Trump savors victory — but the storm is coming. Will the media stand up?

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump made his “victorious” return to the White House and shook hands with President Joe Biden.

A short time later, Trump nominated Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida as attorney general. No, that’s not a headline from The Onion, though it’s bound to be fuel for ongoing skits on “Saturday Night Live.” Seriously. Who talked Trump out of nominating “the late, great” Hannibal Lecter? But wait, there’s more: Former Democratic congresswoman (and 2020 presidential candidate) Tulsi Gabbard has been nominated as director of national intelligence — making her, perhaps, the biggest oxymoron of the many morons being nominated by Trump to fill out his new administration. 

We are deep in darkness, before a four-year storm that, according to those Trump has already appointed to his staff, will be replete with violence against immigrants, overwhelming tariffs, profuse and criminal lies, the further fracturing of our country, a desecration of the Constitution and many other forms of villainy — all of which will be conveniently blamed on Joe Biden and the Democrats in an unending stream of calumnious statements backed up by Elon Musk on his de facto state media operation.

Meanwhile, as the Republicans are talking about eating cats and dogs, the Democrats are eating their own.

Look at the withering commentary from Bernie Sanders: “It’s not just Kamala,” he said. “It’s a Democratic Party which increasingly has become a party of identity politics, rather than understanding that the vast majority of people in this country are working class. This trend of workers leaving the Democratic Party started with whites, and it has accelerated to Latinos and Blacks.”

Many Democrats now say their party went too far left and are declaring that “woke is broke.”

Jon Stewart called that “crap,” at least to some extent, arguing that Democrats by and large campaigned like old-style Republicans. They certainly brought out disaffected members of the GOP to campaign for Kamala Harris. In 2016, Hillary Clinton, while accepting the nomination in Philadelphia, told the Democratic convention that if you had supported the party of Reagan, you were with the Democrats. So Stewart has a point. So does Sanders. 

Meanwhile, the New York Times, in a “news” article — I use that term very lightly and broadly — gave us their opinion about a “depressed and demoralized Democratic Party,” which has begun a “painful slog into a largely powerless future.”

There’s nothing like opinion parading as facts to make you happy. Want a salient fact that’s often overlooked? We don’t vote. As important as this election was, about half of all registered voters didn’t show up to the polls. A statistical minority of voters consistently elect our presidents.

Do we talk about that in the press? Not enough.

Instead, we talk out of our collective posteriors. Take, for example, Jeffrey Toobin of CNN. Trump announced the creation of something he called the Department of Government Efficiency on Tuesday, and said it would be run by Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Let us put aside for a moment that Trump assigned two people to head up a department concentrating on efficiency.

Toobin said live, on CNN, that the pair would have limited success because “there is a very boring and very important law called the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs how the government moves along in terms of changing how it works.” He predicted that Musk and Ramaswamy will become bored and quit their advisory roles because of the massive red tape involved in changing the government.

He might be right about that. But why am I listening to Toobin say anything? What he did on a video conference call should have been the end of his career. He’s an unserious man trying to comment on serious issues. Maybe he’s perfect for the Trumpian times in which we live. But, more importantly, he’s seriously mistaken about how bad things can get.

Musk responded to his new job by posting on X that the “merch” will be great. Yes, good government is all about the merch.

Understand, after the sound and fury, what we’re really seeing here: Trump placing people in power who will be subservient to him, even more so than in 2016. The reason is clear.

The Supreme Court gave Trump the right to take any “official” action with impunity. If Trump decides to strike, and he will, SCOTUS will back him up. All Musk and Ramaswamy have to do is say, “Hey boss, we think you should cut ... [fill in the blank].” Trump takes that “official” action and the Supreme Court backs him up. End of story. He has unlimited immunity for anything that falls under that enormous umbrella. 

Of course, Toobin is part of a much bigger problem that’s ongoing in the press. Until Ronald Reagan threw out the fairness doctrine and all restrictions on media ownership (which was followed by similar actions from every succeeding president), people mostly trusted their newspapers, along with radio and TV news. 

Cause and effect. 

We are long overdue for a reintroduction of the guidelines that offered some degree of trust in the fourth estate. 

Calling for that type of regulation would actually support free speech, destroy media monopolies and provide us with a fertile ground of vetted facts that could lead to cogent, meaningful discussion on issues of public debate. Allowing social media platforms to publish disinformation, often anonymously, promotes dishonesty and maximizes profits for those platforms at the expense of the audience they exploit. Worse yet, it poisons the well of information from which we all drink. 

