1/3/25

COUNTERING THE TRUMP CATASTROPHE
Three good ideas

 

HERE ARE THREE EXCELLENT IDEAS – the kind of imaginative thinking that's needed to counter the Trump catastrophe.

• FREE-PRESS DEFENSE SUPERFUND – A massive fund to combat news censorship and intimidation, taking the financial and strategic burden off the shoulders individuals and organizations targeted by Trump.
• WASHINGTON POST RESCUE – In which the country’s troubled, second-best news organization would be converted to non-profit status, and hopefully endure as a major source of reliable information.
• DEMOCRATIC PARTY MESSAGING “WAR MACHINE” - The Democratic Party would create an aggressive communications effort to target destructive Trump policies, contrasting them with Democratic alternatives.

    These three ideas are just small steps in confronting the horror that already is unfolding as a result of last year's election.
     They may be impractical.
     But they represent the kind of imaginative,  concrete steps that are needed  to prevent or mitigate the barbaric political and cultural consequences of the election.
     The sweeping nature of Trump’s victory – a clear win of his own,  plus MAGA’s takeover of Congress, in addition to an already captive Supreme Court – has left millions of Americans without obvious defenses.
     I, for one, remained shocked by the breadth of the election’s outcome, unsure how to proceed in the coming years, and frankly uncertain whether destruction of America can be prevented.
     But we have to try. The United States is too great, both as a democracy and as a philosophical concept,  to give into despair and bewilderment.
     The appropriate cliché, derived from both underdog sports teams and  long-shot lottery players, is especially important now:
     “You can’t win if you don’t play.”
     I wish I was an idea factory. I'm not. But I admire people who try , and I think we should celebrate everyone who makes a good-faith effort to invent what's possible.
     In that spirit, these three good ideas.
     All have this in common: information. Information will  attacked by Trump, because it’s the key to countering  his abuses and to reform and recovery.

FREE-PRESS DEFENSE SUPERFUND
     One Trump tactic will be to attack the press through  lawsuits and government actions intended to crush writers and organizations, not just with the outcomes, but the sheer expense and strain involved in fighting them.
     To counter this, Josh Marshall, founder and editor-in-chief of the “Talking Points Memo” website,  has written about one possible counter offense.
      He notes that there's been discussion  about “creation of an organization or fund which would take on the job of defending the various lawsuits, prosecutions and generalized legal harassment Trump will bring to the table in the next four years.”
      The effort would require a massive mountain of money and an army of lawyers and other expert staffers.
     Whenever a media outlet would be threatened, the Superfund would step in to shoulder the expense and determine the tactics to defend the attack, fighting fire with fire, punishing the perpetrators legally and financially.
     It would require both philanthropy by billionaires as well as small-fry contributions from thousands of individuals.
     The Superfund would help big outfits, like national newspapers and TV networks, as well as lone bloggers and small outlets like Marshall’s.
     “Trump’s retribution may focus on individuals,” Marshall writes. “But it’s a collective harm. So it makes sense to spread the cost of dealing with it.”
         Here's the link to how Marshall discussed the idea in one of his columns.
         As far as I know, no Free-Press Superfund  has materialized.
    
WASHINGTON POST RESCUE
      News organizations on the scale of a major newspaper are still the most important source of reliable, in-depth information, even as the industry itself has withered.
     The “paper” part isn’t important. What counts is the hefty "news" resources of a New York Times and a Washington Post.
     What has distinguished newspapers in the past has been their enormous newsrooms  – staffed with hundreds of reporters, plus editors, photographers, artists, technologists.
      And it’s not enough to have just one.
     The New York Times appears now to be financially successful, and it IS a great paper. But it has both massive and minuscule  faults for the simple reason that it's run by humans. It needs competition.
      When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos brought the Post  years ago, it seemed that the Times had a needed counter-balance, and, indeed, the Post flourished during Trump’s first term.   

ANN TELNAES' cartoon

 But it’s fallen on difficult times and is losing money. Bezos shouldn’t be required to subsidize the paper indefinitely - and he won't.
     Further, he’s shown himself to be an increasingly flawed owner, quashing the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the election and shamelessly sucking up to Donald Trump.
     Recently, some top reporters have jumped ship to work for The Atlantic magazine, and the Post's top cartoonist, Ann Telnaes quit, when the paper  killed a cartoon mocking Bezos' and other billionaires' seeming to buy Trump's favor.
    
     Press critic Dan Froomkin suggests that Bezos turn the Post into a non-profit organization, guaranteeing its independence.
      Here's how he put it:
     "The good news is that there is a way out of this mess – a way out that would restore the Post’s grand tradition of independence and speaking the unvarnished truth to power.
    "It would also reestablish Bezos’s reputation as a great philanthropist.
Bezos must relinquish ownership of the Post to a nonprofit organization, devoted to journalistic independence."
     Froomkin suggests that Bezos could get a big tax benefit in the process. I wonder whether Bezos might fund the non-profit with a huge endowment, parting with just a fraction of his Amazon billions.
     “We need the Washington Post,” Froomkin writes. “The only way to save it, Jeff Bezos, is to let it go.”
     Here's the link to Froomkin's column.
     I'm not suggesting we hold our breath for Bezos to adopt the idea.
     Which doesn’t mean its not an inspired  proposal.

DEMOCRATS’ MESSAGING “WAR MACHINE”
     The cruelty, stupidity and impracticality of the coming Trump administration will offer an easy target for critics, especially  the Democratic Party.
     But so far, Democrats have failed to speak with a strong, persuasive and unified voice.
      Indeed, the party’s several factions have seemed more interested in either fighting among themselves over the election loss or finding common ground with Republicans.
     U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of my home state – Rhode Island – is having none of that.    

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U.S. SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE

 Instead, Whitehouse wants the party to come up with a communications “war machine” that will attack Republicans.
     Whitehouse made the proposal in a letter to chairpersons of state Democratic parties, a letter  reported by Politico, the online news outlet.  Politico wrote:
     "Whitehouse argued that Democrats have no institutional and centralized setup to attack the GOP, writing (that) Republicans 'rapidly and effectively deploy false narratives, while we struggle to bring true ones to bear.' "

      “We in Congress customarily say we’re ‘fighting’ for things when we really mean working or toiling,” Whitehouse said. “A fight means a defined adversary, a battle strategy, and actual punches thrown. Done well, it involves exposing and degrading your adversary’s machinery of warfare.”
     I think Whitehouse is on to something. The Democrats’ best hope isn’t to get along with Republicans or imitate them or to abandon long-held ideals, but to present Democrats as an attractive, convincing and inspired alternative to Trump and his acolytes.
     Here's the link to the Politico story.
     I  wasn’t able to find the text of the letter itself – it was written in advance of the national party’s selection of a chairperson on Feb. 1. Nor have I heard whether anyone in the party has seconded Whitehouse’s suggestion.
     But it sure sounds like a good approach.
                                                        * * *
     As I've noted, none of these ideas will bring down the Trump administration.
     In fact, none are likely to happen.
     But what they have in common is the kind of thinking that is needed to slow, stop and reverse the evil that Trump will unleash when he's sworn in Jan. 20.
      Fresh, imaginative, practical ideas - lots of them - are the key to unlocking the puzzle created by the election. It's a puzzle which only seems impossible until it's solved.