By far the most widely read piece I’ve written in my time at The New Republic is this one, which I wrote right after the 2024 election and headlined “Why Does No One Understand the Real Reason Trump Won?” My answer to that question was the media—specifically, that an avowedly right-wing media, which existed not to report the news but to elect Republicans and turn liberalism into a grotesque and indefensible caricature of itself, had grown and grown since the 1990s, finally by 2024 reaching the point where it was more powerful and more agenda-setting than the mainstream media.

I wrote: “Today, the right-wing media sets the news agenda in this country. Not The New York Times. Not The Washington Post (which bent over backwards to exert no influence when Jeff Bezos pulled the paper’s Harris endorsement). Not CBS, NBC, and ABC.… Even the mighty New York Times follows in its wake, aping the tone they set disturbingly often.”

Here we sit, 15 months later, and 13 months into Donald Trump’s second presidency, and what’s changed? What’s changed, predictably, is that the landscape is even bleaker. CBS News, now run by Bari Weiss, has become part of that agenda-setting right-wing media—which includes Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, and more. And so has The Washington Post, whose rightward turn on its editorial page started becoming apparent late last year.

And this week, Bezos moved to assert his personal control not just over the opinion pages. Now he’s decided to start dismantling the news side, with the 300 layoffs he ordered Wednesday. As you’ve no doubt read by now, the Post has suffered admittedly massive losses lately—$100 million in 2024. But as you’ve also surely read, Bezos could cover those losses if he wanted to with what he makes in a few days. If he wrote a check tomorrow to cover those losses, his net worth would drop, as Truthout’s Sharon Zhang observed, from the current Forbes-estimated $248.7 billion—all the way down to a worrying $248.6 billion.

So why did he decide not to write that check? I don’t know the man, and of course on some level, rich men hate writing such checks. But if he actually believed in the value of journalism’s role in sustaining democracy, as he appeared to for the first few years after he bought the paper in 2013, he’d have written it happily.

So the question arises: What are we to conclude from his refusal to do so? There’s only one conclusion. He doesn’t care about democracy. He sees no vital role for a vigorous free press in sustaining it. And he wants The Washington Post not only to be a right-leaning libertarian newspaper, which, as many have observed, is his right. He wants it to be a lousy newspaper. A weak simulacrum of what it was once and should be. A newspaper that cannot play its time-honored role as a check on abuses of power.

I note here, as others have, that the Post still has 500 journalists, which is a lot, and that the layoffs largely didn’t touch the national reporting teams. That’s all good, I guess. But just wait. The guillotine will start finding those necks eventually. Why? Because these layoffs won’t staunch losses over the long haul. Indeed, they may make them worse. More subscribers who decided to give the paper one more chance after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement will jump ship (in my anecdotal experience, that’s happening to a considerable degree already). Losses will continue. And one day, the Post’s publisher—this horror-show hack named Will Lewis, this meretricious mountebank who was too cowardly to join the staff call announcing the layoffs but who was spotted at a glam Super Bowl–related event in San Francisco the very next day—will announce that more belt-tightening is required.

And I submit to you that Bezos at best doesn’t care and, at worst, actually wants this on some level. Once upon a dear old time, he seemed to want a real newspaper. But after he threw in his lot with Trump (or Trumps, plural, given his financing of this embarrassing piece of Melania agitprop), that changed. It’s axiomatic: It is impossible to believe simultaneously in a vigorous press and in the success of Donald Trump. The latter, which is based on the smashing of democratic laws and customs, cannot succeed if the former exists. And, on an emotional and psychic and most certainly pecuniary level, Bezos has made his choice.

Rich liberals, I beg of you: Do something. Step in to save The Washington Post. Maybe there’s not a single one of you who has the money to swallow $100 million in annual losses. But maybe five or six of you together do. And by the way: If you do it right, and you hire the right editors and rehire some of the old columnists and do some intelligent modernizing around video and podcasts and are willing to be an unapologetically liberal newspaper, you’ll find an audience again.

You’ll be doing a lot more than saving some jobs. “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost,” Thomas Jefferson wrote a friend in 1786. A news outlet isn’t a shoe store. It’s a guardrail against tyranny. It shouldn’t surprise us that a man worth a quarter-trillion dollars, whose wealth has increased tenfold in the last decade, doesn’t care about this. Democracy, tyranny … makes no difference to him. In fact, to the extent that democracy makes room for his employees to try to join unions and so forth, democracy is an inconvenience. So is a free press.

