President Donald Trump has finally told the truth about something. He’s embraced Project 2025. Anyone who believed his disavowals last year during the campaign is, of course, a fool. And the media, reporting those disavowals, looked foolish. Trump knew, as he has known all his life, that all you have to do is lie about something, and the press, following the rules of objectivity, will report straightforwardly what you said. So he largely got away with it. The Kamala Harris campaign tried to tie Trump to the project, as in this ad; but it didn’t manage to convey the project’s extremism with any force.

And now? The Democrats have another huge opportunity to hang Project 2025 around Trump’s neck. It should be easier now, for two reasons. One, it’s not purely hypothetical anymore. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, a community-driven initiative, the Trump administration has already checked off 48 percent of the project’s goals. Two, Trump and OMB Director Russell Vought’s open promises to shred the federal bureaucracy give Democrats a huge target. The question is, do they have the skill—and the guts—to hit it?

Alas, that question, as usual with the Democrats, should have a clear answer but doesn’t. The obvious strategy is to call all hands on deck and, now that Trump has said what he said, make this shutdown about not only Obamacare subsidies but two other things: about the looming job cuts themselves and about Vought personally because his name and his extremist, un-American goals to remake the United States as a Christian nation should be known to every American.

The first message should be simple: What Trump and Vought are about to do here is the second coming of Elon Musk and DOGE. The DOGE effort was not exactly popular: Last spring, poll after poll, like this one, showed that while the general concept of cutting the size of the federal government had appeal, people really didn’t like the way Musk and his minions were going about it. This time around, Democrats can plausibly say that it’s going to be worse. DOGE staffing cuts came to around 300,000. An estimated 750,000 federal employees are being furloughed due to the shutdown. Vought probably thinks most of them are expendable. It shouldn’t be hard to make these cuts deeply unpopular.

Second, tell Americans who Vought is, what he believes, the things he has said. He’s a Christian nationalist who believes Trump is “God’s gift” to America and wants the U.S. to be “a nation under God.” These are of course completely un-American ideas. Article 6 of the Constitution contains the “no religious test clause,” which applies to holding a public office or trust in the U.S.; but beyond that, the Founders were crystal clear that American citizenship and civil rights were open to all—as Thomas Jefferson once put it, citing John Locke, neither “Pagan nor Mohametan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth [of Virginia] because of his religion.” George Washington said that “religious controversies are always more productive of acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause,” and therefore each should be left to worship (or not) as he or she saw fit. I could go on and on and on.

Making these two arguments requires the Democrats to take two moral and unambiguous stands. The first is in defense of an activist federal government. The second is in defense of the religious pluralism upon which this country was founded.

I’d love to be able to write with confidence that I think they’ll do it. Odds are they won’t. Most of them shy away from moral arguments. They’re afraid—not all of them, but most of them—to go toe to toe with Trump on a topic like religion. There is utterly no reason for this. Most Americans agree with them. Polls will often show that a disturbingly high percentage of Americans want this country to be a Christian nation, but when you look at crosstabs, you see quickly that the number is high because among Republicans it’s around 75 percent. It’s well under 50 percent among independents, which is the number that matters. Still, the Democratic Party has trained itself over the years to stay away from such matters.

They also just don’t speak with one voice and hold together. Right now, the only poll I’ve seen on the shutdown looks very good for them. A Washington Post survey found that respondents blamed Trump and Republicans over Democrats by 47 percent to 30 percent. Interestingly, independents blamed Republicans over Democrats by 50 percent to 22 percent.

You’d think and hope that would gird Democrats’ loins. And maybe it will. But remember: Three Senate Democrats voted for the Republican version of the bill to reopen the government. Four more need to cave for the Republicans to get their bill through. Democratic senators are heading back to their states this weekend, where they’re going to hear from furloughed federal workers about how they need their paychecks.

In a sense this is understandable and defensible. Democrats tend to care about these people’s actual lives, whereas Republicans don’t give a crap about them since they’re just a bunch of deep-state Trump haters anyway. Also, Democrats genuinely don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of federal employees lose their jobs, both on a simple human level and because Democrats believe these people are doing important work.

So that’s all nice. But at the same time, the Democrats could win this fight. If the Post poll is right, they’re already winning. And now that Trump has introduced the unpopular Project 2025 into the equation, the door is open for the Democrats to make Trump’s posture here even more unpopular. Also, I’d argue that to the extent the shutdown will result in chaos, well, people understand that it’s Trump who is the sower of chaos in this country. Majorities are far more likely to blame Trump for chaos than Democrats.

