Trump Wrecks America. His “Patriotic” Fans Cheer. Is There Any Bottom?

I was going to write one more liberal column expressing outrage about what Donald Trump has done to the White House this week, but then I thought: Why? What would be the point? The people who would agree with me would agree with me, and the people who wouldn’t wouldn’t, and the world would go on its merry way.

Of course the president’s destruction of the East Wing is beyond outrageous. It’s completely illegal and un-American—not just un-American, but anti-American: the unilateral, I-don’t-give-a-fuck desecration of a civic shrine that belonged to all the people. Democracies have appointed bodies that oversee such things. Dictators, actual and aspiring, ignore all that. Call it overreaction if you must, but I’m sure I’m hardly the only American to google “Albert Speer Germania” this week.

And yet, it’s probably only the third-most-outrageous thing Trump has done since Monday. To place, in horse-racing parlance, I’d put the pardon of Changpeng Zhao, who “invested” in the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency start-up and who pleaded guilty in 2023 to allowing his Binance crypto exchange to be used—get this now, and imagine a Democrat issuing a pardon to such a person—by, among other unsavories, Hamas’s military wing (not just plain old Hamas—its military wing!).

And taking the gold medal this week would be the $230 million extortion that the sitting president of the United States demanded from the Department of Justice. (I cannot believe I just wrote that sentence.) A Pahlavi-level tacky ballroom can always be torn down; these other corrupt precedents cannot be undone.

No—one more outraged liberal column won’t add much this week. The more interesting thing I’ve been thinking about lately is not the leader who perpetrates these acts but the people who allow them and cheer them. Because this is the truly maddening question, from a small-d democratic perspective. Authoritarian-fascist demagogues come along sometimes; that’s the world. But democratic societies stop them. Why hasn’t ours stopped Trump?

We are cursed with four categories of fascism enablers. The interesting question about each group is not merely what they are doing, but why: What motivates them? Let’s go through them.

First, obviously, are the Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court. Call them 1a and 1b, because I believe they have different motivations. The Republicans in the House and the Senate are mostly just tiny cowards who fear Trump, a possible primary challenger from the right, and most of all the MAGA base. The video clips that I hope they play over and over in future high school civics classes, assuming these thugs can’t fully erase our democracy, will be the ones of GOP legislators scurrying for the elevators as they deny having knowledge of Trump’s latest assault. Against stern competition, House Speaker Mike Johnson, the tiniest coward of them all, is the most pathetic exemplar of this: “I’m not gonna comment on something I haven’t read, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” he told reporters this week when they asked him about the DOJ bribe.

The six conservatives on the Supreme Court, in contrast, aren’t cowards. They know what they’re doing, and they have no voters to fear. We must assume that they are consciously creating the America they want. That’s most true of the two deepest reactionaries, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. But to varying degrees, it’s true of the other four conservatives, John Roberts very much included. The record they are leaving behind of these terse, barely explained pro-Trump shadow docket decisions will be their legacy—of shame, if we manage to restore democracy after Trump, or of glory, if we descend into a Hunger Games society.

Group two consists of the cowards in the corporate and business worlds who surely know on some level that Trump is dangerous. But they stay silent, for, I think, one of two reasons, or some combination thereof. One, they fear Trumpian retribution. Two, they want their taxes cut. Have a gander at this list of donors to Trump’s razing of the East Wing for his ballroom. Talk about a basket of deplorables. Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone. The Fanjul brothers, the megarich sugar magnates and welfare queens. Meta (Mark Zuckerberg). Amazon (Jeff Bezos). Palantir (Peter Thiel). Others are less blatantly offensive but obviously covering their corporate behinds. These are not by and large stupid people. On some level, they see what Trump is doing to this country. They just care more about other things.

Third come the right-wing “media” outlets that serve as Trump’s propaganda arms. Among this group again I think we see dual motivations. The first is the kind of cynicism exposed in those publicly released Fox News depositions relating to the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit: Trump is good for business, so they lie for him to make money. The second motivation is more genuine: They truly despise liberals and liberalism and think we must be stopped at all costs, even when it involves lying to their audiences for a higher purpose. This mixture of the insincere and the sincere may seem incongruous, but actually the two motivations mesh together perfectly: The insincerity ensures that they defend and minimize every single thing Trump does, while the sincerity drives their coverage of Democrats and liberals, although it too is salted with plenty of cynicism, as when they try to persuade their viewers that some kooky neo-Marxist tenured postmodernist professor stands in for American liberalism.

