and standards of self-restraint that his predecessors had respected. Three weeks into his second term, hand-wringing about norms seems quaint.

Other presidents have occasionally ignored or claimed a right to bypass particular statutes. But Mr. Trump has opened the throttle on defying legal limits.

“We are well past euphemism about ‘pushing the limits,’ ‘stretching the envelope’ and the like,” said Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University and the author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law. The array of legal constraints Mr. Trump has violated, Mr. Shane added, amounts to “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.”

So yeah, kind of ironic: Savage quotes a guy in February saying that “we are well past euphemisms,” and then goes on to employ them frequently in the ensuing months.

The Exception

The strongest offering from the news side of the Times I’ve seen so far actually came in March, in the “Interpreter” newsletter by Amanda Taub. It was headlined: “‘This Is Worse’: Trump’s Judicial Defiance Veers Beyond the Autocrat Playbook”. It was basically an interview with one of the foremost experts on authoritarianism:

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”

“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”

Quoting Levitsky is good. Listening to him, realizing it’s the truth, and using appropriately blunt language in the Times’s institutional voice would be a lot better.