So the Democrats can win this. They need to stand together and stick to principles. I just wish history suggested they were better at this.

The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel was about the 2,786th objectionable thing this second Trump administration has done. Many of its attacks on the American way of life have been utterly horrific—some have been direct assaults on the rule of law, others have sent completely innocent human beings to detention camps. So why does an action taken against a late-night host stand out?

It’s a frontal attack on the one element of our social contract that nearly everyone, from left to right, agrees on and values more than anything: freedom of speech. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787 decided against including a Bill of Rights, confident that everyone would understand that the federal government would exercise only the powers enumerated in the document itself. But many critics, mostly those known as the anti-Federalists, insisted that that wasn’t enough. They said: Add a list of specifically enumerated rights, or we’re not ratifying.

And so, James Madison, who had been a strong opponent of such a list in 1787, turned around and, as a member of the first U.S. Congress representing the fifth district of Virginia, drew up the list the critics demanded. His original list included 17 rights. Congress passed 12, and the states ratified 10.

There was never any question as to which right would be enumerated first. The First Amendment concerns both religion and speech, but over the centuries, freedom of worship has grown less contested, and it has been the cause of free speech rights for which people have fought and gone to prison. Historically, most attempts to suppress speech have come from those in power trying to silence various forms of protest or dissent (hence, from the right, generally speaking). Recent years have seen the emergence of a small but vocal anti–free speech left, whose presence is mostly limited to social media and college campuses, and which is about to make Bari Weiss a very rich woman.

But the vast majority of us agree: Free speech is inviolate and applies to all of us, even those with noxious views. A poll last year found that 63 percent of Americans considered free speech “very important.” It was second only to inflation and ahead of crime, health care, immigration, and seven other issues. Not bad for an abstract idea.

But abstract ideas last only as long as those who have power—political and financial power—agree that they should last. James Madison couldn’t have contemplated Donald Trump. And he never would have imagined Perry Sook and Chris Ripley.

Wait, who are Perry Sook and Chris Ripley, you ask? They are the men, Sook in particular, who made this Kimmel cancellation, this direct attack against free speech, happen. Their names don’t appear in many news stories. More people need to know who they are.

Sook is the CEO of Nexstar Media Group. He started the company in the 1990s with one local television station, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Today, Nexstar owns 197 stations. It also operates NewsNation, the cable news channel trying to compete with Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. NewsNation is where disgraced CNN anchor Chris Cuomo landed, and its “talent” is somewhat ideologically mixed. But Sook, 66, has dropped broad hints in past interviews about his own leanings. Last November, he expressed the hope that “fact-based journalism will come back into vogue, as well as eliminating the level of activist journalism out there.” You might think that by “activist journalism,” he means, you know, the cable news network that paid a $787 million settlement to a private company to avoid being forced to admit that it told lies about the 2020 election. But you’d be wrong. On Wednesday, he showed us what and who he means by “activist journalism”: Jimmy Kimmel, over one comment that right-wing social media went to town on.

Chris Ripley is the CEO of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair is better known than Nexstar. It vaulted to public prominence after that chilling 2018 video went viral of dozens of local Sinclair anchors reading from the same Orwellian script about “fake news.” Sinclair is more avowedly right-wing than Nexstar. But they both passionately share and are pursuing one central right-wing goal: the end of media regulation in the United States. Under FCC rules, no single owner can reach more than 39 percent of households.

These kinds of regulations go back to the 1920s, when radio first hit the scene, and they were designed to make sure that Americans heard a range of voices. No one on either end of the political spectrum challenged them for decades. In the late 1960s, a Pennsylvania right-wing radio preacher (why is it always people like this?) went on air to smear a local journalist who had attacked Barry Goldwater. The matter went up to the Supreme Court, which held—unanimously, left to right—that the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine was consistent with the First Amendment: That is, the court said, yes, the exposure to opposing viewpoints was an essential part of democracy.

Traditional news and speech values, imperfect though they were, held for about six decades. Then merger mania hit in the 1980s, and we began to understand that media companies were companies—were interested in profit more than civic ideas such as truth and free speech. At the same time, the Reagan administration started going after the Fairness Doctrine. Later came Rupert Murdoch and Fox. Then came merger after merger after merger. Sad to say, it was Barack Obama’s FCC, under Chair Julius Genachowski, that finally killed off the Fairness Doctrine officially, but it had been long since functionally dead anyway.

Right now, Sook awaits FCC approval of a merger that will allow Nexstar to be in more than 39 percent of American homes. And Sinclair wants to grow and grow. And that is what happened Wednesday night. Sook announced that his 32 ABC stations would not broadcast Kimmel’s show. Sinclair, with its 30 ABC affiliates, made a similar announcement shortly thereafter. And ABC—or really, Disney—caved.

