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Tag: authoritarianism
Hegseth For President? It's A Laughable Idea That Must Be Taken Seriously

Hegseth For President? It's A Laughable Idea That Must Be Taken Seriously

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth may be contemplating a promotion. His Monday trip to campaign with Republican congressional candidates in Iowa, home of the first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses, spurred a Washington Post report that the visit is consistent with the belief among “officials familiar with Hegseth’s thinking” that he “is considering a run for president or some other political office after his time in the Trump administration is over.”

Hegseth, a bombastic former Fox News weekend host who spent years speaking directly to the Republican base through that MAGA propaganda network, may be uniquely attuned to the right's attention economy. He could become the presidential candidate of the right-wing media’s id, running a furious culture war campaign fixated on domestic political enemies that checks all the boxes for authoritarian-minded pundits indifferent to traditional policy issues.

Anti-Muslim. Hegseth has much to offer the MAGA pundits who casually declare that “Islam is here to kill us and convert us” and call for “using military force to start raiding mosques and removing these people from our country.” At home, he has decried the “Muslims’ birth rates” in multiple states and fearmongered about the success of Muslim political candidates, warning that “Islamists” are trying “to seed the West with as many Muslims as possible.” And abroad, he has written that “just like the Christian crusaders who pushed back the Muslim hordes in the twelfth century, American Crusaders will need to muster the same courage against Islamists today” — then literally overseen U.S. forces bombing Muslims in Iran and Yemen as defense secretary.

Anti-DEI. At Fox, Hegseth was at the forefront of the right’s assault on policy initiatives promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, warning that such policies had weakened the military and calling for “a new commander in chief that’s going to get rid of all of this CRT, DEI nonsense, all the gender nonsense.” He’s now put that into practice at the Pentagon, firing or canceling the promotions of numerous Black and female senior officers, overseeing the banning and attempted expulsion of trans service members, and launching a study that seems engineered to ban women from serving in combat roles.

Anti-press. Right-wing media hate the traditional press, and Hegseth, who urged readers of his 2020 book to “disdain, despise, detest, [and] distrust” the news media, never misses an opportunity to demonstrate his contempt for mainstream reporters. He’s smeared news outlets as unpatriotic for not running headlines like “Iran increasingly desperate,” and mocked and derided individual reporters, even denouncing his former Fox colleague Jennifer Griffin as “the one who misrepresents the most intentionally.” Under his leadership, the Pentagon rolled out a stringent new set of rules for reporters and, when journalists at major news outlets turned in their press passes rather than signing them, replaced those reporters with right-wing influencers and staffers from MAGA outlets.

Anti-immigrant. Perhaps no current issue unites the right-wing commentariat like virulent attacks on immigrants — and Hegseth’s rhetoric aligns perfectly with them. “When you import the Third World, you get Third World hierarchy, values, and chaos,” he said in a November 2024 Fox segment, adding: “Your quality of life is going down. You feel less safe. Your resources are being drained. ... But don't speak up about that. If you do, you're the racist.” As defense secretary, he used a speech in France marking the anniversary of D-Day to attack the “invasion” of migrants hitting European beaches, asking, “When will European capitals do something about that invasion?”

Pro-war crimes. It’s not an overstatement to say that Hegseth has his current position because the president appreciated his Fox advocacy on behalf of U.S. service members accused or convicted of war crimes, which he seems to reject as a legitimate category. He wrote in 2024: “Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?” At the Pentagon, Hegseth “has fired and reassigned uniformed lawyers and dismantled many of the offices set up to prevent the targeting of civilians and related sites,” focused his public statements on the need for “lethality,” and carried out operations in the Middle East, Indian Ocean, eastern Pacific Ocean, and Caribbean Sea that experts say could include war crimes, as The New York Times reported.

Pro-Christian nationalism. Hegseth has “invok[ed] Christian theology in public statements about the war with Iran,” including urging the American public to pray “every day, on bended knee” for a military victory in the Middle East “in the name of Jesus Christ,” and told a conference of defense ministers from the Western Hemisphere that “our nations” are “Christian nations under God,” the Times reported. He invited Pastor Doug Wilson, “a self-described Christian nationalist who wants to repeal a woman's right to vote, has defended slavery and believes homosexuality should be a crime,” to give a sermon at the Pentagon earlier this year.

