The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state.
At some point, the evidence becomes overwhelming -- and we have reached that point. The frog in the metaphorical pot of water has boiled to death.
Armed soldiers patrol the streets of the nation’s capital, with more cities apparently to come. Immigrants who have done nobody any harm are abducted and disappeared by masked agents. The state is seizing stakes of national companies. Election integrity is under attack. Political opponents are targeted with criminal probes. Federal judges’ orders are ignored. Educational institutions are extorted into obedience. Key functions of the government are politicized and degraded. Expertise and science are devalued. Trump speaks of serving an unconstitutional third term. Media organizations are paying tribute to the ruler.
Most significantly, perhaps, there are no guardrails anymore. No one inside the executive branch will tell Trump no. No one in in the ruling party in Congress will tell him no. The right-wing majority of the Supreme Court won’t tell him no.
And our dominant media institutions won’t call him out.
Rather, they obscure reality under a haze of incremental stories, each one presented as if what is going on is fairly normal. As if it’s just politics.
Every outrage is just one more thing Trump has done, rather than the ever-mounting evidence of a corrupt dictatorship.
The coverage is a play-by-play as the burners click upward, rather than a check to see if the frog is still alive, which it is not.
The closest the New York Times newsroom will come to telling readers the truth, for instance, is to say that Trump is “promoting an aura of authoritarian nationalism,” or that certain actions “increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries” behave.
The Washington Post will quote critics accusing Trump of “authoritarian overreach,” and protesters calling him “fascist,” but leaves even the most obvious conclusions to the readers to make themselves.
The Associated Press sometimes levels with its audience. It has published some exemplary articles recently, including “Trump moves to use the levers of presidential power to help his party in the 2026 midterms” and “Trump ran on a promise of revenge. He’s making good on it.” But the day-to-day coverage gives no indication of the breakdown of democracy.
Outside these newsrooms, the cries of “authoritarian” and “fascist” have been numerous, some dating back to 2016. But now the chorus of voices is growing louder and more mainstream.
Historian Garrett Graff called it this morning. He wrote in his “Doomsday Scenario” newsletter:
The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.….
Everything else from here on out is just a matter of degree and wondering how bad it will get and how far it will go? Do we end up “merely” like Hungary or do we go all the way toward an “American Reich”? So far, after years of studying World War II, I fear that America’s trajectory feels more like Berlin circa 1933 than it does Budapest circa 2015.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called it on August 4:
We have crossed a line. We are in a place we did not want to be, but we are there. The thing we were all warning about for the last few years is not coming. It is here. We are in it…
We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country. And it sounds melodramatic to say it, I know, but just go with that for a minute, right? Think -- think in melodramatic terms. Think in cinematic terms. Imagine the cartoon level caricature of what you think a dictatorship looks like.
I mean, it’s secret police, right? A massive anonymous unbadged, literally masked, totally unaccountable internal police force ….
You would expect, right, that you’d have a scapegoated minority group blamed for all things, in our case, immigrants, right?....
In a cartoon caricature of an authoritarian country, displays of military might are not just for the country’s external enemies. They’re for the country’s own people, right? Because in an authoritarian country, you turn military force inward toward the people of that country.
She had much more to say. It’s worth watching.
MSNBC’s Ali Velshi called it on Sunday, opening his show with a powerful monologue about the collapse of democracy:
Each new abuse is justified as temporary, necessary, even an emergency. Until one day it’s not temporary at all. Until one day the justifications stop altogether because once power is absolute it no longer feels the need to explain itself. At best, each assault may seem like an outlier until the day you wake up and realize the system itself has become unrecognizable. Well that’s where we are -- right now. It’s not where we’re headed. It’s where we are
The tragedy of what’s unfolding and the danger of what’s ahead will be compounded if American citizens an masse – all of us – do not recognize this moment for what it is.
Here’s a transcript.
The question is when -- if ever – our newsroom leaders will reach their tipping point.
For now, they will say that it’s not their job to be the opposition – that’s the job of the opposing party. And therefore, if leading Democrats aren’t calling it authoritarianism, then they certainly won’t.
But that excuse is becoming moot. Top Democrats are in fact becoming increasingly blunt – including the Democratic National Committee chair this morning, at the DNC’s summer meeting in Minneapolis. “This is not politics as usual. This is authoritarianism. It’s fascism dressed in a red tie,” Ken Martin said. He also called Trump the “dictator-in-chief.”
It is past time for our most consequential news organizations to recognize that Trump is leading an authoritarian regime.
I think that would lead to a different kind of journalism, one that prominently and repeatedly explains what constitutes an authoritarian state, and which of those factors are present here.
This new journalism would contextualize incremental events as actions of an increasingly authoritarian state. It would more closely monitor the integrity of the election process. It would more actively cover the resistance to the authoritarian state. It would explore how other countries have rejected authoritarianism in the past.
On Sunday, Perry Bacon, the former Washington Post opinion columnist who is now a staff writer at the New Republic, fantasized about a media that connects the dots:
CNN and MSNBC with a constant “The Trump Dictatorship” chyron on-screen. How Democracies Die authors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt writing weekly columns in The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal. Reporters at major news outlets specifically assigned to cover authoritarianism, occasionally traveling abroad to study other autocrats and compare their moves to Trump’s.
This new journalism would have a different tone. It would shift from “it’s just politics as usual” to “we are in state of emergency.”
And in so doing, it would serve a public that deserves better than it’s getting, both from its government and from its media.
The top newsrooms aren't in denial. They know perfectly well what is happening. They're under orders from their wealthy owners to cover up the nastiness and tell us everything is wonderful. When one of the leading newspapers abandons the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness," the darkness has arrived.
I already see a new media emerging on places like Substack and YouTube. A lot of people started doing commentary, and in this they were not so different from what happens pretty regularly on MSNBC. But now some of these outlets are actually starting to break news.
Right now these these channels are obviously very diffuse and don't have anything like the money that the Washington Post and the New York Times have. But I expect that they will increasingly displace traditional media, especially if traditional media can't bring themselves to report what is plainly obvious to everyone. You cannot be the "paper of record" If you refuse to report the biggest story of the century.