And finally—the MAGA faithful. Here let’s distinguish between the soft Trump supporters and the true red-hots. Of the 40 or 42 percent of Americans who still say they approve of Trump’s job performance, I’m guessing that a third or so are soft supporters. Some are swing voters. Some are evangelicals for whom a Democratic vote is basically out of the question. Some remember the first Trump economy fondly. There are lots of different motivations there, but what they have in common is that they don’t necessarily consider him America’s savior.

But that other two-thirds … I hesitate to say these are bad human beings. But their rage at certain developments in the United States over these last 30-odd years is so overpowering that their civic and small-d democratic instincts have been buried by the antagonisms Trump has brought to the surface of American politics. They once knew, or they know, or a part of them knows, that no actual leader should be calling human beings “vermin.” But that empathic impulse isn’t much match for rage, which can be quite exhilarating and liberating (we all must admit that we know this feeling from personal experience).

How deep does that rage run? We don’t yet know. We have yet to see its bottom. Tearing down part of the White House may lose him a portion of the softs, as polls suggest. But it won’t bother the red-hots, who’ll leap to point out, as I saw some nincompoop do on Newsmax Thursday night, that what Trump did was really no different from Barack Obama ordering the building of his basketball court. The pardon of Zhao is in fact the liberation of the crypto industry from the shackles imposed by Sleepy Joe. The DOJ bribe is money due to Trump fair and square. And so on and so on.

I sometimes wonder what it will take for some of these folks to peel away. What if ICE agents just start shooting people? They already are; but I mean en masse. I doubt even that will change anything. Things will change when the rage stops being exhilarating, and I doubt that happens anytime soon.

It takes all four of these groups to sustain Trumpism. If Republicans in Congress were doing their constitutional job, Trump would still be Trump but the legislative branch would have established the reality of limits. The corporate class could have said to him: We too know that we thrive best under democratic norms, and we cannot tolerate you breaking those. The right-wing media could still be basically pro-Trump while adhering more closely to the principles of conservatism than to genuflection before one man. And finally, his base too could at least from time to time acknowledge error on his part and demand that he adjust course.

But none of these things are happening. And it’s hard to see them happening anytime soon. Bad as this week was, it’s not close to the bottom we’re going to hit.

If you’ve heard any Republicans talk about Saturday’s No Kings marches across the country, you know what they’re calling them. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday referred to the marches collectively as a “hate America rally.” He continued: “Let’s see who shows up for that. I bet you see pro-Hamas supporters. I bet you see antifa types. I bet you see the Marxists in full display.” Many others on the right have echoed these sentiments over and over, and Fox News and the other state propaganda outlets have followed suit, thus washing the brains of their viewers into accepting, once again, the exact opposite of reality.

You will probably find the occasional Marxist or antifa type or even the odd Hamas enthusiast marching somewhere tomorrow, because this is still a free country, and people aren’t asked a series of litmus-test questions before they’re allowed to join the fray. But overwhelmingly, these are marches of mainstream Americans. These are marches of teachers, lawyers, laborers, service workers, accountants, nurses, Pilates instructors, bank tellers—everyone. These are marches of people who love their country and are horrified at what President Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing to it. These are marches of patriots. The real, actual, thoughtful, quiet, modest, non-flag-hugging patriots (because history teaches us over and over that the people who need to make a show of hugging the flag are often the people who hate a country’s true ideals but need to fool folks into thinking the opposite so they can trample on those ideals and have it called patriotism).

Have a gander at this map of march locations for tomorrow. There are 16 in Wyoming—a state notoriously pulsing with Hamasniks. There are 18 in Oklahoma, that veritable hornet’s nest of antifa hooliganism. There are another 18 in my home state of West Virginia (go, Morgantown contingent!), where Marxism has obviously taken deep root among an unsuspecting populace.

Once again, these are not mere lies from Johnson et alia. I make this distinction from time to time, and it’s worth making again here. A lie is a mere denial of truth—“I never said that” or “No, Mom, that isn’t my pot, I was just holding it for Mark.” What Republicans are doing here, as they do with such regularity, is more than lie. They invert the truth. They say its exact opposite. They do so with two express intentions: to make people believe that their political foes are doing that which they themselves are trying to get away with, and to make it easier to get away with defiling the Constitution.