So take it off his hands. Make Bezos the proverbial offer he can’t refuse. He may actually refuse to sell to a liberal consortium—his preference for tyranny may now be that stark. But it can’t hurt to try. Your accountants might grouse, but there is no question that history will reward you.

It was already a pretty weird week, what with Tulsi Gabbard—the official in charge of gathering foreign intelligence—showing up at a Georgia election office for an FBI raid. But then, on Thursday, the president of the United States filed a lawsuit that is an obvious shakedown of the government he runs. Donald Trump, his two older sons, and their business are suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion for allowing a government contractor to gain access to their tax filings (the contractor later leaked the files to the press). It reads like a transparent attempt to steal a few billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury while he can get away with it.

It’s an interesting twist of fate that the Gabbard raid and this lawsuit both dropped in the same week, because they actually go together quite well in the Venn diagram of Trumpian iniquity. Both developments prove a core point about our system that everybody had better learn and be prepared to act on after Trump leaves office (assuming that happy day comes): namely, that Trump has shown that a conscienceless and corrupt person can pollute the system in endless ways because previous generations never anticipated that someone this comprehensively conscienceless and corrupt could win high office. There simply aren’t laws that prohibit much of what he does because it never occurred to anyone that a holder of high public trust would ever even try such stuff.

Let’s look first at this IRS suit, beginning with a little historical background. First of all, as The New York Times reported when it got the leaked documents, Trump paid no federal taxes in 10 of 15 years from 2004 to 2019. We don’t know that that was a crime; maybe it was just fancy accountants. But one way or the other, it sure isn’t right.

But OK, they got leaked. That’s against the law. Of course, one could argue that the only reason they had to be leaked was that Trump refused to release his tax returns publicly, making him the first presidential candidate since Richard Nixon not to do so. Had he complied with that honorable custom—one that requires that people adhere not to a law but to a democratic norm of behavior—there would have been no leak.

But fine. They were leaked. That’s illegal. And guess what? The guy who did it is in prison! He started serving a five-year sentence in May 2024. We can debate whether, in breaking that law, Charles Littlejohn in fact performed a public service (historical fact of note: Nixon’s returns also were leaked, and for that crime, no one was ever indicted). But Littlejohn broke a law, and he was convicted. The system, on paper, worked.

For normal human beings, that would have been enough. Justice was served. But not for the Trumps. The slightest whiff of an opportunity to scam someone or someones—in this case, the taxpayers he was elected to serve—gets them salivating like hyenas over a springbok carcass. So now we have the unprecedented and frankly insane circumstance of the sitting president of the United States suing the government of the United States, over which he himself presides, trying to use his office to line his pockets. They’ll pick that carcass to the bone if they can.

Now you might ask: Shouldn’t there be some kind of law preventing the president of the United States from suing the federal government, at least while he’s in office? I’m not a lawyer, so maybe there is some such law from 1856 or whatever, and someone will discover it. But assuming there’s not, I can tell you why there’s not: It never occurred to people that a president could be so petty and venal as to do something like this!

Now let us turn to Gabbard. She has been sidelined for some time, ever since she made the error, fatal in Trumpworld, of saying something true to the factual record—that U.S. intelligence services saw no evidence that Iran was building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t care what she said,” Trump said at the time, “I think they were very close to having one.” More recently, she was frozen out of the action on Venezuela.

So, needing a way to get back in Dear Leader’s good graces, she boned up on a topic that she knew would demonstrate her value: the “fraudulent” 2020 election. How can she possibly claim jurisdiction over this obviously domestic matter, many have been asking since this week’s raid? Well, she can’t, on real Earth. But on Trump Earth, you might recall that back in 2020, there were some wild conspiracy theories that involved foreign governments and intelligence agencies.

Remember “Italygate”? I thought you might not. It never really gained traction among us flat-earthers. But it was a QAnon favorite for a while there, and it held that an Italian aerospace company and an Italian Army general worked with the American Embassy in Rome to use Italian satellites to remotely switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Yes, that is what they believed.

Then there’s the China angle, which Trump was touting on social media just the other day. In case the Italygate story isn’t ominous enough for you, Trump tossed China into the mix. “China reportedly coordinated the whole operation,” he posted. “The CIA oversaw it, the FBI covered it up, all to install Biden as a puppet.” This is the stuff of mad dogs and March hares, to put it mildly. But if you’re Tulsi Gabbard, it’s ample reason to claim that a conspiracy this immense not only allows for the nation’s chief intelligence officer to be involved, it veritably demands it!

