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.
Yesterday’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.”
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.
-Robert Reich
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