But don’t ask me. Let’s ask James Madison. Imagine that the chief author of the Constitution and Bill of Rights could watch tomorrow’s events and observe the post-event spin. What would he think? Whose side would he be on? It’s obvious. He’d be with the marchers. And it’s not even close.

How do we know this? For a lot of reasons, but perhaps chief among them is Federalist 47, penned by Madison, which discussed the importance of separation of powers.

One of the hallmarks of Trump 2.0—and indeed, from a constitutional point of view, perhaps the hallmark—is the way that, as Trump has made so many moves to concentrate power in his own hands, the other branches of government have supinely gone along with absolutely everything. Congress under Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune is a joke, and as for the Supreme Court, well, it’s too tragic to be a joke.

We’ve seen many examples of both branches bending over for Trump at every turn, but arguably, the most egregious one just happened: Trump diverting other monies to pay troops during the shutdown. As TNR’s Matt Ford shows here, it’s blatantly illegal. The Constitution says clearly that Congress appropriates such funds. Trump claimed the power to do so as commander in chief, but he has no such power.

The Republican Congress has lain down and said fine. And the really pathetic thing here is that Congress could move a bill directing the payment of troops during the shutdown. It would pass easily. But that can’t happen because Johnson won’t call the House into session, because there’s a new Democrat waiting to be sworn in whose seating has potential ramifications for Trump with respect to the Jeffrey Epstein affair. Again, it all revolves around the wishes and perceived needs of Dear Leader.

As for the Supreme Court, it has given Trump practically everything he’s asked for. It has defied him on a couple of minor occasions, but even on the most notable of those, its holding was vague and pusillanimous: It ruled in early April that the administration must “facilitate” the return to the country of Kilmar Abrego García, but it also held that a district court judge had gone too far in ruling that the administration had to “effectuate” his return (he was finally returned to the United States in June). But on almost all other matters, the court has given Trump exactly what he’s wanted. And this week, during the Voting Rights Act hearings, we saw a court majority working nakedly to advance the partisan goals of one political party and its president.

Now—back to Madison.

Federalist 47 was Madison’s brief to the citizenry in favor of the concept of separation of powers—and his argument to them that powers were sufficiently separated in this new Constitution so as to guard against tyranny. Because tyranny was his great concern. In fact, he wrote: “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective [emphasis mine], may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

This accumulation has not, I admit, happened in a legal sense. But in practice, this is precisely where we are today. So had Madison been among us these last nine months to observe what Trump and the Republicans and the court’s majority have done, there is no question that he would say: “Yes. This is tyranny.”

I asked Michael Klarman of Harvard Law School, author of the amazing book The Framers’ Coup about the Constitutional Convention, for his thoughts on the relevance of all this. He emailed back:

Madison and other Framers believed that “ambition would counteract ambition,” by which they meant largely that Congress would check an autocratically inclined executive. Madison and the other Framers were not anticipating the development of a party system, which actually happened quite soon after the founding. Today, all that matters to Republican members of Congress is that they support Trump, whether he is hiding something in the Epstein files, nominating incompetent people to run agencies, destroying congressionally created agencies, murdering people off the coast of Venezuela, or sending troops into American cities to oppress the people. Cowardly, toadying members of Congress are providing no check whatsoever on a tyrannical executive. It is an abandonment of their oaths, really no different from their predecessors who resigned their positions to join the Confederacy in 1860–61.

And the courts? Klarman wrote, “Lower court judges are doing a great job in trying to check that executive. But the Supreme Court—out of some combination of fear, calculated effort not to be defied, and underlying agreement with much of Trump’s agenda—has mostly been complicit in Trump’s authoritarian project.”

This is tyranny. We’re not lurching toward tyranny. It doesn’t loom on some hypothetical horizon. It’s here. Right now.

Madison was right about tyranny. But obviously he was wrong that the Constitution was strong enough to guard against executive accumulation of power. He assumed, as Klarman put it, that the other branches would do their jobs. But Patrick Henry, the noted anti-federalist, turns out to have had the more sober view. In his speech against ratification, he anticipated people such as Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and John Roberts:

Where are your checks in this government? Your strongholds will be in the hands of your enemies. It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest, that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs, should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world, from the Eastern to the Western hemisphere, blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad?

