Special Investigations

Press Freedom Defense Fund

A Government of Trump, by Trump, and for Trump

A very special guest post from Tom Engelhardt.

Twenty-three years ago, I sat down in Metro Diner on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to pick the brain of an illustrious book editor about an ambitious project. It launched me on a life-changing odyssey.

Not so long after that meeting, I sent Tom Engelhardt a draft of an article for his new website, a listserv-turned-publication bearing his name, TomDispatch. One article turned into two, turned into 20, and on and on. Tom and I would work together for the two decades-plus that followed. On some days, we talked by phone as many as 10 times, discussing authors and article ideas and TD’s trademark introductions. But mostly, the calls were about edits. Tom doesn’t use the “track changes” feature when editing documents, so I would print, read, and mark up a hard copy of an article by Jonathan Schell, Mike Davis, Barbara Ehrenreich, or some other fantastic writer whose work I could scarcely believe I could have a hand in crafting. And then we would polish the piece to a high gleam.

Occasionally, when I would meet Tom for dinner near his home, I would edit a piece on the 1 or 9 train, and we would go about the process in person. It’s been many years since we did so, but I can still see Tom, silhouetted against the warm glow of his computer’s screen in his pleasantly cluttered writer’s garret, overstuffed with books and vintage children’s toys and various tchotchkes from a lifetime in publishing. I can see myself, standing over his right shoulder, directing him to my next edit: “Two ’graphs down, last sentence …”

For years, we worked as fellows of The Nation Institute and its current iteration, Type Media Center, where TomDispatch operated under its good auspices. We reported alongside each other at protest marches in New York City and Washington, D.C., and wrote articles together. Tom edited my books, and I worked on his. We even founded a book imprint together. It was a rather incredible run of collaboration and, by the humble standards of progressive media, dare I say a modest success.

At some point in the midst of all this, Tom told me that I was the only one to whom he could imagine handing over the keys to TomDispatch. I was humbled that he would offer me the chance to take the helm of a publication that not only bore his name but also was, in a very real sense, an extension of himself. I was polite about it but turned him down flat. It wasn’t for me, I said. And, frankly, I couldn’t envision anyone else running the site (which, I might add, he encouraged me to rename NickDispatch). Somewhere along the line, though, I reconsidered and was grateful that Tom said the offer still stood.

Today, our long journey from the corner of Broadway and West 100th Street in 2003 comes full circle as I publish the first piece by Tom Engelhardt at my new iteration of TomDispatch, now a part of The Intercept. If you had told me and Tom then that the bloviating real estate developer — who had just signed on to a 13-episode reality TV series called “The Apprentice” and was dating Slovenian model Melania Knauss — living roughly three miles south of our breakfast spot would today be America’s despotic president, we wouldn’t have believed it. So imagine explaining it to America’s founders, as Tom does in his askance look at the country’s recent semiquincentennial. Hopefully it’s........

© The Intercept