Even so, this might not have been quite the crisis it is with someone else in the White House. Under President Kamala Harris, for example, would Sook and Nexstar even be petitioning a Democratic FCC for this merger? Probably not. The current Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, has clearly stated her opposition (to TNR’s Greg Sargent, among others) to what Chairman Brendan Carr did in threatening ABC and Kimmel. Recent Democratic FCC Chairs Jessica Rosenworcel (Biden) and Tom Wheeler (Obama) have been strong voices for media diversity. It seems to me a safe bet that under President Harris, none of this would be happening.

But she is not in the White House. Donald Trump is. And a right-wing hero was just assassinated. Trump and his movement will use Charlie Kirk’s murder to justify any number of unconstitutional and illegal actions. And it filters down from them. Clemson University has fired five faculty and administrators. Teachers are losing their jobs over their social media posts about Kirk. And it sure isn’t Trump firing them. He has created an atmosphere of fear that many, many others on down the right-wing food chain, from Sook and Ripley to local school administrators, will zealously enforce.

And that’s why this week is different. It pitted a near-universally cherished American value against a combination of corporate power and authoritarian contempt for that value—and the value was smashed to pieces.

If you’re terrified of where all this may end, you are right to be. Stephen Colbert is gone; Kimmel, possibly gone for good (I hope not). CBS is becoming conservative. Skydance, the company handing CBS to Bari Weiss, may be about to take over CNN. The Washington Post is cracking up. The New York Times faces another one of Trump’s $15 billion lawsuits. In this next year or two, we may well be counting on the Times to do what CBS and ABC have refused to do and fight this battle to the bitter end.

The text of the First Amendment was edited down from Madison’s original language. His first-draft passage on speech and the press said: “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”

I wish that language had remained—it’s clearer and more emphatic, especially that “inviolable” part. It might have stiffened the backs of the people we’re going to be counting on to preserve free speech in this country and made it harder for right-wing federal judges to chip away at these rights. It would not, alas, make any difference to tyrants, and as of Wednesday night, it’s clearer than it ever was before that tyranny is where we’re headed.

I will admit that I learned some useful things about Charlie Kirk this week. I learned that he commanded a unique respect and even ardor on the MAGA right. Old high school friends who are MAGA pop up regularly on my Facebook feed, and they were distraught, several to the point of tears. They had him pegged for a future president, which sure had never occurred to me, but which made sense after I gave it some thought. He was young, articulate, nice-looking; possessed of a certain kind of charisma. He had an instinct for how to connect with young men emotionally. I’ve also read some liberals who knew him saying in these last couple of days that he was, in person, unfailingly polite, and that matters. This is the Kirk the right remembers: someone who engaged in civil debate and persuasion and who infuriated liberals only because he was smart and he usually won.

Kirk’s most ardent fans can, and will, believe what they want. The truth is that he infuriated a lot of us because he spread toxic lies across this country like a blanket of Agent Orange (David Corn and Joan Walsh iterated a number of them this week). And while he often had an impressive battery of facts at his command, his manner of debating involved a lot of dishonest rhetorical legerdemain. I watched a clip Thursday in which he challenged a young white male student somewhere: “What can a white man do in this country that a Black man can’t do?”

It’s a very clever question. That framing—the use of the verb “do”—reduces racism to matters of the freedom to move about in society. And in that sense, what’s the problem? Yes, we once had white and “colored” waiting rooms down South, but these days, a Black father can take his kids to a ballgame just the same as a white father can. But a real conversation about racism means talking, for example, about the historical legacies that have resulted in white households owning on average $250,400 in wealth and Black households $24,520. That’s a direct result of Blacks not being allowed to buy houses in most neighborhoods in this country until relatively recently. In addition, there is still tons of discrimination in mortgage lending. That’s what racism is, and the fact that Black men can “do” a lot of what white men can “do” in this country does nothing to mitigate these persistent facts—facts that only liberals, by the way, have ever had the courage to try to change.

Was Kirk’s assassination a tragedy? It was absolutely a tragedy. Whether the killer had a political motivation or not, the silencing of a voice, even a toxic voice, in that fashion is ghastly. If you spend enough time online (and here’s a good reason why you shouldn’t), you’ll be able to find people, seemingly somewhere on the left of the political spectrum, chortling over Kirk’s death. It’s an understatement to say that this is very bad form. But you’ll struggle to find any prominent liberal leaders or elected Democrats saying anything........

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