The Americans who are marching Saturday are the Americans who embrace Madison’s principle but have sadly come to acknowledge Henry’s insight. And they—not Trump, not Johnson, not Roberts—are the people who truly love this country.

Johnson also said Wednesday that Saturday’s marchers are “the people who don’t want to stand and defend the foundational truths of this republic, and that’s what we’re here doing every single day.” As ever with these frauds, he was talking about himself. He may be dense enough not even to know it. But Saturday’s marchers know it all too well.

David Axelrod is far better known these days for occasionally wagging his finger at his fellow Democrats than for breathing partisan fire, so it caught my eye when he posted this on X Wednesday: “So far, the ICE gang has shot & killed an unarmed man & lied about the circumstances; shot a woman 5 times for obstructing their vehicle; roughed up elderly women and zip-tied small children; shot a clergyman in the face with a pepper ball; marched through downtown Chicago, masked and armed. And they’re not going after the ‘worst of the worse,’ [sic] as promised. Most of the people they’re snagging have clean records. Some are citizens. To be clear: This is NOT making Chicago safer. It’s state-sponsored mayhem; dangerous political theater calculated to provoke.”

Historians sometimes say that when societies are descending into fascism, it can be hard for the people to notice it in real time. Well, historians of the future, I’m here to tell you: We are noticing. Millions of us are noticing. And we are horrified and enraged. We are well aware: We once lived in a country that, for all its frequent imperfections, was a place where the rule of law was a broadly shared value and where leaders acted with democratic restraint. We now live in a country where there is no rule of law; where leaders, especially the president but also others who support him, spit on the idea not only of democratic restraint but of democracy itself; and where the timorous first reflex of nearly every member of one of our two political parties is, at virtually all times, to do precisely what the leader wants.

That’s fascism. It may be—for now—a comparatively mild form of fascism. Political opponents aren’t being jailed or shot, opposition media outlets aren’t being shuttered, and books aren’t being burned. But a lot of things are happening that are terrifying. And last year, we lived in a country where the three scenarios I just listed were barely conceivable. Today, we live in a country where they are more likely only a matter of time.

Let’s go back to Axelrod, and specifically, his use of the phrase “state-sponsored mayhem.” That is exactly what President Trump is imposing upon Chicago. To take just one of the incidents Axelrod cites: Pastor David Black of the First Presbyterian Church was with a small gaggle of protesters outside a Chicago ICE facility. Three agents stood on the roof of the two-story building as Black and the others stood on the sidewalk maybe 15 feet away from the building. Black raised his arms to the sky, as if in prayer. Someone who appears to be a fellow protester approached Black to confer with him. Next thing you see in this video is a considerable puff of smoke explode from Black’s forehead as he falls to the ground. That’s a clergyman. Exercising his First Amendment right (he’s fine, and he’s suing). Black later told CNN: “We could hear them laughing.”

Shooting an unarmed and peacefully protesting pastor is by definition an act of state-sponsored mayhem. State-sponsored mayhem starts at the top, with the president’s thuggish, lawless threat to imprison the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago (by the way—Greg Sargent speaks to said governor, JB Pritzker, on his Daily Blast podcast today). From there, the people with the uniforms and the badges and the guns get the message, and they go out and do the things Axelrod listed above.

Administration officials pile lie upon lie upon lie. With respect to Portland, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt refers preposterously to “the radical left’s reign of terror” there. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declares antifa to be “just as dangerous” as ISIS, which was killing perceived apostates by the thousands at its peak and raping little girls. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, rants nightly about armed confrontations that either don’t exist or exist solely because the administration creates them so it can have the footage that will air over and over on its propaganda network, Fox News. It’s all toward the purpose of erasing dissent, erasing democracy. As Zeteo’s Kim Wehle put it last week, reporting on two Trump-issued “national security” directives: “The president is taking steps to criminalize being anti-Trump in America.”

When a president and his aides are doing that, it’s no longer America.

When masked government thugs take potshots at a priest, it’s no longer America.

When a handpicked hack prosecutor with no prosecutorial experience indicts two honorable American citizens within a month of the president ordering their prosecutions, and when two real prosecutors quit rather than pursue these obscenely political prosecutions, it’s no longer America.

