Covering the Revolution

We have tumbled into a moment of revolutionary change. Donald Trump aims at nothing less than a radical reconfiguration of the federal government—and this time, he has the plans and the people to do it. The scale of transformation that took progressive elites 50 years of the last century to accomplish, Trump seeks to reverse in four. At 78 and not eligible for reelection, he’s an old man in a hurry surrounded by a much younger crowd of men and women with a gleam in their eyes and fire in their bellies.

Trump’s revolutionary objectives explain the eccentric character of his appointments and the take-no-prisoners approach to his pardons and executive orders. You don’t expect a line grunt like Pete Hegseth to be a sophisticated manager of the enormous Department of Defense. You don’t appoint a politically shunned scientist like Jay Bhattacharya to protect the status quo at the National Institutes of Health. You don’t place a fierce critic of the FBI like Kash Patel to be the head of the FBI in order to promote business as usual. You don’t make Tulsi Gabbard, fresh off the terrorist travel list, director of national intelligence because you trust the judgment of the intelligence agencies.

These are highly motivated agents of change, who have no qualms about breaking the office furniture and restructuring the institutions they now lead into forms adapted to the storm and stress of the 21st century. This is also the populist principle in action, with the low raised to boss it over the high.

The pardons and executive orders issued by Trump push their point to the logical extreme. The pardon of the January 6 prisoners included violent as well as nonviolent offenders, for example, and the prohibition of birthright citizenship barred the children of “lawful but temporary” visitors as well as the offspring of illegal aliens. Political and judicial battles will thus be fought on the extreme edges of the president’s program, leaving the strategic core untouched—or so he plainly thinks. For those caught in the earthquake, there will be much pain and some injustice, but this too is a sign by which we recognize the revolution.

What are the terms of discussion for such an upheaval? There is, to be sure, a voracious hunger for information, but journalists and the intellectual class as a whole have blundered dismally when it comes to reporting on Trump. The man resides in their cognitive blind spot—all the drama, the mannerisms, the truly epic reversals of fortune, though transparent to most Americans, have been invariably distorted and misunderstood by them.

Jim Rutenberg and the Abandonment of Objectivity

Let’s examine two separate suggestions, somewhat apart in time and intent, about how to cover Trump and his works. Once we have cleared that ground, I want to suggest a third approach that might be best suited for understanding the difficult birth of a new political order out of the womb of the old regime.

At the start of the 2016 electoral contest pitting Hillary Clinton against Trump, the New York Times published an article that marked the first fissure in the news media’s fatal breach with its 20th-century standards. Titled “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism” and authored by veteran correspondent Jim Rutenberg, the article purported to be a report on the facts, not an opinion piece.

An empirical question was posed: Should the “dangerous” and “abnormal” Trump be covered by the media like every other presidential candidate? The clear answer, of course, was “no.” Trump had placed himself beyond the pale of democratic politics. To prove this, witnesses were brought forward, most of them familiar today as members of the shrill anti-Trump chorus—Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, former CIA director Michael Hayden, editors from the Washington Post and the Times. All agreed that the Trumpian horror nullified the journalist’s duty to objective reporting. Scarborough was cited as asking, rhetorically, “How balanced do you have to be when one side is irrational?”

Rutenberg never explained what was to take the place of objectivity, but a blunt activist language was strongly implied. The press was to act as warning label to a toxic candidate. Trump’s lies were to be called out as such, his “racist and nationalistic tendencies” criticized, his love of dictators exposed for all to see, his “alarming” recklessness and ignorance revealed. Yet all of this was being done already. The chorus had been in ear-shattering shriek mode since the start of the presidential campaign.

What Rutenberg’s article did was to convert a guilty fact into a noble ideal: The prestige news media was now a loyal adjunct of progressive politics in general and of the Democratic Party in particular—and that was fine. Brimming with zeal and self-righteousness, the New York Times led the way into the era of postjournalism, an operational model defined by Andrey Mir, who coined the term, as commodifying polarization.

Once you take sides in an ongoing battle, your understanding of the enemy will be wholly tactical. You want to win, not debate or reflect. Not surprisingly, every loathsome attribute heaped on Trump went unexamined. He was the Beast of the Apocalypse, end of story. No attempt was made to explain why such a monster attracted tens of millions of voters. The bigotry and manipulation were taken for granted. Rutenberg and the media, in a sense, got Trump right: He was an “abnormal” revolutionary figure. But having reached that conclusion, they simply went on the attack and stopped thinking.

