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Donald Trump banned MS Now, CNN, and Politico from the White House this weekend, and the media is in an uproar. They have every right to be. It is an unprecedented attack on the First Amendment from a president who has never once demonstrated respect for the Constitution he swore an oath to. The courts will likely undo it. I hope they do, quickly. I feel for the reporters who showed up to work yesterday and found out they’d been locked out for the crime of doing their jobs.
And I want you to notice what else happened at almost exactly the same moment.
The Washington Post published a report that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth have been lying about the number of American service members killed in this illegal war in Iran. They’re lying about the dead. They’re lying about the wounded. They’re lying about the condition of our bases in the Middle East. They’re lying about our missile capabilities and they’re lying about Iran’s. And they are refusing to give the families of the dead the benefits those families are owed — because the president won’t categorize this as a war, because categorizing it as a war would force Congress to do its constitutional job and actually vote on it.
Read the article when you have a minute. It is one of the most sickening things I have seen from this administration, and I have seen a lot.
It is also, for the most part, not what the media is talking about today.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you Donald Trump is some Machiavellian genius. He obviously isn’t. He’s a rabidly stupid moron who is crashing our economy, getting people killed, and careening his own party off a cliff six weeks before the midterms. But he does understand one thing at a bone-deep level, and it’s the only thing he’s ever been good at: the press loves nothing more than covering the press. Kick the press corps and they will spend three days talking about the press corps. He’s not a chess player. He’s a guy who has figured out which button makes the noise.
And we bit. Again.
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My entire X feed today is the media ban. Every cable hit I’ve seen today is the media ban. It is not the economy. It is not the corruption. It is not the fact that our own government has been lying to us about how many Americans it has gotten killed in a war it started without authorization. That’s the trade we just made, and we made it in about ninety minutes.
I am not telling you the press ban doesn’t matter. It matters. Freedom of the press is not a side issue, and I’ll be right there in that fight. What I’m telling you is that there are families in this country right now grieving a child, a husband, a wife, a parent who served — people who did something braver than anything I have ever done in my life, who put their bodies between the rest of us and the worst things in the world — and those families cannot get acknowledgment from their government. They cannot get the benefits they are owed. They cannot even get the country to say out loud what happened to the person they loved. And the reason is paperwork. The reason is a political calculation about a congressional vote.
I keep thinking about the day Donald Trump used a dead soldier’s casket in a fundraising email. Do you remember that? It was a blip. Two days of coverage and then it was gone, buried under the next thing, which was buried under the next thing.
That’s the part that has really gotten to me this afternoon. The sheer volume of it. I know I’m not the first person to say this, but if you gathered every person on this planet and ranked them by how much they remember about this administration, I have to be somewhere near the top of that list. It’s my job. It’s been my life for a decade. And even I have forgotten dozens of genuinely horrific things these people have done. That’s not an accident. That’s the strategy. Flood the zone until nothing sticks, until outrage becomes weather, until even the people whose entire profession is paying attention can’t hold it all in their heads at once.
So here’s where I land, on a Saturday, in my office, writing a newsletter I had no plans to write on a day I meant to spend with my family.
The corruption, the attacks on our democracy, the destruction of our economy, the grotesqueness of this administration — it is unprecedented in American history. Which means the accountability has to be unprecedented too. And the reforms that make sure this can never happen again have to be unprecedented as well.
I don’t care what wing of the Democratic Party you come from. I don’t care about your lane, your donors, or your careful positioning. If you are not prepared to use power — to hold these people accountable to the fullest extent of the law, to claw back the money Trump and Jared Kushner and the rest of them have stolen from the American people, to transform this system of government so it serves the public instead of a handful of corrupt tech billionaires, to put power back in the hands of working people who are outworking every politician and every bureaucrat in that White House — then you are not getting my vote. You’re just not.
It is time to elevate a different kind of politician.
Because understand what we have learned this week. If you will lie about how many Americans died in an illegal war you started, six weeks before an election, you will lie about anything. You will hurt anyone. And you are never, ever going to produce a single idea that makes one person’s life better. These are the worst among us, and a country cannot survive if people like that are not exposed daily, shamed daily, and held accountable for their crimes.
So no, I’m not going to spend today on the press room. I’m holding those military families closest to my heart. They deserve better than a government that won’t even say their names, and they deserve better than a country that’s looking the other way because the president threw a shinier object into the room.
That’s where I’m at today. That’s me laying my heart on the line, on a weekend, when I’d rather be with my kid.
I love you guys. Enjoy your weekend. And take whatever you’re feeling right now and turn it into some kind of action — that’s worth infinitely more than the feeling.
We know he’s a malignant narcissist but the piece that often gets overlooked is that’s he’s very much a sadist. So when people implore him to think of the people of this nation who are hurting, I shudder. Please don’t remind him we are here. He will only give the thumbscrews another twist!
Beautifully and truthfully written, Mikr. Thank you. I hope your message gets passed around to the right people -- and the wrong people who follow this idiot.