When the third-ranking official in the country, the speaker of the House of Representatives, delays the swearing-in of a duly elected member of that body because he knows she will vote to release files that potentially may shed light on unsavory behavior by the president, it’s no longer America.

When the presidential administration announces that it’s going after nonprofit charitable groups that have operated unmolested in this country for decades under Democratic and Republican administrations because they donate to causes the president disfavors, it’s no longer America.

When naturalized citizens are canceling overseas trips because they can’t be certain they’ll be welcomed back to their own country upon return, it’s no longer America.

When the Department of Education is bullying universities into agreeing to a “compact” under which they’ll promise not to “belittle” conservative ideas, it’s no longer America.

When the president and his family have used his office to enrich themselves to the tune of $3.5 billion in nine months, and when the Congress, controlled by the president’s party, refuses to do a thing about this rancid, dictator-level corruption, it’s no longer America.

When the Supreme Court of the United States has sold its soul to all this barbarity, it’s no longer America.

And when this thuggish dictator-wannabe is also a buffoonish man-child who sits there in his breathtakingly tacky Oval Office with his fake face and fake hair next to another head of state (the president of Finland) as he boasts yet again about passing a simple dementia test that a 10-year-old could ace, and we realize that this man-child is the sitting president, it’s no longer America, at least for anyone who cares about how we look to the rest of the world.

Historians of the future: Rest assured, millions of us know all this in real time. We are horrified, shocked, enraged, and ashamed. We are acting, in a thousand ways, to oppose it. This cannot, and will not, be how the United States ends.

President Donald Trump has finally told the truth about something. He’s embraced Project 2025. Anyone who believed his disavowals last year during the campaign is, of course, a fool. And the media, reporting those disavowals, looked foolish. Trump knew, as he has known all his life, that all you have to do is lie about something, and the press, following the rules of objectivity, will report straightforwardly what you said. So he largely got away with it. The Kamala Harris campaign tried to tie Trump to the project, as in this ad; but it didn’t manage to convey the project’s extremism with any force.

And now? The Democrats have another huge opportunity to hang Project 2025 around Trump’s neck. It should be easier now, for two reasons. One, it’s not purely hypothetical anymore. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, a community-driven initiative, the Trump administration has already checked off 48 percent of the project’s goals. Two, Trump and OMB Director Russell Vought’s open promises to shred the federal bureaucracy give Democrats a huge target. The question is, do they have the skill—and the guts—to hit it?

Alas, that question, as usual with the Democrats, should have a clear answer but doesn’t. The obvious strategy is to call all hands on deck and, now that Trump has said what he said, make this shutdown about not only Obamacare subsidies but two other things: about the looming job cuts themselves and about Vought personally because his name and his extremist, un-American goals to remake the United States as a Christian nation should be known to every American.

The first message should be simple: What Trump and Vought are about to do here is the second coming of Elon Musk and DOGE. The DOGE effort was not exactly popular: Last spring, poll after poll, like this one, showed that while the general concept of cutting the size of the federal government had appeal, people really didn’t like the way Musk and his minions were going about it. This time around, Democrats can plausibly say that it’s going to be worse. DOGE staffing cuts came to around 300,000. An estimated 750,000 federal employees are being furloughed due to the shutdown. Vought probably thinks most of them are expendable. It shouldn’t be hard to make these cuts deeply unpopular.

Second, tell Americans who Vought is, what he believes, the things he has said. He’s a Christian nationalist who believes Trump is “God’s gift” to America and wants the U.S. to be “a nation under God.” These are of course completely un-American ideas. Article 6 of the Constitution contains the “no religious test clause,” which applies to holding a public office or trust in the U.S.; but beyond that, the Founders were crystal clear that American citizenship and civil rights were open to all—as Thomas Jefferson once put it, citing John Locke, neither “Pagan nor Mohametan [Muslim] nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth [of Virginia] because of his religion.” George Washington said that “religious controversies are always more productive of acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause,” and therefore each should be left to worship (or not) as he or she saw fit. I could go on and on and on.

Making these two arguments requires the Democrats to take two moral and unambiguous stands. The first is in defense of an activist federal government. The second is in defense of the religious pluralism upon which this country was founded.

