How the press enables Trump’s second stab at dictatorship

If you follow Marcy Wheeler, you know Trump begging for Putin’s help in 2016 and 2024's floundering impeachment are the same scandal. But only if you follow Marcy.

Due to the obvious authoritarian aims of the 2025 Project and a promise to ”certainly” prosecute political opponents, there has been a fair amount of discussion about how Donald Trump might weaponize the Department of Justice in his second term.

To this Emptywheel’s Marcy Wheeler asks, “Are you nuts?”

In my “How are you feeling about democracy?” interview with her, she went on:

Did you not see Bill Barr? 

Because Bill Barr did all of that. Like he shut down multiple criminal investigations into Trump and his allies, including an ongoing investigation into Roger Stone that disappeared…

He did the Durham investigation. There was no crime. He just said, "John Durham, you're going to go look for a crime involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Go!" And, you know, a five-year investigation found nothing, embarrassing, made stuff up, fabricated stuff. And then this other side channel, right, where you're fabricating stuff to feed into the Hunter Biden investigation.

And that's just the start of it.

Listen to the whole interview above or at Apple Podcasts or SoundCloud or this thing. Full transcript available here.

If you’re like me, you’re still waiting for the press to wake up and put together all the scandals of the first Trump administration with the disasters that are unfolding right now. 

You’re wondering what will be enough. Because Donald Trump’s ever-increasingly fascist ramblings and promises to pardon everyone who tried to overthrow the government hasn’t been it. Trump using his allies in the House GOP to hand Ukraine over to Vladimir Putin has barely registered 1/100th the odium The New York Times reserves for a Black academic’s questionable footnotes. And a special counsel appointed by Trump indicting a star witness in the GOP’s impeachment of Joe Biden for spreading Russian disinformation has not invited even one major news organization to step back and revisit how they’d been snowed out of covering the massive scandal of Trump and the GOP’s alignment from Putin and the worst regimes in the world, include Trump’s current benefactors, the Saudi royal family.

Part of the problem is indeed the flood of “shit” that Steve Bannon once described. Few of us have Marcy’s Wheeler’s RAM and hard drive space, nor her expertise at tracking the legal abuses of Donald Trump dating back to at least 2016. But The New York Times, for instance, has shown the ability to break through the noise to fixate on attacking trans health care or trumping charges of plagiarism against Black academics or revealing shocking discoveries like that Joe Biden was born in 1942. 

You have to assume that the way the press has been snowed by Trump and Bill Barr and Rod Rosenstein before Barr can’t be accidental. 

This isn’t to exactly imply there’s a conspiracy to elect a fascist dictator who has vowed to imprison journalists so many times it doesn’t even make the news anymore. But Trump has always benefited from a normalcy bias that entices journalists at papers like The Times to take politicians at their word and to generally tailor their coverage to whatever they’re saying next – unless a politician does something truly unforgivable like, say, be a Democrat who turns 81 or uses home email at work.

They just don’t know what to do with a Republican who won’t ever put up his hands and say, “You got me!” And because, as Finding Gravity’s Jamison Foser told me in a previous interview, they believe themselves to be part of the biased “liberal media,” reporters get scared off by Trump just repeating the words “hoax” or “Russia.”

Every major paper in America should be doing what Marcy Wheeler is doing. 

Not just tracking the ongoing trials related to January 6th with ruthless acuity and honesty. They should be doing what she’s doing with her “Ball of Thread” series, explaining what the last eight years show us about Trump’s already successful attempts at authoritarianism and how he’s already sold out our national security.

Because if Trump gets a real second chance at dictatorship, their ability to tell the truth likely won’t just be limited by their own fecklessness.