Here in the United States this week, employees of the U.S. Institute of Peace, who rarely if ever made headlines beyond the fact that their agency is often the venue for White House Correspondents’ Dinner after-parties, were rousted from their place of work by armed authorities backing Elon Musk’s misnamed wrecking crew, the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk’s goons were apparently unmoved by the fact that USIP is not an executive branch agency and thus outside of DOGE’s alleged purview. The episode raised important questions about whether there are appreciable limits to the private property that DOGE can enter and take over. Unfortunately, much of the media stood there, dancing, as one more instance of Trumpian misrule unfolded behind them.
I wish more media professionals would realize this. Unfortunately, all around us I see more of the same exercises in sanewashing that we saw in the media’s disastrous run-up to the 2024 election. The aforementioned siege of the Institute of Peace is a perfect case in point. The New York Times characterized the matter as a “simmering dispute” between two sides that don’t have equal standing where the truth is concerned. But one is an agency that says, correctly, that it is “a congressionally chartered nonprofit that is not part of the executive branch,” and the other is a group of unaccountable thugs whose response is, “We don’t care.” Still, at least the Times made note of the fact that armed police were part of this “standoff.” One local news station left that out of their account.
Donald Trump did not fire any commissioners from the [Federal Trade Commission] today. Donald Trump declared that he had fired the commissioners. That is, functionally, he announced a desire that he should have the power to fire FTC commissioners and named the commissioners that he would fire if he were to have that power—a power which he does not, within the bounds of the law and the constitution, possess.
Or consider a report of a more recent vintage from The Washington Post: “Trump has a plan to remake the economy. But he’s not explaining it very well.” The piece reduces the trouble the president is having on the economic front—where for the first time he’s underwater on polls—to one in which he’s left the investor class with insufficient insight into his master plan. In this telling, the president’s claims of a soon-to-arrive golden age are taken at face value. “If the administration’s plan succeeds, the $30 trillion U.S. economy would be remade,” the article claims, adding that the United States was set to become “even more self-sufficient, producing more of its energy, lumber, steel and computer chips than ever before.”
Like I said, you can sound a little strange when you straight-facedly account for the plain facts of this administration. But what’s the alternative? Most of what the Trump administration does, every day, is act illegally or unconstitutionally, rampaging and pillaging the government in ways that we’d discuss in much clearer terms if it were happening in some other autocracy—like Myanmar, for example.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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