I’d love to be able to write with confidence that I think they’ll do it. Odds are they won’t. Most of them shy away from moral arguments. They’re afraid—not all of them, but most of them—to go toe to toe with Trump on a topic like religion. There is utterly no reason for this. Most Americans agree with them. Polls will often show that a disturbingly high percentage of Americans want this country to be a Christian nation, but when you look at crosstabs, you see quickly that the number is high because among Republicans it’s around 75 percent. It’s well under 50 percent among independents, which is the number that matters. Still, the Democratic Party has trained itself over the years to stay away from such matters.

They also just don’t speak with one voice and hold together. Right now, the only poll I’ve seen on the shutdown looks very good for them. A Washington Post survey found that respondents blamed Trump and Republicans over Democrats by 47 percent to 30 percent. Interestingly, independents blamed Republicans over Democrats by 50 percent to 22 percent.

You’d think and hope that would gird Democrats’ loins. And maybe it will. But remember: Three Senate Democrats voted for the Republican version of the bill to reopen the government. Four more need to cave for the Republicans to get their bill through. Democratic senators are heading back to their states this weekend, where they’re going to hear from furloughed federal workers about how they need their paychecks.

In a sense this is understandable and defensible. Democrats tend to care about these people’s actual lives, whereas Republicans don’t give a crap about them since they’re just a bunch of deep-state Trump haters anyway. Also, Democrats genuinely don’t want to see hundreds of thousands of federal employees lose their jobs, both on a simple human level and because Democrats believe these people are doing important work.

So that’s all nice. But at the same time, the Democrats could win this fight. If the Post poll is right, they’re already winning. And now that Trump has introduced the unpopular Project 2025 into the equation, the door is open for the Democrats to make Trump’s posture here even more unpopular. Also, I’d argue that to the extent the shutdown will result in chaos, well, people understand that it’s Trump who is the sower of chaos in this country. Majorities are far more likely to blame Trump for chaos than Democrats.

So the Democrats can win this. They need to stand together and stick to principles. I just wish history suggested they were better at this.

The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel was about the 2,786th objectionable thing this second Trump administration has done. Many of its attacks on the American way of life have been utterly horrific—some have been direct assaults on the rule of law, others have sent completely innocent human beings to detention camps. So why does an action taken against a late-night host stand out?

It’s a frontal attack on the one element of our social contract that nearly everyone, from left to right, agrees on and values more than anything: freedom of speech. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention in the summer of 1787 decided against including a Bill of Rights, confident that everyone would understand that the federal government would exercise only the powers enumerated in the document itself. But many critics, mostly those known as the anti-Federalists, insisted that that wasn’t enough. They said: Add a list of specifically enumerated rights, or we’re not ratifying.

And so, James Madison, who had been a strong opponent of such a list in 1787, turned around and, as a member of the first U.S. Congress representing the fifth district of Virginia, drew up the list the critics demanded. His original list included 17 rights. Congress passed 12, and the states ratified 10.

There was never any question as to which right would be enumerated first. The First Amendment concerns both religion and speech, but over the centuries, freedom of worship has grown less contested, and it has been the cause of free speech rights for which people have fought and gone to prison. Historically, most attempts to suppress speech have come from those in power trying to silence various forms of protest or dissent (hence, from the right, generally speaking). Recent years have seen the emergence of a small but vocal anti–free speech left, whose presence is mostly limited to social media and college campuses, and which is about to make Bari Weiss a very rich woman.

But the vast majority of us agree: Free speech is inviolate and applies to all of us, even those with noxious views. A poll last year found that 63 percent of Americans considered free speech “very important.” It was second only to inflation and ahead of crime, health care, immigration, and seven other issues. Not bad for an abstract idea.

But abstract ideas last only as long as those who have power—political and financial power—agree that they should last. James Madison couldn’t have contemplated Donald Trump. And he never would have imagined Perry Sook and Chris Ripley.

Wait, who are Perry Sook and Chris Ripley, you ask? They are the men, Sook in particular, who made this Kimmel cancellation, this direct attack against free speech, happen. Their names don’t appear in many news stories. More people need to know who they are.