Matt Taibbi and the Suspicion of Sellout

Matt Taibbi may be the best of an outstanding new crop of independent journalists working mainly on the Substack platform. On January 22 of this year, Taibbi posted a longish essay that addressed the question we have been pursuing: “What’s the Right Way To Cover the Trump Presidency?”

That title is somewhat misleading, though. Taibbi’s essay was a rumination on the perverse relationship—at once dominating and dependent—between government on one side and Big Money and Big Tech on the other. That relationship reached a nadir of corruption under the shadowy characters who controlled the “Biden” administration. Corporate giants were both bullied and, for a price, indulged.

Having flushed the First Amendment down the toilet, the Biden people made Big Tech an offer it couldn’t refuse: Silence those online voices we hate or get dismembered by antitrust litigation. At the same time, in what looked suspiciously like a protection racket, they rang up huge donations from Big Money—Kamala Harris’ campaign raised an extraordinary $1 billion in a month. Taibbi, whose perspective hovers between populist and cynical, has no doubt that these deals bought favors for the corporations. “In the nearly endless line of political errors,” he writes, “Democrats in the Trump era bathed in money from layoff artists and job exporters while endlessly insulting people in nonprofessional jobs, making any claim to be the party of the working people automatically laughable.”

But then he noted the “billionaires’ row” sitting “behind Melania’s hat” at the Trump inauguration. These were the same individuals, lording it over the same outfits, that had censored and deplatformed anyone from Trump himself to the Hunter laptop-reporting New York Post to the “Babylon Bee” satirical site, along with thousands of helpless members of the public. Here was the abusive privileged class, suddenly aligned behind the rising power. And Taibbi wondered whether he was witnessing a revolution or simply a shift in personnel.

That’s his benchmark for covering Trump. “The question for me is whether the election really ushered in a new day, or if it’s business as usual, just rebranded,” he writes. Unlike Rutenberg, Taibbi hasn’t bought into the historical abnormality of Trump—and he measures change in a very specific way. “Trump owes his office to 70-plus million angry people, and it seems to me the only fair way to judge his presidency is to see if they continue to get the shaft, above all financially.” Taibbi confesses to “a sinking feeling that they will.”

Whether Trump is an authentic carrier of radical change is absolutely the central question to any analysis of his administration. But how do we judge? Taibbi isn’t exactly wrong. The financial fortunes of the 70 million who voted for the president belong in that discussion—but in a minor way. Why so? Because a true revolution is an almost spiritual event. Ordinary persons in large numbers will seize on some ideal devoid of immediate economic benefit—liberty, equality, salvation—and mobilize under that flag. The battle cry could be “All power to the Soviets” or “Allah is great.” The leaders may profit from the ideal, or not. The lowly may be exalted or impoverished in a cascade of unintended consequences. This has been the trajectory of every political and religious revolution known to us.

Trump could improve the material well-being of his voters with few changes to the system. He seems intent on more, and to gauge his progress we should ask whether any of the following conditions are met. A new elite must replace the old ruling class. Institutions must be conquered and retooled, or new institutions erected, to sustain a steady pressure for the desired change—say, low immigration and merit-based employment. Political power must become the lever for cultural renewal, with a reorientation to the new ideals by art, entertainment, professional life—even the way we look and talk.

The dead past will be transcended and forgotten. That sounds improbable, maybe even pathological, but I have personally experienced it in my long life. By the Reagan years, the world of the hippies and anti-war protests, of which I had been a part a short decade before, felt like a weird, dimly recollected dream.

Alexis de Tocqueville and the Problem of History

Every revolution labors mightily to destroy the detestable past yet can be understood only in terms of what came before. By definition, revolution is the obliteration of history—that’s the point of the exercise. But the forces and grievances that explode into revolution lie buried in that history; once access is denied to them, revolution becomes an unintelligible abstraction. Sometimes the arrow of causation takes on a human face: The unstoppable bulldozer that is Trump in 2025 would be inexplicable without reference to the hollow skin suit that was Joe Biden in 2021-2024. Yet Biden and his frailties will soon be forgotten.

The problem of history is one of continuity. Trump, for example, wants to annihilate the ruling sanctities of the “long 20th century,” but to do so he must struggle within a framework dominated by those sanctities. The weapons the president has wielded in his assault on the establishment—the executive order, the federal hierarchy, etc.—have fallen from the hands of his predecessors and form part of a long cycle of use and abuse, reform and retribution. Institutions he now considers corrupt will, if all goes well, grow in strength and authority under his administration, dragging their dreary past behind them. Trump’s entire enterprise of repudiation and change, properly understood, will turn out to be the flowering of a seed planted deep within the old order.

