The Washington Post has systematically altered its editorial policies to favor the actions and policies of Donald Trump.  Now there are additional signs that its news division is pulling punches in order to favor the president.  In an Oval Office session with the press last week, Trump was unaware that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had summoned hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals to Washington on short notice and without any reason for the order.  When Trump was asked about the meeting, he clearly was unaware of Hegseth’s order and tried to cover himself by saying that it was a “good idea for the secretary to be meeting with foreign general officers.”  There were no foreign officers involved in Hegseth’s order, of course, and Vice President J.D. Vance immediately jumped in to downplay the meeting, and change the subject.  The Post ignored Trump’s ignorance.

The same day, the Post, in two op-eds, gave false credit to Trump for standing up to President Vladimir Putin on Russia’s war with Ukraine.  Marc Thiessen, a right-wing polemicist, concluded that Putin “will regret treating Trump with such contempt,” and said that “Trump won’t back down in the face of Putin’s escalation.”  Thiessen ignored the fact that Trump and Vance had sandbagged Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House in February, and that Trump ever since has been washing his hands of the war that he promised to end in 24 hours.  More ominously, he ignored the fact that Trump’s wavering and waffling has enabled Putin to escalate his genocidal actions in Ukraine and threaten members of NATO with provocative overflights.

David Ignatius, a long-time apologist for the U.S. military and intelligence communities, credits Trump’s so-called tougher talk with giving Putin a “red line” in the war.  It’s absurd to believe that Trump has issued red lines in Ukraine or in Gaza for that matter.  Trump’s impulsive outbursts and escalating rhetoric can’t be seen as part of a new strategic path or even an indication of Trump’s future actions.  One thing is clear: every Trump threat and warning has led Putin to intensify military attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and to indulged in more threatening actions in Europe.  Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has similarly exploited Trump’s bluster and, as a result, thousands of innocent Palestinians are being killed or starved to death.

Trump further confuses the issue by crediting President John F. Kennedy with issuing a red line of his own in the Cuban missile crisis by imposing a quarantine in 1962 to stop future Soviet military deliveries.  In actual fact, Kennedy altered the quarantine to give more time for Nikita Khrushchev to retreat and then secretly promised to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey, which was part of the secret diplomacy that ended the confrontation.  Diplomacy was the key to ending the Cuban missile crisis.

As a result of the editorial interference and even censorship of some of its best writers, the Post’s leading journalists are packing their bags (and their Pulitzer Prizes) and heading to more open journalistic enterprises.  Ever since the owner of the Post, Jeff Bezos, killed an editorial in 2024 that endorsed Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, the paper has lost its leading luminaries to rival publications and media outlets.  A former executive editor of the P,ost, Marty Baron, wrote recently that Bezos was :basically fearful” of President Trump.  As a result of Bezos’ actions, hundreds of thousands of subscriptions to the Post have been cancelled.

E. J. Dionne, one of the nation’s best columnists, is now writing for the New York Times.  Ruth Marcus, a leading columnist on judicial matters, is writing for the New Yorker magazine.  Marcus left the post after Bezos killed one of her columns, which immediately ran in the New Yorker.  Carol Leonnig, a leading investigative reporter, has joined the investigative staff of MSNBC.  All three of them had won Pulitzers or were finalists in Pulitzer competitions.  Jennifer Rubin, a Post columnist for 15 years, was one of the first to leave.

The major beneficiaries of these departures have been the Post’s leading rivals, including the New York Times, The Atlantic, and MSNBC.  Jonathan Capehart, another Pulitzer Prize winner, is currently a TV commentator at MSNBC.  Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize cartoonist, left after several of her works were rejected.  David Shipley, the Post’s opinions editor, resigned to protest the change in the editorial direction of the paper under Bezos and the publisher, Will Lewis.  Other luminaries took buyouts to get away from Bezos’ authoritarian dictates, including veteran political reporter Dan Balz as well as excellent reporters such as Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, who joined The Atlantic.

It is particularly disconcerting that the mainstream media, which initially swallowed Washington’s lies about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan for decades before seeing the truth, is now pulling its punches on Trump’s policies in Ukraine and Gaza.  And now Hegseth has moved to limit journalists reporting from the Pentagon.  Hegseth’s new rules would restrict the reporting of unauthorized material, which would conflict with Supreme Court rulings in years gone by that limited “prior restraints on publication.”  This would represent a direct attack on the First Amendment, which was not tolerated by the Court in the wake of the Pentagon Papers.  Of course, Trump’s 6-3 majority on the court doesn’t provide any protections for the separation of powers or constitutional authority.

Authoritarian leaders such as Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orban, and Erdogan  have moved quickly to stifle the press, and the media have been slow to retaliate.  The Times’ Frank Bruni and Bret Stephens still believe that “Trump will not retreat.” Meanwhile, there is no better way to stifle democracy than to engage in press censorship, which the Founding Fathers certainly understood 250 years ago.

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