Going forward, if you want reliable information you have to reintroduce the regulations that stress facts over profits. These regulations must include social media. And no, that is not censorship. 

It’s a promotion of facts over dangerous propaganda. Once upon a time, we all understood this. There is a lot of nuance on this issue. You can’t shout fire in a crowded theater when there is no fire. Libel and slander are not protected speech, but satire most certainly is. Courts of law decide the areas of disagreement. Anti-SLAPP laws protect small and independent publishers against corporate bullies. But please: Keep on tweeting out simplistic, misleading or downright false accusations in anonymity. That’s so helpful in solving difficult and important problems — by further dividing the electorate at public expense, while the rich keep getting richer.

But the way things are right now, do not expect the members of the press to stand up in great numbers against Trump. Their bread is buttered by publicly fellating him and his minions whenever possible.

Those who do stand up to him have the deck stacked against them in this corporate environment. Some journalists have wondered whether our lives could be in danger if we push back against Trump. 

That’s a complicated question too, and the answer demands nuance.

I covered the first Trump administration, all four years of it. I had to defeat him three times in federal court to keep my press pass, which his administration tried to take away. That was the greatest threat we faced from Trump, honestly: kicking us out of the White House.

He routinely called us “fake news” and insulted us. But I never feared for my life from Trump or his staff, some of whom were highly professional and tried against all odds to get information to the press corps — unlike the Biden administration, which routinely ignored us and paid a high price for doing so. 

It was Trump’s supporters, often angry and stirred up by him, who were dangerous to our physical well-being. Some of us, through our news organizations, had to foot the bill for private security at various Trump rallies. 

Going forward, I expect it to get a lot more strident this time around. 

With the Supreme Court backing him, Trump will ban reporters the administration deems “fake news” or “enemies of the people.” He might yank press passes with impunity. He will manage the press personally, and try to make sure he gets exactly the reporting he wants.

I believe he will kneecap the White House Correspondents Association, by ignoring our recommendations and requests and possibly taking over assignment of seats in the Brady Briefing Room — traditionally the province of the WHCA. 

Interactions with the press will be tightly controlled and will give the appearance Trump wants to maintain — being the man of the people — while limiting his interactions with journalists to those of whom he approves. That’s what he did most recently on the campaign trail.

I can also envision that his antagonism toward reporters might extend to a variety of criminal, civil and financial investigations.

But honestly, no, I do not see physical risk from Trump in the offing. He won’t need to do that.

If that happens, it will come from his supporters.

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Trump has named Taylor Budowich as a deputy chief of staff in charge of communications and personnel. Budowich played a significant role in the campaign and in Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America, and also served as CEO of the super PAC that’s actually called MAGA Inc. 

Budowich has no formal training or experience in communications, but has effectively communicated and amplified Trump’s frequent lies. In June 2022, as the House select xommittee on the Jan. 6 insurrection began holding public hearings, Budowich told Insider: “The entire MAGA movement is united against this illegitimate committee and will work to ensure President Trump is defended against yet another Democrat show trial.”

The next month, as the Center for Media and Democracy reports, when committee co-chair Liz Cheney announced that Trump had attempted to contact an unnamed witness who was set to testify, Budowich shot back by tweet: “The media has become pawns of the Unselect Committee. Liz Cheney continues to traffic in innuendos and lies that go unchallenged, unconfirmed, but repeated as fact because the narrative is more important than the truth.”

What a joy it’s going to be trying to decipher whatever is said by whoever becomes Trump’s press secretary, with Budowich in charge behind the scenes. Don’t expect any enlightenment from those of us in the press room. Budowich and his staff will act as blunt-force trauma, applied to reporters.

Meanwhile, Trump’s choices just keep getting worse, and weirder. He picked Pete Hegseth, a Fox News host, for defense secretary. That’s going to go over great with the Joint Chiefs. It is already being reported that “Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history.” Was Carrot Top not available?

Others were quoted as saying, literally, “Who the f**k is this guy?” Well, he looks like a poor man’s Josh Brolin — with more makeup. 

Indeed. Who the f**k is he — and who are we? And we are all together.

Remember this: Trump is a client of Elon Musk. Musk is a client of Vladimir Putin. One Putin ally has said publicly that Trump has “obligations” to those who brought him into power.

As the Democrats try to climb over a continually lower bar with no success, the rest of us should remember that.

Our democracy is dead.

Long live our democracy.