Together with his abject loyalty to Donald Trump, those positions make Hegseth a plausible candidate for the GOP ticket. That could come in the form of a 2028 primary battle against Vice President JD Vance, who has fallen out of favor with much of the right-wing media. But the former Fox & Friends Weekend co-host is also just 46 years old — if Vance wins the nomination but loses the general election that year, Hegseth could easily spend a few years returning to the network as a contributor or hosting a podcast, sitting on defense industry boards, and campaigning for Republicans before running for the 2032 nomination.

Hegseth was manifestly unqualified for his current position, his stewardship of the Pentagon has been a series of rolling disasters, and he is among the most unpopular members of Trump’s widely reviled administration. But in a world in which the former host of The Apprentice is currently serving his second term in the Oval Office, it is worth taking Hegseth’s potential candidacy seriously.

Incompetent Authoritarians: Military Misery Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Incompetent Authoritarians: Military Misery Will Continue Until Morale Improves

Is this America? I mean, think about the American way of war. We are not a warrior nation, which is fine. We are a lot of other things.

We were a nation that was supreme in the arts of peace. We were a nation of know-how. America won its wars by doing the arts of peace right, by.building better and more stuff than other countries. By getting our act together in ways that didn’t necessarily involve fighting.

Of course, you always need courageous warriors. You always need people able and willing to risk death in the service of their nation. But what America was supreme at was logistics. If you ask how did America and its allies pull off D-Day, well, a lot of it was being able to deliver supplies to the beaches of Normandy in a way that the Germans never thought was possible.

America was always the place, the country that was really good at logistics. For us to be not feeding our sailors, not able to keep ships that are not, after all, under fire all the time, to keep the plumbing working, that is incredible.

The idea that the president is imposing his personal aesthetic preferences to undo design decisions that were made by military professionals is also basically incredible.

Okay, what is this all about? And what happened? Some of it is specifically military, but mostly it’s not. I think these military failings should be put in the same context as the frantic and disastrous destruction and redesign of Washington, D.C. The demolition of the East Wing. The disastrous attempt to refurbish the reflecting pool to reflect Trump’s aesthetics. Even the gold leaf and gold lettering that is polluting the White House. All of this is really part of the same picture.So what is going on here?

Obviously we have a seriously mentally ill, mentally deficient guy with his finger on the button. The president of the United States is clearly dissociating, I’ve been calling it sundowning because I personally saw sundowning during my father’s awful last year.

Trump is not in full possession of his faculties, and he is obsessing about things that are really just kind of remnant ego trips. I haven’t read the Haberman book yet, but reportedly he spends a large fraction of his time and probably a larger fraction of his mental energy on his redecoration projects, which aside from all being carried out disastrously are also in incredibly bad taste. But this is where he is. He’s actually more interested in his giant, tacky, gilded ballroom than he is in the fate of the nation.

But how does somebody like this end up able to impose his will on these disastrous things? How does he end up able to eviscerate the military?

Well, part of it is that this is a wannabe authoritarian regime. We’re in a peculiar state now where the United States is not yet a police state. It is not yet a place where the secret police will cart you away for expressing the wrong opinion, unless you are not a white U.S. citizen. Maybe the time is coming when that will happen. But in any case, we are not yet East Germany under the Stasi. We are not yet Putin’s Russia.

But the Republican Party, senior politicians, who should be feeling that they have at least some dignity, ability to take a stand, behave as if they were living in an authoritarian state. They’re obviously terrified. They’re afraid to express any dissent. They go along with Bush’s — see, I’m dissociating, living in the past myself. They’re going along with Trump’s wishes.

On top of that, I think it really helps to think of the ruling party in America right now as being a party that behaves as if we were a full-on authoritarian state. And one of the things we learn about in studying how authoritarian regimes behave is, first of all, that the leader actually can be possibly the worst informed person in the nation because nobody dares to tell him bad news. We’re hearing this a lot about Putin, that he doesn’t know how badly his war is going. Well, Trump in many ways probably still doesn’t understand how badly his war is going.

