Month: January 2025

[Rough of cartoon killed.]

The Ann Telnaes sketch portrays Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos paying tribute to soon-to-be-again President Donald Trump. For the first time in her career, her cartoon was killed “because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary.” Telnaes explains (“Why I’m quitting the Washington Post”):

As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness”.

Yesterday, the New York Times reported Trump’s record fund raising totals since being elected a second time (“Trump Has Reeled in More Than $200 Million Since Election Day“):

It is a staggering sum that underscores efforts by donors and corporate interests to curry favor with Mr. Trump ahead of a second presidential term after a number of business leaders denounced him following the violence by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Trump has promised to gut the “deep state” and made various promises to industry supporters. Among the pledged donors for the inaugural events are Pfizer, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta, along with cryptocurrency firms.
The total haul for the committee financing his inaugural festivities — at least $150 million raised, with more expected — will eclipse the record-setting $107 million raised for his 2017 inauguration, according to three people briefed on the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to share internal financial information.

The Times article notes, “Contributions to inaugural committees … are one of the last major opportunities to financially support a second-term president.” The phrase “protection money” does not appear, though there is this:

David Tamasi, a lobbyist who has raised money for Mr. Trump, dismissed a suggestion that corporate interests were giving to avoid Mr. Trump’s wrath, though he acknowledged that some donors may be trying to atone for having previously maintained distance from the president-elect.
“It is a time-honored D.C. tradition that corporations are enthusiastically embracing this cycle in all manners, largely because they were on the sidelines during previous Trump cycles,” he said. “They no longer have to hedge their political bets.”

Time-honored indeed (though so are bribery, graft, and extortion). Count on Trump, over the next four years, to push this “D.C. tradition” to limits we’ve never seen before.

Post Script – January 7, 2025: Puck reports that Melania Trump scores a $40 million payout from Amazon.

As Josh Marshall noted (after the news of the documentary, but before Puck reported the dollar figure), Jeff Bezos is acting rationally. Marshall adds (“Oligarchia, Here We Come“):

This seems like a pretty good sign that the titans of corporate America don’t look content to just be friendly to Trump but definitely go all in as special friends to the incoming President. It may not be quite North Korea territory, though who knows? But it does look more and more like the model of post-Soviet republics in which you have a nominal democracy in which an emerging class of oligarchs bid for the favor of the strong man with accelerating and competitive feats of dignity-losing strength. First, ABC’s decision to take the L in Trump’s defamation suit. Now, Jeff Bezos’s decision to fund a look at the heroic story of Melania Trump’s rise from post-Titoist Yugoslavia to trendsetter in the field of arm-candying.

And, of course, other prominent oligarchs are on board. For those keeping score:

Donations to Biden’s inaugural fund in 2021:
Meta = $0
Tim Cook = $0
Sam Altman = $0
Google = $200,000
Amazon = $200,000

Donations to Trump’s inaugural fund in 2025:
Meta = $1,000,000
Tim Cook = $1,000,000
Sam Altman = $1,000,000
Google = $1,000,000
Amazon = $1,000,000

The oligarchy is here.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote a prescient bestseller, How Democracies Die, which was published not quite two years after Donald Trump landed in the White House. Although the authors inform us (in the introduction of Tyranny of Minority Rule) that they were surprised by what transpired in the last two years of that term — “We have studied violent insurrections and efforts to overturn elections all over the world, from France and Spain to Ukraine and Russia to the Philippines, Peru, and Venezuela. But we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.” — their book offers a clear explanatory framework, foreshadowing what took place after their book went to print in January 2018.

In an interview with Michael Tomasky, they suggest something else they had not foreseen: that as Trump returns to power with Republican control of both houses of Congress, attacks on civil society and on political opponents pose the greatest threat to our democratic institutions.

As Ziblatt puts it: “the need to rewrite the Constitution, say à la Viktor Orbán, is probably not the thing that’s concerning at this moment, because our Constitution works pretty well for the party that’s in control of all branches of government, and really the more serious concern is the risk of those in power going after the democratic opposition in ways that undermine competition. So it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition. That’s something that we really didn’t spell out in that scenario back in 2018, but it’s something that is top of mind for me right now.”

Levitsky suggests that “we’re going to see really classic authoritarian behavior. Many of us tend to think that—particularly given that most of us haven’t experienced authoritarianism in the United States—we tend to think of authoritarianism as dissolving the Constitution, locking up opponents, and eliminating electoral competition. And that’s highly unlikely. It’s very, very unlikely that we see a move toward sort of Putin-style authoritarianism.”

He continues:

But what I think has gotten insufficient attention among Americans is the centrality of simply politicizing the state and deploying it in ways not only to punish rivals, but also to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines. And so, you know, first and foremost, we’ve been told to expect that the Department of Justice will be wielded to punish those who have tried to hold the Trump administration accountable. I think we’ll see it wielded against some politicians. We’ll see it wielded against some businesspeople. We’ll see it wielded against some civil society leaders. We may see it wielded against Harvard and other elite universities.
So I think this government will, far more than the first Trump administration, politicize key state agencies and wield them in ways that raise the cost of continued opposition. There may be a handful, dozens, of exemplary cases, but those cases have the potential to signal to thousands and thousands of other people that it’s just not worth engaging in politics the way they used to before. And so, young lawyers will not jump into politics, but rather stay in the law firm. Young journalists will decide to stick to the sports beat rather than cover politics. Young CEOs will decide that it’s better just not to donate to the Democratic Party. It’s very difficult to gauge how consequential that will be, but that tilting of the playing field is coming.

Let’s underscore that “classic authoritarian” threat (which goes beyond hollowing out effective government agencies and weaponizing law enforcement against Trump’s opponents): to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines.

This authoritarian strategy is already seeing success even before Trump’s return to the White House.

Consider the billionaires and corporate CEOs who own and run mass communications outfits. Two recent headlines describe the threat to these folks (“Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media“) and the media’s swift response (“Media’s suck up moment“). Threats from the president-elect and his MAGA allies have hardly been veiled. The folks threatened understand how much financial and reputational damage a hostile federal government could bring. They are already falling into line. That’s anticipatory obedience.

Timothy Snyder, in On Tyranny, warns in Lesson #1: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked.”

Yeah, that’s happening. Right before our eyes.

And it’s not just media moguls. Once upon a time, in the aftermath of the January 6 rioting at the Capitol, corporations pledged to withhold support for those who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. These businesses were for democracy then. But that promise has gone by the wayside for many of them, as they offer lavish inaugural gifts in tribute to the vindictive soon-to-return president.

The incentives have changed. The world is different. It’s tougher to refuse to obey. Our freedom is more constrained than before.

[Post edited for clarity and additional links added on January 2, 2025.]