I don’t want to get too inside baseball on the infamous 11th-hour decisions by the billionaire owners of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post to block their newspapers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris.
I know it’s a newspaper story. And as a newspaper person — yeah, I still consider myself one, even as I’m working at the Colorado Sun, an online news site — I was shocked, disappointed and mostly angry (or should I just go all the way and say, majorly pissed off?) about the news.
I used to work at the L.A. Times. The years I worked there were my introduction to big-time journalism.
I nearly worked at The Washington Post. I turned down a job there despite getting an offer from my hero, Ben Bradlee. That was my introduction on how not to manage a big-time journalism career.
But the truth is, this is only tangentially a newspaper story, even as at least 250,000 subscribers had canceled their subscriptions to the Post. I’m sure the number will grow higher now that Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, has written an entirely unconvincing and certainly self-serving op-ed column, uh, explaining his cowardly decision by saying that he’s just trying to restore media credibility.
Press Watch says that betrayed readers have left more than 140,000 online comments at the Post site, including in response to this devastating commentary by Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes on the paper’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan.
It may not matter much, unless you’re me, how any of this affects people in the newspaper business.
What does matter is that, strangely enough, these decisions — along with similar decisions made by others in positions of power — tell us as much or more about the risks of electing a strongman than any article or column I’ve seen in any newspaper, in any magazine, on any podcast, on any blog, on any news website.
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We can argue about whether Trump is truly a fascist — although the evidence is starting to be overwhelming. Just ask the former generals who knew him best and who now tell us he’s a stone-cold fascist. Just listen for the echoes when he calls migrants “vermin” or that they’ll “poison the blood” of the country.
Just listen to Trump’s henchmen at his MAGA Garden party who not only openly spewed racism and sexism and most other forms of bigotry, but also said, in the words of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, that “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
All this would be troubling enough if Trump’s restoration tour is a success. But how many of you believe that Trumpism begins and ends with Trump? Historically, strong men emerge in times of economic and political crisis. What Trump and his team have done so well is to convince half of America that we’re in that crisis, that America is a hellscape, that migrants eat dogs and cats, that Aurora is one among many cities that have been conquered.
It’s all too likely that the infrastructure in place, much of which preceded Trump, will remain if he wins or loses next week — or whenever Trump is no longer part of the political equation. I worry that there may be tens of millions of Trump cultists who could be convinced to move onto the next person who presents himself as a would-be savior of the aggrieved.
And meanwhile, even as Bezos decides that The Washington Post’s editorial voice should remain silent in face of all that, we get further daily reminders of the weakness of the mainstream media in countering Trump’s false narratives. An endorsement probably wouldn’t change any of that, even in a race as close as this one.
But a non-endorsement in the closing days of the race for two newspapers that have repeatedly called into question Trump’s fitness for office? That speaks volumes.
As for Trump himself, he almost certainly can’t define fascism. He routinely calls Kamala Harris, and anyone else on his personal enemies list, both fascists and Marxists, both low-IQ and leading forces of “the enemy within.”
Trump doesn’t have any ideology unless there’s an ideology to demeaning and threatening retribution against anyone who opposes him. Calling Harris a fascist is just another insult to him, like calling Harris retarded or calling America the world’s garbage can.
The real story about the non-endorsements is about ultra-rich men — yes, usually men — bending a knee to power. And not just to power. It’s worse than that. It’s bending a knee to potential power, to the risk of a strongman that Trump promises to be. It’s bending a knee to a would-be authoritarian, just in case.
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As Yale historian Timothy Snyder wrote in his book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century”:
“Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”
Amazon owner Bezos, who is worth more than $200 billion, would be, if anyone would be, sheltered from whatever venom Trump could attach to him. If $200 billion doesn’t protect you in this country, then what exactly is the point of having all that money, besides being able to spend hundreds of millions on a yacht.
Bezos bought the struggling Washington Post for $250 million — far more than it was worth on the open market — to help protect American journalism. Whatever he says, Bezos is now protecting himself, his business interests, his standing. Or do you really think he believes the best stance for a newspaper is to withhold an editorial opinion on a president who promises to bring in the military to quash dissent?
We can safely make a guess at Bezos’ motives not only because the head of one of his companies, Blue Origin, met with Trump — Bezos called the meeting an unfortunate coincidence of which he was unaware — on the very day the Post announced its non-endorsement decision.
No, we can guess this because Fortune magazine recently looked at the 10 richest people in America and found that only one had publicly endorsed either Harris or Trump. You know which one that is — the shock jock gazillionaire Elon Musk, who has turned Twitter into X into a member in good standing of the MAGA propagandaverse.
Musk has also reportedly contributed upwards of $100 million to those organizations supporting Trump out of his own outsized pocket. And speaking of Musk’s pants, I personally fear I may never unsee the bare-midriff sight of Musk’s literal leap to Trump’s support.
The rest of the Terrible Ten, we’re told, have stayed silent in the face of Trump’s assault on the system that, in large part, helped make their fortunes possible.
As David Corn helpfully points out in his Our Land newsletter for Mother Jones, the 10 plutocrats cited by Fortune are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, former Google CEO Larry Page, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Google cofounder Sergey Brin and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
Some of these muted multibillionaires are even traditional Republican donors. But Corn points us especially to Dimon, who has told associates he privately supports Harris but who, according to the New York Times, also tells associates he’s afraid to risk publicly saying so. Corn also points to Gates, who has reportedly privately contributed $50 million in support of Harris’ campaign (to a dark money group that doesn’t reveal its donors) but won’t endorse her publicly. And Corn points to Buffet, who openly campaigned for Hillary Clinton against Trump in 2016 but says he won’t take a stand this year.
They aren’t the only ones sitting out this most profound election, in which one candidate is a mainstream Democrat and the other is an adjudicated rapist who also exchanges love letters with dictators. You can cite the Trump-averse Republicans (the Bushes, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell etc., etc., ) who won’t publicly support Harris even when stalwarts like Liz and Dick Cheney do. You can cite many others.
They’re all reminders of Tim Snyder’s lesson on authoritarianism — that by ceding control to power before an authoritarian even asks for it, you’re unconsciously extending the authoritarian reach.
And when the lesson comes from newspapers — particularly from the same newspaper that gave us Woodward and Bernstein and an owner in Katharine Graham who famously stood up to threats from John Mitchell and Richard Nixon — it tells us something even more disturbing: that democracy truly can die in darkness if the cowardly owner decides to flick off the lights.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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