The really striking thing about the munitions shortage and now the horrible conditions on US ships is that to the extent that any action has been taken on either of those issues is it has been only after extensive reporting in the press. So now the Pentagon is talking about a crash program to have defense manufacturers produce more of the missiles that we’ve been running out of. But it’s not clear it’s even started yet, and that call didn’t happen until many months into the war, whereas the munition shortage was obvious to independent observers just a few weeks in — that we were expending munitions that we couldn’t replace. Nothing happened until there was widespread press reporting.

The USS Lincoln has finally been recalled for refit and shore leave. But that didn’t happen until after many press stories about it, all of which were denied, but it’s very obvious just looking at the behavior that the Pentagon and Hegseth and Trump finally reacted saying, oh, I guess something needs to be done. We can’t let this go on. But they didn’t do it until after the press reported.

Now, is this because they’re totally callous? Well, they are. They don’t care at all. The people who yell support the troops most loudly are the people who actually have no interest whatsoever in supporting the troops. But I think it’s probably also the case that they may not have known. That nobody told Trump that we were running out of missiles. He may have read some press stories to that effect, but he said that’s all fake news and nobody within the administration was willing to tell him.

They may not have been willing to tell Hegseth either, who by all accounts flies into a rage and punishes anybody who brings him bad news.So they just didn’t hear about this. They didn’t hear about the munitions. They didn’t hear about the conditions for US sailors until the drumbeat fromthe press became too loud for them to remain insulated, to remain in denial.

So this is what happens. This is the problem with authoritarian regimes. It goes with the related problem with authoritarian regimes, which is that they have a single point of failure. You elevate one person to a position of untouchable authority, and if that person loses it, that person is sundowning, there is no recourse.

One more thing to say about what’s going on is that authoritarian regimes systematically promote incompetence. This is Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism. That it’s not just that they value sycophancy and loyalty above competence. They actually actively dislike competence. Because someone who is competent, someone who knows what they’re doing, might stand on their dignity, might refuse to follow instructions from above. You need third-raters or worse.

This has long been true in areas that I know something about. It’s been true of right-wing economics forever. It’s long been the case that although there are plenty of conservative, competent economists, what the right-wing wanted, even pre-Trump, was creatures like Steve Moore or Larry Kudlow, people who had no idea actually how to do economic analysis, but were unimpeachably, unquestionably loyal because after all, they had no constituency to fall back on.

So we have this mix of leader principle, Führerprinzip -- yes, I think we’re allowed to use the original German here -- information blackout at the top because nobody wants to tell the leader bad news, and incompetence as a general principle throughout the government.

And if you want to understand how the Reflecting Pool happened, if you want to understand how we ended up with this hole in the ground, that was previously the east wing of the White House, all of this is fundamentally the same stuff and it’s true of lots of other areas of policy as well.

Still, I guess most of us thought — I thought, mea culpa — that the military would be among the last places to be hit by this. That, first of all, it should be obvious even to people likeTrump and Hegseth that you don’t muck too much with the military, that you don’t destroy the one instrument you really have, and also that the military itself had, so I thought, a strong enough culture, was highly enough respected among the populace that the military would be able to stand up and say no.

But it turns out that I was wrong. And so instead of being insulated from the craziness and incompetence, the military is actually possibly the most acute victim of everything that’s happening.

At this point they might manage to start feeding the sailors and fix the toilets, though I wouldn’t put 100 percent odds on that. But the broader problem of really destroying one of the last real sources of U.S. strength, that is not going to go away. Instead, it’s going to be the same thing. And the misery will continue until morale improves.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Paul Krugman.

Trump Lawyer: We Can Bulldoze The Statue Of Liberty Without Any Public Recourse

Trump Lawyer: We Can Bulldoze The Statue Of Liberty Without Any Public Recourse

A single exchange in last Friday’s District of Columbia Circuit argument laid bare the Trump administration’s strategy in a series of recent cases: push through deeply unpopular and frequently illegal measures, disable Congress, and freeze out the public from being able to do anything about it.

The exchange concerned Trump’s most cherished goal of remaking the White House—the people’s house—in his imperial and garish image.Recall how we got here. Last fall, with no congressional authorization and no completed legal process, the administration simply got up one day and started digging a huge hole where the East Wing had been. By the time the National Trust for Historic Preservation sued in December, the East Wing was gone, and large-scale excavation was well underway.

