I want to talk today about the media’s coverage of the Trump-Vance-Musk coup.
I’m not referring to coverage by the bonkers right-wing media of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and its imitators.
I’m referring
to the U.S. mainstream media — The New York Times, The Washington Post,
the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Public
Radio — and the mainstream media abroad, such as the BBC and The
Guardian.
By not calling it a coup, the mainstream media is failing to communicate the gravity of what is occurring.
Thursday’s
opinion by The New York Times’ editorial board offers a pathetic
example. It concedes that Trump and his top associates “are
stress-testing the Constitution, and the nation, to a degree not seen
since the Civil War” but then asks: “Are we in a constitutional crisis
yet?” and answers that what Trump is doing “should be taken as a
flashing warning sign.”
Elon
Musk’s meddling into the machinery of government is a part of the coup.
Musk and his muskrats have no legal right to break into the federal
payments system or any of the other sensitive data systems they’re
invading, for which they continue to gather computer code.
This
data is the lifeblood of our government. It is used to pay Social
Security and Medicare. It measures inflation and jobs. Americans have
entrusted our private information to professional civil servants who
are bound by law to use it only for the purposes to which it is
intended. In the wrong hands, without legal authority, it could be used
to control or mislead Americans.
By
failing to use the term “coup,” the media have also underplayed the
Trump-Vance-Musk regime’s freeze on practically all federal funding —
suggesting this is a normal part of the pull-and-tug of politics. It is
not. Congress has the sole authority to appropriate money. The freeze
is illegal and unconstitutional.
By
not calling it a coup, the media have also permitted Americans to view
the regime’s refusal to follow the orders of the federal courts as a
political response, albeit an extreme one, to judicial rulings that are
at odds with what a president wants.
There
is nothing about the regime’s refusal to be bound by the courts that
places it within the boundaries of acceptable politics. Our system of
government gives the federal judiciary final say about whether actions
of the executive are legal and constitutional. Refusal to be bound by
federal court rulings shows how rogue this regime truly is.
Earlier
this week, a federal judge excoriated the regime for failing to comply
with “the plain text” of an edict the judge issued last month to
release billions of dollars in federal grants. Vice President JD Vance,
presumably in response, declared that “judges aren’t allowed to control
the executive’s legitimate power.”
Vance graduated from the same law school I did. He knows he’s speaking out of his derriere.
In
sum, the regime’s disregard for laws and constitutional provisions
surrounding access to private data, impoundment of funds appropriated
by Congress, and refusal to be bound by judicial orders amount to a
takeover of our democracy by a handful of men who have no legal
authority to do so.
If this is not a coup d’etat, I don’t know what is.
The
mainstream media must call this what it is. In doing so, they would not
be “taking sides” in a political dispute. They would be accurately
describing the dire emergency America now faces.
Unless
Americans see it and understand the whole of it for what it is rather
than piecemeal stories that “flood the zone,” Americans cannot possibly
respond to the whole of it. The regime is undertaking so many
outrageous initiatives that the big picture cannot be seen without it
being described clearly and simply.
Unless Americans understand that this
is indeed a coup that’s wildly illegal and fundamentally
unconstitutional — not just because that happens to be the opinion of
constitutional scholars or professors of law, or the views of Trump’s
political opponents, but because it is objectively and in reality a
coup — Americans cannot rise up as the clear majority we are, and
demand that democracy be restored
~ Edward Johnson