Notes on the Darkness
Is preserving democracy only a slogan for America's newspapers?
Since 2015, by my lights, we’ve been groping toward the realization that America is in the midst of an existential confrontation with a 21st century form of authoritarianism—one that puts the United States’s tradition of representative government and even its grasp on objective reality at risk.
For nine years now, Donald Trump has been the personification of this threat of authoritarianism, and the political movement he leads—which has grown to encompass virtually the whole Republican party—has been his instrument for bringing it into being.
Because Trump presents himself as a candidate for president, it’s common to frame opposition to his authoritarianism in electoral terms. To oppose Trump, in this view, is to side with the Democrats and the incumbent president in the election. As Ben Smith wrote introducing his recent interview with The New York Times’s top editor:
“I stopped by Joe Kahn’s modest office in the New York Times newsroom Thursday to ask him what some of his readers want to know: Why doesn’t the executive editor see it as his job to help Joe Biden win?”
With that strawman framework established, Smith and Kahn went on to have a comfortable conversation about how it’s not a newspaper’s job to favor one candidate over the other. A newspaper’s job, instead, is to give the voters information impartially.1 The voters’ job is to make their decision in a free and fair election, and we all then live with the consequences. It’s a tidy little answer.
But this is not a tidy moment. The truth is that no one genuinely expects the newspapers of America to “help Joe Biden win” by overlooking his faults or exaggerating his virtues. Instead, the hope among some readers is that the media won’t quit on the task they set for themselves back in the early days of 2017—keeping democracy alive in America by reporting the truth.2
In any case, defeating Trump at the ballot box is, at best, a piece of the equation for saving democracy. At least as important is resisting Trump’s subversion of the electoral system, overcoming any repetition of his violent attempt to seize power, and preserving the rule of law in the face of widespread intimidation campaigns from his movement.
Experience has shown that Trump and his fanatical followers are not willing to live with the consequences of a free and fair election that he doesn’t win. We saw the proof of this written in blood at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and in the long campaign of evidence-free 2020 election denial that preceded it, but the pattern was clear long before that. Trump never accepted that Ted Cruz won the Republicans’ Iowa caucuses in 2016. During the 2016 general election campaign, when Trump believed he would lose, he began spreading the same baseless claims of voter fraud that he would deploy to sow chaos when he did lose the 2020 election. Even after his inauguration, Trump refused to accept that he had lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, organized a voting integrity commission to investigate his lying claims of 3 to 5 million illegally cast ballots, and refused to accept its conclusions when it found no substantiation. Extensive examinations, prompted by Trump’s denialism, have failed to identify any evidence of fraud that could have changed the outcome of any election that he’s lost, yet his claims of fraud persist. Recently, Trump has once again said he won’t commit to honoring the results of the 2024 election. Trump’s record shows that it’s highly likely Trump’s defeat at the polls will be accompanied by another round of deceitful, unsubstantiated claims of fraud and another attempt to somehow seize power by force or other extralegal means.
The threat of extralegal violence that emanates from Trump is by no means limited to the electoral realm. It menaces anyone who acts against his interests.
Earlier this year, District Judge Lewis Kaplan turned to a panel of jurors in his courtroom in downtown Manhattan with a piece of advice. The jurors had just returned a staggering $83.3 million verdict against Trump in the rape defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll. Without elaborating, Judge Kaplan told them:
My advice to you is that you never disclose that you were on this jury.
While the judge didn’t provide his reasons, he didn’t really need to. It’s readily apparent to any observer of American life that any identifiable individual who deals a serious setback to Trump—or is in a position to deal one—attracts an extraordinary amount of intimidation, threats, and harassment, often from Trump himself, from the cloud of aides and operatives who do his bidding, and from his most fervent and extreme supporters. Moreover, this intimidation goes far beyond the typical (and already daunting) blowback that anyone who confronts a major public figure is likely to face.
In a recent filing in the stolen documents case in Florida, Special Counsel Jack Smith observed:
There is a clear and demonstrable pattern in which numerous people “have had their lives turned upside down” after being publicly identified as a participant in a proceeding involving defendant Trump.
Special Counsel Smith went on to describe some of the threats the government has observed:
The presiding district judge in the election case [Judge Chutkan] received a racist death threat; the Special Counsel and his staff have been subject to threats and harassment; the chambers of the justice presiding over the civil fraud case in New York [Justice Engoron] “have been inundated with hundreds of harassing and threatening phone calls, voicemails, emails, letters, and packages”; and potential witnesses against him are routinely subject to the sort of threats that “pose a significant and imminent threat to individuals’ willingness to participate fully and candidly in the process, to the content of their testimony and evidence, and to the trial’s essential truth-finding function.”
Special Counsel Smith’s warnings have been made manifest in Trump’s ongoing hush money trial in New York, where the presiding judge has found him in criminal contempt ten separate times so far for violating a gag order intended to protect witnesses, court staff, and jurors from threats and intimidation.
What does this all mean for journalism? In my view, one thing it means that covering Trump through the reductive lens of a presidential candidate—albeit an eccentric and troubled one—is essentially a category error.3
Trump is not just a candidate, not just a Republican, and not just a politician. He is objectively the leader of a nationalist, militant, authoritarian movement—one that bears pretty much all the hallmarks of Robert Paxton’s definition of a fascism.4 That movement came intolerably close to casting aside American democracy in January 2021. It threatens American democracy if Trump wins the 2024 election; it threatens American democracy if he loses the election; and it threatens America’s democratic, law-governed social order today, tomorrow, and every day with intimidation and violence no matter what happens this November.
Trump and his movement are in a dark place; they’re threatening to drag us all into the darkness with them; and they deserve to be covered that way.
In one of the odder beats of the Semafor interview, Kahn suggests that the information the newspapers ought to provide is driven by issue polling. The example he gives of a top issue for coverage, immigration, has not been near the top of any recent issue polling. And another issue the Times has obsessively covered, Biden’s age, isn’t anywhere in the polls.
On February 22, 2017, a month after the inauguration of Donald Trump, The Washington Post debuted a slogan beneath the name of the paper, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” that seemed to recognize the stakes of this struggle and to commit the newspaper to one side of it—to preserving democracy and keeping the lights on.
A few days after The Washington Post’s gambit, The New York Times ran a full page print ad that kicked off its own campaign.
The Times’s ads focused on the truth (“worth defending,” “more important now than ever,” “vital to democracy”). They came in the wake of the newspaper’s self-celebration over its decision to refer to the words of a sitting president as a “lie.” In the early days of his first term, Trump had lied repeatedly about topics large and small—from the size of the crowd that came to see his inauguration (larger than Obama’s in Trump’s telling, smaller in reality) to the defeat he had suffered in the popular vote (never happened in Trump’s telling, a margin of 3 million votes in reality). The Times had labeled the latter claim a lie.
Tweets from 2016:
Paxton’s definition, from The Anatomy of Fascism (2004):
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.