Judge Richard Leon initially rejected the Trust’s first two injunction requests because they rested on flawed legal theories. Then, in March, he granted a preliminary injunction on the Trust’s amended complaint, halting above-ground construction. The administration took an emergency appeal, and the DC Circuit administratively stayed the injunction the very next day, permitting construction to proceed while the appeal was expedited.

By the time of Friday’s argument, three million pounds of steel rebar were in the ground, and the structure was beginning to rise above it.That brings us to last Friday’s argument. The DC Circuit is commonly considered the second most powerful federal court in the nation. Given the court’s sophistication and the personal importance to Trump of the project, the administration sent its version of the A-Team. Yaakov Roth is a senior official in the DOJ’s Civil Division, as well as a lawyer with a gold-plated résumé that includes a clerkship for Justice Antonin Scalia and extensive appellate experience.

The most active questioner on the panel was Obama appointee Judge Patricia Millett. In the course of pressing Roth on the administration’s standing argument, Millett dropped the hypothetical that crystallized the Department’s position.

“If this were the Statue of Liberty,” Millett asked, “the people whose ancestors—that was the first thing they saw coming to this country, but the government moved too fast—nothing can be done by them to challenge it?”

Roth’s answer: “I think that’s right, yes.”Roth’s answer was not a mistake under pressure. He had thought through the implications of the administration’s position and understood that Millett would be quick to exploit any inconsistency and use it to unravel the administration’s case.

Millett simply followed the logic to its destination and asked him to confirm it. He did, as he had to. The only check, he allowed, would be Congress—which would have to pass a law that Trump could veto, requiring two-thirds to override.

Millett then named what she had gotten Roth to concede: “Move fast and break things and then nobody has standing.” Roth conceded that was essentially correct.

That is the administration’s playbook for a series of recent high-handed moves: the $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 defendants; the systematic destruction of presidential records; the collusive settlements with Flynn and Bannon; and now the ballroom rising on the demolished White House East Wing.

In each of these examples, the administration follows the same two-step plan.

First, neuter Congress: anything requiring legislation to stop faces a certain presidential veto, and the two-thirds override is a mathematical fantasy as long as enough Republican members remain terrified of Trump’s one remaining real weapon, the threat to come after them.

Second, neuter the courts: argue that no one has legal standing to challenge what is being done, that the injury is too generalized, too abstract, too aesthetic to cross the Article III threshold.

The argument is not that they’re acting in the interests of the American people; it’s rather that the American people can’t do anything about it.

Congress can’t act. Courts can’t hear it. The bulldozer rolls with no brakes.

There is nothing inherently improper about an administration’s invocation of standing doctrine. The requirement that plaintiffs show a concrete, particularized injury before federal courts will take up their claim is a valid constraint, rooted in Article III, and courts across the ideological spectrum have enforced it against litigants of every stripe. The constitutional design is that federal courts are not a substitute for legislative action.

But the administration has taken its reliance on standing to a new low, and used it to bypass legal accountability for a series of issues of intense popular concern. It has combined aggressive standing arguments with bare-knuckle intimidation of Republicans in Congress. The result is a pincer movement that leaves the public—the people who overwhelmingly object to a $1.8 billion giveaway to January 6 defendants, who feel in their bones that the White House belongs to all of them, who do not want their government shredding documents that belong to the people–with no branch to turn to and no courthouse door that will open.

The power of the Millett hypothetical is that it smokes out where the administration’s argument leads. Can the executive lay waste to the Statue of Liberty? Damn right, says Roth—and even if it’s a rank violation of the executive duty to take care, nobody can stop it because nobody has standing.

It’s their game plan, anyway. But the administration’s retreat last week on the slush fund shows what can crack it: a combination of legal exposure and political pressure. The payout to January 6 insurrectionists was odious as well as unconstitutional, and the legal attacks and political pushback reinforced each other. That process is ongoing: Judges Williams, Brinkema, and Leon can still bring the legal hammer down, making it that much harder for the administration to work its will, and for Republicans in Congress to just acquiesce to Trump’s lawless action.

