Trump’s Assault Demands a United Front– www.vanityfair.com
Source Link
Excerpt:
Donald Trump has been in office for only about two months, but his administration is on a supercharged march to exert complete control over both the media and academia. So much of this is right out of Project 2025, which involves concentrating executive power while castrating the judicial and legislative branches. I predicted last month that the latter two might be something of a bulwark, as they were last time, against Trump’s worst instincts. This time, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case: Congressional Republicans will seemingly rubber-stamp just about anything Trump wishes, while Democrats appear increasingly powerless against the GOP’s groupthink. Only the courts and the cratering financial markets have provided some checks on Trump—and he has unsurprisingly decided to ignore both.
That’s why I’ve spent so much time lately thinking about how we can protect the norms and institutions we still have. Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse appeared on my podcast last month to argue that Democrats should fight the “corruption” and “chaos” of “Trump and his creepy billionaires” by “hang[ing] together with persistent and relentless focus on the real danger we are facing.” That call for solidarity isn’t just applicable to Democrats; it also applies to the media and the university system, which Trump is targeting through a process of divide and conquer.