Sook is the CEO of Nexstar Media Group. He started the company in the 1990s with one local television station, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Today, Nexstar owns 197 stations. It also operates NewsNation, the cable news channel trying to compete with Fox, CNN, and MSNBC. NewsNation is where disgraced CNN anchor Chris Cuomo landed, and its “talent” is somewhat ideologically mixed. But Sook, 66, has dropped broad hints in past interviews about his own leanings. Last November, he expressed the hope that “fact-based journalism will come back into vogue, as well as eliminating the level of activist journalism out there.” You might think that by “activist journalism,” he means, you know, the cable news network that paid a $787 million settlement to a private company to avoid being forced to admit that it told lies about the 2020 election. But you’d be wrong. On Wednesday, he showed us what and who he means by “activist journalism”: Jimmy Kimmel, over one comment that right-wing social media went to town on.

Chris Ripley is the CEO of the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Sinclair is better known than Nexstar. It vaulted to public prominence after that chilling 2018 video went viral of dozens of local Sinclair anchors reading from the same Orwellian script about “fake news.” Sinclair is more avowedly right-wing than Nexstar. But they both passionately share and are pursuing one central right-wing goal: the end of media regulation in the United States. Under FCC rules, no single owner can reach more than 39 percent of households.

These kinds of regulations go back to the 1920s, when radio first hit the scene, and they were designed to make sure that Americans heard a range of voices. No one on either end of the political spectrum challenged them for decades. In the late 1960s, a Pennsylvania right-wing radio preacher (why is it always people like this?) went on air to smear a local journalist who had attacked Barry Goldwater. The matter went up to the Supreme Court, which held—unanimously, left to right—that the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine was consistent with the First Amendment: That is, the court said, yes, the exposure to opposing viewpoints was an essential part of democracy.

Traditional news and speech values, imperfect though they were, held for about six decades. Then merger mania hit in the 1980s, and we began to understand that media companies were companies—were interested in profit more than civic ideas such as truth and free speech. At the same time, the Reagan administration started going after the Fairness Doctrine. Later came Rupert Murdoch and Fox. Then came merger after merger after merger. Sad to say, it was Barack Obama’s FCC, under Chair Julius Genachowski, that finally killed off the Fairness Doctrine officially, but it had been long since functionally dead anyway.

Right now, Sook awaits FCC approval of a merger that will allow Nexstar to be in more than 39 percent of American homes. And Sinclair wants to grow and grow. And that is what happened Wednesday night. Sook announced that his 32 ABC stations would not broadcast Kimmel’s show. Sinclair, with its 30 ABC affiliates, made a similar announcement shortly thereafter. And ABC—or really, Disney—caved.

Even so, this might not have been quite the crisis it is with someone else in the White House. Under President Kamala Harris, for example, would Sook and Nexstar even be petitioning a Democratic FCC for this merger? Probably not. The current Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, has clearly stated her opposition (to TNR’s Greg Sargent, among others) to what Chairman Brendan Carr did in threatening ABC and Kimmel. Recent Democratic FCC Chairs Jessica Rosenworcel (Biden) and Tom Wheeler (Obama) have been strong voices for media diversity. It seems to me a safe bet that under President Harris, none of this would be happening.

But she is not in the White House. Donald Trump is. And a right-wing hero was just assassinated. Trump and his movement will use Charlie Kirk’s murder to justify any number of unconstitutional and illegal actions. And it filters down from them. Clemson University has fired five faculty and administrators. Teachers are losing their jobs over their social media posts about Kirk. And it sure isn’t Trump firing them. He has created an atmosphere of fear that many, many others on down the right-wing food chain, from Sook and Ripley to local school administrators, will zealously enforce.

And that’s why this week is different. It pitted a near-universally cherished American value against a combination of corporate power and authoritarian contempt for that value—and the value was smashed to pieces.

If you’re terrified of where all this may end, you are right to be. Stephen Colbert is gone; Kimmel, possibly gone for good (I hope not). CBS is becoming conservative. Skydance, the company handing CBS to Bari Weiss, may be about to take over CNN. The Washington Post is cracking up. The New York Times faces another one of Trump’s $15 billion lawsuits. In this next year or two, we may well be counting on the Times to do what CBS and ABC have refused to do and fight this battle to the bitter end.

The text of the First Amendment was edited down from Madison’s original language. His first-draft passage on speech and the press said: “The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.”

I wish that language had remained—it’s clearer and more emphatic, especially that “inviolable” part. It might have stiffened the backs of the people we’re going to be counting on to preserve free speech in this country and made it harder for right-wing federal judges to chip away at these rights. It would not, alas, make any difference to tyrants, and as of Wednesday night, it’s clearer than it ever was before that tyranny is where we’re headed.