That is the 1-2 punch the moment calls for, and it is available for the ballroom as well. Roth told the court that the public has no voice in the Mar-a-Lago-ization of the people’s house. We can prove him wrong. The task is to raise the political stakes so that every Republican representative feels the heat for going along with Trump’s massively unpopular project.

The White House is the most universally recognized symbol of the national government. Its relatively modest, neoclassical structure stands in harmony with the Capitol and the Supreme Court up the hill. It is the building that millions of schoolchildren visit, that Americans call “the people’s house.” It’s the antithesis of the gaudy ornateness of Trump’s gold-plated imperial design.

There is a profound un-American quality to Trump’s ballroom makeover. He is, in effect, trying to crown himself Emperor—cowing Congress and parrying court action with aggressive standing arguments pressed all the way to the Supreme Court. It is a gesture of deep contempt for the country whose most beloved building he is trying to remake in his own image.

Many of my colleagues believe that he can’t be stopped. I see the force of their positions, but I don’t share them. My best guess is that Trump’s Xanadu monstrosity does not get completed, even though it has been engineered to parry every legal and political challenge the system can throw at it. Some combination of legal and political resolve will hold the line.

An administration lawyer told the judges in the second most powerful court in the country that no court can stop a president who moves fast enough from destroying the White House or the Statue of Liberty. The administration is counting on paralyzing the courts and the Congress, and ultimately on the public’s apathy. The slush fund showed that’s a losable bet. The formula is public pressure, judicial accountability, and Republicans made to own it at the polls. The first part is up to us.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Talking Feds.

Trump Administration Demands American Press Propagandize Its Iran War

Trump Administration Demands American Press Propagandize Its Iran War

We are two weeks into President Donald Trump’s ill-conceived war of choice against Iran, and the president is already suggesting his administration should shut down news outlets for producing critical reports — or even consider treason charges based on spurious claims of collusion with America’s enemies.

Though U.S. and Israeli forces have successfully bombed a wide array of Iranian targets and assassinated its former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran has followed through with its strategic doctrine by closing the Strait of Hormuz, shutting down a major channel for the global energy and fertilizer trades.

As a result, Trump is begging/demanding foreign navies bail him out by sending ships to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, deploying additional troops and ships to the region for unknown reasons, lifting sanctions on Russia in hopes of lowering the price of oil, denying reports that a Pentagon investigation preliminarily found the U.S. military accidentally incinerated scores of Iranian schoolchildren with an errant missile — and railing against the American press for refusing to report that the war is going well.

Meanwhile, Trump’s hand-picked Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, is signaling to broadcast stations that they will face regulatory retribution if they don’t “correct course."

It’s all part of the authoritarian playbook Trump wields against news outlets that produce anything less than Fox News-style propaganda. The protections of the First Amendment ensure that those outlets could likely prevail in court — but fighting is expensive, and over the course of Trump’s second term so far, the corporate moguls who control them have proven unnervingly unwilling to do so.

Trump rails against press, demands government retribution

Last week, former Fox News host Megyn Kelly bemoaned that the network’s coverage is offering lockstep support for Trump’s Iranian “excursion.”

“Now it's, you cheerlead the war, support the military industrial complex, or … you're a loser,” she said on her podcast. “It's infuriating because we're talking about life and death. We're talking about American life or death. And this is a dereliction of duty.”

As Kelly suggests, when Trump turns his television to Fox, he is getting unhinged validation of his efforts. But the president is not satisfied with that. He wants every American news outlet producing the same Fox-style war propaganda.

Trump used what he baselessly described as “an intentionally misleading headline by the Fake News Media” to denounce the press in a Saturday morning Truth Social post.“The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (in particular), and other Lowlife 'Papers’ and Media actually want us to lose the War,” he wrote. “Their terrible reporting is the exact opposite of the actual facts! They are truly sick and demented people that have no idea the damage they cause the United States of America.”

In another post on Sunday evening, the president baselessly claimed that Iran had been “working in close coordination with the Fake News Media” to promote a fake, AI-generated video depicting a U.S. ship burning in the Persian Gulf.

“The story was knowingly FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say that those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information!” Trump posted. “The fact is, Iran is being decimated, and the only battles they ‘win’ are those that they create through AI, and are distributed by Corrupt Media Outlets.”

