This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 4 episode of “The Briefing with Jen Psaki.”
American democracy is under threat. Right now, Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to undermine the validity of the midterm elections, using the same language he used in the lead-up to 2020 to sow doubt in the outcome if he did not win.
On Wednesday, Trump was asked about his recent calls for an unconstitutional federal takeover of our elections. “We can’t allow cheating in elections,” he told NBC News, adding, “If they [the states] can’t do it honestly and it can’t be done properly and timely, then something else has to happen.”
The president was also asked if he would accept the will of the voters in November if Republicans lost control of Congress. “I will, if the elections are honest,” Trump replied.
There’s a simple and obvious reason Trump is doing this. He knows he has become increasingly unpopular, and he does not think he and his party can win on their own.
A crucial element of that strategy — a critical part of how he tries to lie his way out of unpopularity — is to make it so that his narrative is the only one people hear.
A new Quinnipiac University poll found Trump’s approval rating is now just 37% — that’s three points down from where he was in that same poll just three weeks ago. On every issue from the economy to immigration to foreign policy, his approval rating continues to sink to new and deeper lows.
So Trump is doing what he has done his entire life: He’s trying to lie and cheat his way out of it. He’s denying that there is any way voters could reject the path that he and his party have put us on.
That’s not self-delusion; it’s an intentional strategy.
A crucial element of that strategy — a critical part of how he tries to lie his way out of unpopularity — is to make it so that his narrative is the only one people hear.
He doesn’t just do this by being louder than his critics or saying things that are more outlandish. Since taking office, Trump has done everything he can to cut off access to reliable information about his administration.
He banned The Associated Press from the White House press pool, killed all federal funding for public broadcasting, shuttered the overseas offices of Voice of America and took control of the military news outlet Stars and Stripes.
His minion at the Federal Communications Commission made mob-like threats against broadcast networks that have critical coverage of his administration.
Trump has also threatened news organizations with lawsuits over their reporting, sometimes getting them to fork over millions of dollars that they could have spent on quality journalism.
He put new restrictions on Pentagon reporters, forcing the most legitimate press out of the building altogether and replacing them with right-wing propagandists.
His FBI even took the extreme step of raiding the home of a Washington Post reporter who happened to be very well-sourced within the federal government.
At every turn, Trump has tried to cut off the public’s access to truth and to real, fact-based reporting about how he is running the country. What he desperately wants is for his warped version of the story to be the only thing out there and for his claims go unchallenged and unchecked.
All of the powerful people trying to get into his good graces know that and have been more than happy to help him do it — people such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who have allowed disinformation to spread like wildfire on the social media platforms they control.
Or the executives at Disney/ABC who gave Trump millions to settle a baseless lawsuit, and then pulled late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air before bowing to public pressure to reverse the decision.
Or billionaire father-and-son duo Larry and David Ellison, who took over CBS News, paid Trump millions to settle another baseless lawsuit and then handed editorial control to a right-wing apologist who had no experience running a major news organization.
Then there’s another Trump ally: the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
Just this past week, we watched the fourth-richest man in the world line the Trump family’s pockets by having his company spend $35 million to promote “Melania” — that’s on top of the $40 million Amazon already paid to acquire the documentary.
As that marketing blitz hit the airways, Bezos was seen cozying up to Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, for a photo op at his space company.
Then, on Wednesday, Bezos gutted one of America’s most storied newspapers, The Washington Post. The paper laid off more than 300 journalists and about 30% of its total workforce. The cuts reportedly affected all departments.
Anyone who tells you that this was all just about the bottom line is in need of some perspective.
Back in 2013, when Bezos bought The Washington Post, the purchase price was less than 1% of his total net worth. Since then, his net worth has skyrocketed about 10 times, from $25 billion to an estimated $260 billion.
To give you a sense of how his spending priorities have changed, consider that the price he paid to acquire The Washington Post back then was about half of what he spent to construct his big luxury superyacht.
As The New York Times’ Peter Baker pointed out, Bezos would have only had to spend what he makes in a single week to keep The Washington Post paper operating as usual for five more years.
While Wednesday’s cuts have been portrayed as a decision to address declining readership, it was decisions made by Bezos and his leadership team that helped put the paper on that path.
After Bezos decided to cancel The Washington Post editorial board’s tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, a quarter of a million readers canceled their subscriptions.
Despite that reaction from readers, Bezos and his leadership team continued their apparent effort to appease Trump.
A year ago, in what many saw as an attempt to placate the administration, Bezos overhauled the Post’s editorial board, narrowing editorial coverage to just two topics: free markets and personal liberties.
In retrospect, that is kind of ironic, since our tariff-loving authoritarian president has done his level best to destroy both of those things. Then, there’s the fact that when the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post journalist, Bezos stayed conspicuously silent.
But of course, none of that would ever be enough to stop the good journalists at The Washington Post from doing their jobs and angering Trump in the process — because that is what good journalists are supposed to do.
I spent more than 20 years answering reporters’ questions on campaigns, in the State Department, and over the years at the White House under two presidents.
I knew that when Washington Post reporters such as Karen DeYoung or David Ignatius called about a national security scoop when I was at the State Department, or Jeff Stein got his hands on an internal policy memo or Michael Shear had gotten wind of a campaign strategy, my life was about to become harder because they were and remain excellent, hard-hitting, well-sourced reporters.
Their jobs were never to make my life easier, or to make a president of either party feel good about himself, and it certainly was never to make billionaires more money.
It was to report information to the public. It was to bring to light what was happening inside the government and to hold to account the people leading it.
Adults who work in presidential administrations, even when they are being criticized, are supposed to understand that. Adults who take it upon themselves to buy legacy media institutions are supposed to understand that.
Bezos used to understand that — or at least he pretended to. In 2016, he spoke about the role of journalism at a conference and told the audience:
One thing that I think is not appropriate that Donald Trump is doing is working to freeze or chill the media that are examining him. It’s just a fact that we live in a world where half the population on this planet, if you criticize your leader, you’ll go to jail or worse. We live in an amazing democracy with amazing freedom of speech … That’s a very important cultural norm, and without cultural norms, the Constitution is just a piece of paper.
Those comments came three years after Bezos had already purchased The Washington Post, a paper that already had a long and storied history of holding powerful presidents to account. The paper that broke the Watergate story that ultimately led to Richard Nixon’s resignation. The paper that was among the first to connect the dots in the Iran-Contra scandal that would forever tarnish Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The paper that would go on to break major stories about Trump, from his horrific comments on the “Access Hollywood” tape to his efforts to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state to “find him” votes and overturn an election.
But now, Bezos appears willing to trample on the legacy of that storied American institution.
Allison Detzel contributed.
