US President Donald Trump in the White House Rose Garden. Photo by Daniel Torok.

"KaMaLa TriEd tO WaRn YoU!"

No sweetheart. WE tried to warn HER.

A non-political civil service, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs, USAID, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Scholarships, federal funding for scientific and medical research—the Washington Post, the Kennedy Center, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution, Ivy League universities, “big law”—the great institutions of liberal America are falling to Trump like dominoes, one by one. Those with the biggest reputations have all too often capitulated, starting with the Fourth Estate.

Obeying in advance began well before Trump’s inauguration on January 15. Last October Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder and ex-CEO of Amazon, sniffed the way the wind was blowing and intervened to cancel the editorial board’s proposed endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election.

The owner’s interference in the editorial independence of the storied paper whose journalists ended Richard Nixon’s presidency provoked the resignation of Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan and the loss of over 250,000 subscribers. Editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts and columnist Michele Norris, the first Black female host for National Public Radio (NPR), followed Kagan out the door.

The Los Angeles Times also backed out of endorsing any candidate on the orders of billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, which led Editorials Editor Mariel Garza to quit, together with editorial board members Karin Klein and Robert Greene. When Soon-Shiong’s 31-year-old daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, claimed that the family declined to endorse Harris “to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children” in Gaza, her father hastened to deny any such suggestion.

Early in January, the Washington Post refused to publish a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ann Telnaes that depicted Bezos, Soon-Shiong, and tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg (founder and CEO of Meta) and Sam Altman (co-founder and CEO of OpenAI) offering “bags of money to a larger-than-life Trump statue standing on a decorated pedestal with its head just out of view.” Telneis resigned from the Post, where she had worked since 2008, in protest at this blatant act of political censorship.

Zuckerberg and Bezos have had their disagreements with Trump in the past. But along with other billionaires, both were a prominent presence at his inauguration. So was Elon Musk. Well before their current bromance bloomed, Musk had tried to ingratiate himself with Trump by reinstating his account on X (formerly Twitter). His Latin comment “Vox populi, vox dei” (the voice of the people is the voice of God) reads ominously in retrospect.

Meta hastened to pay $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump filed after his banning from Facebook following the January 6, 2020 assault on the Capitol, and obligingly replaced independent fact-checkers on Facebook and Instagram with X-style user-generated “community notes.” Independent fact-checkers were “too politically biased,” explained Zuckerberg, and it was “time to get back to our roots around free expression.”

On February 26 Bezos instructed Washington Post editorial staff that from now on only opinions supportive of “personal liberties” and “free markets” would be accepted for the opinion pages of the paper, and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned. Bezos says he asked Shipley whether he wanted to stay on, suggesting “if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’” Ain’t free expression great?

Billionaires have much to gain from cozying up to Trump—like a $4.5 trillion tax cut and a bonfire of environmental and other regulations—and even more to lose if they don’t. For those less willing to kiss the ring, the administration has other means of persuasion.

Speaking at the Conservative Policy Action Conference (CPAC) on February 23, 2024, MAGA cheerleader Kash Patel urged:

A year later, MAGA’s war against the media is raging on all fronts.

Among other “intimidation tactics” (as the New York Times rightly describes them) designed to control the news, the Trump administration has removed Associated Press reporters from the White House press pool; stripped the White House Correspondents’ Association of its historic role in deciding which journalists have access to the president; and attempted to dismantle Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Free Asia, which Trump accuses of a “leftist bias” and failing to project “pro-American” values.

The New York Times may complain about Trump vilifying its star correspondents, but it is not above self-censorship when it matters. Per CNN, on April 5, “1,400 “Hands Off!” mass-action protests were held at state capitols, federal buildings, congressional offices, Social Security’s headquarters, parks and city halls throughout the entire country,” and involved “millions of people.” One of the largest marches stretched for 20 city blocks on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The Times reported it on page 18 of its Sunday print edition.

The DOGE Subcommittee of Congress, headed by Trump’s ally Marjorie Taylor Greene, has threatened the public broadcast networks NPR and PBS, whose CEOs it summoned on March 26 “to explain why the demonstrably biased news coverage they produce for an increasingly narrow and elitist audience should continue to be funded by the broad taxpaying public.”

Trump has meanwhile extorted $15 million from ABC News in an out-of-court settlement of a defamation case over its reporting of the E. Jean Carroll trials, and his campaign is suing the Daily Beast for defamation in “a transparent attempt to intimidate The Beast and silence the independent press.” Other intimidatory litigation is ongoing against CBS News, the Des Moines Register, and the Pulitzer Board.

“Hands Off!” protesters rally against the second administration of President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, April 5, 2025. Photo by G. Edward Johnson/Wikimedia Commons.

“Hands Off!” protesters rally against the second administration of President Donald Trump in Washington, DC, April 5, 2025. Photo by G. Edward Johnson/Wikimedia Commons.

Trump has used executive orders to go after several top law firms who have taken cases and represented clients he doesn’t like. An order against the law firm Jenner & Block, for example, punished it for pro bono representation of transgender people and immigrants. The sanctions imposed on this and other practices include removing their lawyers’ security clearances, barring federal agencies from doing business with them, and excluding them from federal government buildings—including the courts.

An executive memorandum of March 22, aimed at immigration lawyers in particular,

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