(In reality, responsible news outlets have been debunking that video, not distributing it, according to CNN’s Brian Stelter.)

“It's pretty criminal because our media companies, who have no credibility whatsoever, are putting out information that they know is false, and it's a very dangerous thing for the country,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One later that night, “I think they could be in serious jeopardy."

Trump’s weekend anti-press binge followed coverage complaints from Pete Hegseth, the former Fox & Friends weekend host who now heads the Pentagon, who used a press conference on Friday morning to gripe extensively about the banners he has seen on TV news coverage:

Yet some in this crew, in the press, just can't stop. Allow me to make a few suggestions. People look up at the TV and they see banners, they see headlines. I used to be in that business. And I know that everything is written intentionally.

For example, a banner or a headline: “Mideast war intensifies,” splashing on the screen the last couple of days, alongside visuals of civilian or energy targets that Iran has hit, because that's what they do. What should the banner read instead?

How about, ‘Iran increasingly desperate,’ because they are. They know it and so do you, if it can be admitted.

Hegseth posited that an “actual patriotic press” would produce such coverage. He also decried a CNN report detailing how the Trump administration “failed to fully account for the potential consequences” of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” he commented, referencing a Trump ally’s effort to take over CNN’s parent company with the help of the administration.

With Carr, a cause for alarm

It is disturbing enough that the president of the United States is a deranged authoritarian who responds to a faltering war by ranting about its coverage. But what makes it worse is that his administration is filled with apparatchicks eager to carry out his demands for retribution.

Carr, who was reportedly with the president at his Mar-A-Lago club over the weekend, responded to Trump’s initial post complaining about journalists who “actually want us to lose the War” by threatening the licenses of broadcast stations that produce critical coverage.

“Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions - also known as the fake news - have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up,” Carr wrote. “The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."

Carr was nonspecific about how broadcasters could avoid reprisal (and Trump had lashed out at newspapers, not broadcast networks, in his post), but he’s a hack who is typically willing to carry Trump’s water no matter how absurd the underlying complaint may be.

Trump signaled his approval for Carr’s threats in his Sunday evening “TREASON” post, writing, “I am so thrilled to see Brendan Carr, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), looking at the licenses of some of these Corrupt and Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations."

Stelter, in an extensive report drawing on comments from First Amendment lawyers, notes that Carr “has very little power to follow through” and that television stations, if they are willing to fight such attempted reprisals in court, “are not at serious risk of being banned."

“Any government action against a licensee would cause a protracted legal battle, even more so given the current media-bashing climate, because a station would likely cite Trump’s retributive streak and mount a First Amendment case,” Stelter wrote.

There is a strong argument that stations would be victorious if they fought Carr’s attempts to strip their licenses. But there were also strong arguments that ABC News and CBS News would be victorious if they fought the lawsuits Trump filed over their coverage in 2024. The problem was that rather than going to court on behalf of a free press, Disney and Paramount, their parent companies, decided it was in the interest of their broader business holdings to fold.

The advantage Trump and Carr have in their fight to cudgel the press into line is that it can be very expensive to fight the federal government on behalf of the First Amendment — and what the last year shows is that many people who own or control news outlets don’t care enough about such principles to do it. And Disney and Paramount had much deeper pockets to pay lawyers than an individual local broadcast news station does. Even Sinclair Broadcast Network, which owns or operates nearly 200 stations across the country, has a market cap of around $1 billion, compared to roughly $175 billion for Disney.

If Carr threatens the licenses of Sinclair stations, are its pro-Trump owners really going to go to the mat for the free press rather than using his complaints as an opportunity to push coverage even further to the right?

It’s also worth taking seriously Trump’s threats of treason charges against news outlets. The Justice Department is now staffed by loyalists like former Fox host Jeanine Pirro who are willing to follow through on his demands for political prosecutions. Those efforts keep failing — but they raise the cost of dissent and thus chill free speech.

And that’s what the president wants, as Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt made clear when she channeled him on Monday morning.

“The president has said enough with this coverage from other networks that are not telling you the truth, that are so negative about what’s going on,” she said. “This is a pro-America fight, and every network needs to get on board with that."

And if they aren’t, there will be consequences.

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

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