So now we are about to launch—at the expense of the same taxpayers whose pockets la famiglia Trumpa is trying to pick in the IRS suit—into an investigation into “crimes” that are more than five years old (and thus likely beyond the statute of limitations) and were never committed anyway. But Trump wants people to go to jail, and Gabbard and Pam Bondi—who meanwhile is 41 days late delivering the Epstein files and thus in clear violation of federal law—will move heaven and earth to make sure someone does. (Note: Bondi released more than 3 million Epstein-related documents today, just a couple hours after I wrote this.)

Again, we might ask: Why is there no law preventing a president from using his government to pursue such obviously baseless revenge lawsuits? Because no one imagined a president would behave so sleazily. Or they thought that, if one did, surely Congress, regardless of party loyalty, would step up and assert its constitutional authority and make an unequivocal statement about what is right and wrong in a democratic society. Yeah. Right.

So this is where we stand, as we begin this second year of the second Trump presidency. Three more years of this. It’s getting harder and harder to see how we survive it, but if we do, Congress is going to have to pass a bunch of laws that were never thought necessary until we elected a gangster as president.

Most of the obvious reactions to Jack Smith’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday have already been delivered, and I agree with them. It’s hard to imagine what on earth Chairman Jim Jordan—and hearing his whiny, tinny, angry, lying voice awoke involuntary physiological reactions I’d spent years trying to vanquish—and the Republicans thought they were accomplishing. To any non-Kool-Aid-drinking American, they looked ridiculous. Smith was calm. The Republicans were jumping out of their skins competing to get their sound bite featured on Fox News. All they managed to do was to remind people that Donald Trump is a criminal and that in a sane world, the Senate would have convicted him on the second impeachment (the January 6 one) and barred him from holding federal office for life.

I want to focus on one matter I’d forgotten all about. I’m thinking maybe you had too. That’s the question of this second volume of Smith’s report on Trump’s crimes, which focuses not on January 6 but on Trump’s theft of those classified documents he took down to Mar-a-Lago. It was written by Smith and his team back when the investigation was active. It is generally presumed to contain details about the matter that are heretofore unknown. Its release to the public was blocked by—speaking of memories I’d successfully repressed—Florida Judge Aileen Cannon.

I trust you remember her track record here. She tossed the classified documents case in July 2024, ruling that Smith had been improperly appointed to his position as special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland. From the moment the case landed on her docket, Cannon, who was appointed by Trump, barely concealed her obvious partisanship in her actions, which brought her some jaw-dropping reprimands from the Eleventh Circuit Court, which employs her. She was a judicial joke.

But she didn’t stop during the campaign. No! Once Trump was safely back in the White House, she ordered, on the second day of Trump’s second presidency, that the Department of Justice could not release the second volume of the Smith report (the first part had been released by Garland’s Justice Department the week before, in the waning days of Joe Biden’s presidency).

A couple of nonprofit legal outfits sued. Cannon dragged her feet. She spent 2025 ignoring petitions from the two nonprofits that were seeking to get the volume released. Finally, last November, a three-judge panel of the Eleventh Circuit—which, by the way, included one Trump appointee—chastised Cannon’s delays and gave her 60 days to do something.

The 60 days came and went at the beginning of this month, and—shocker—nothing happened. Then, as fate would have it, just this Monday, three days before Smith’s public testimony, the matter of the second volume vaulted back into the news as a lawyer for Trump filed a motion asking Cannon to permanently block the Justice Department, “as well as its current, former, and future officers, agents, officials, and employees” (note well: future officers!), from making the second volume public.

Two points here. First, we have the rather odd spectacle of Trump, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney put it on Bluesky, “litigating in his personal capacity against the Justice Department he runs.” But of course the key word in the motion, as noted above, is “future.” If Cannon grants this motion and a Democrat wins the White House in 2028, even that future attorney general won’t be allowed to release Volume II.

Second—about Trump’s lawyer. We’ve seen the basket of deplorables Trump has hired to defend either him or his government in court: Alina Habba, illegally installed as a federal prosecutor in New Jersey, who resigned after a court disqualified her; Todd Blanche, still the number two at Justice, famous for his softball interview with Ghislaine Maxwell and for defending moving her to a cushier prison; Emil Bove,........

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