A war on history is a return to the frenzy of history. Coverage of this revolution must therefore deal in clarity of causal context, dissecting with a forensic examiner’s eye the connective tissue between paralysis and hyperactivity—more specifically, between the infinite weariness of the Obama-Biden era and the present hectic hour.

The most apt exponent of this mode of analysis was the 19th-century French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville. In “The Old Regime and the Revolution” (1856), Tocqueville laid bare the path by which prerevolutionary France reformed itself into extinction. The process was similar to what occurred in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, with one major exception: The structure of the French government was made more centralized, pliable and irresistible than before. The only constraint on power was the habitual incompetence of the monarchy. When the revolutionary assembly seized the government, it “exchanged ... mildness for ferocity,” with “nothing to check or delay it for an instant.” Louis XVI was beheaded by a system put in place during his reign.

If we pay close attention, we can observe such historical irony at work right now. Those who criticized Barack Obama for trampling on constitutional norms when he vowed to rule by the pen and the phone, for example, should pause to ponder where Trump’s agenda would be today without that precedent.

Trump aims to behead the Deep State with its own government-issue guillotine. But if he succeeds, how will this new system differ from that Deep State?

France experienced a number of violent “revolutions” after the original, leading to severe shifts in the form of government—from monarchy, to republic, to empire. Yet, Tocqueville tells us, these crises didn’t give rise “to long continued or general disorder; they have been scarcely felt, in some cases hardly noticed by the majority of the nation.” He goes on to explain: “The reason is that, since 1789, the administrative system has always remained untouched in the midst of political convulsions.” Changes in government, in other words, can be dramatic, but the conquest of the Deep State, achieved in France only by the 1789 revolt, is always a rare and revolutionary event.

Thus Trump’s victory in 2016 was attended by a hysterical uproar, yet little changed beyond the names at the top of the government masthead. But in 2024, his administration is hacking wildly at the limbs of that bloated colossus, Leviathan, and the results, for good or ill, will be felt in the lives of many Americans.

Coverage of political change is typically tendentious, and coverage of Trump has been ridiculously so. That has contributed to the corruption and loss of legitimacy of the old news media. A space has opened for authors with a more rigorous intellectual approach—and they can be found with relative ease. The need, in brief, is for writers who possess a sense of the permanence of institutions and the persistence of memory—who have a consciousness of the past not as a graveyard but as the engine of all change. True historians like Niall Ferguson and Victor Davis Hanson fit these requirements. So do those who have analyzed in fine detail our own old regime of the elites, Christopher Rufo, say, or Taibbi himself. In such hands, the revolution will be reported on less as the unprecedented circus it outwardly appears to be than as the series of improvisations on a theme ordained by history that it actually is.

Yours Truly and the Return to First Principles

Trump is inescapable. As an analyst, I’m bound to cover him extensively over the next four years. How should that be done? My take is that the traumatic rupture preceded Trump—it began with the Obama years and accelerated, in a manic if haphazard fashion, under the faceless political phantoms who ran the Biden White House. To counter this damage, Trump has promised “a revolution of common sense.” The phrase is ambivalent. It has been interpreted to mean going back to a normal society—one in which the definition of woman won’t baffle a Supreme Court justice. But there is no going back. Any student of history knows that.

The whirlwind we are now reaping is a gigantic effort to bring something new—and, one hopes, good—into the world. It will arise from and be connected to our history, as I keep insisting, but its orientation must be toward the disruptive technologies that, for whatever reason, the old elites loathed and sought to suppress. The digital age in government is about to begin, and the possibilities are staggering.

My question is about the ideals and principles fundamental to this reconfiguration. We should expect more than the embrace of technology. We should demand that the freedom and adventure that are the beating heart of American life be at a minimum protected, or better yet increased, in the new dispensation. Take the issue that I consider most important: freedom of speech. Trump has torn down the censorship bureaucracy cobbled together by his predecessor, and he seems to have persuaded the tech oligarchs who served as censors to open up their platforms. Will this last? Or are we in an illusory moment in the swing of the pendulum, between the censorship of the crazed left and that of the self-righteous right?

We can’t go back to the past, but our country can be renewed by a return to first principles. According to Machiavelli, even a moribund society can be brought back to life and strength if it recaptures the spirit of the founders—that is to say, the virtues that first launched the community into history. Silicon Valley types would call this the startup mentality, tightly focused on the core mission but flexible and inventive in getting there. Since the digital tsunami smacked into their rigid hierarchies, American institutions have faced an existential choice: become a startup or sink into chaos. The old regime chose chaos and called it “our democracy.” But that was a decrepit president’s game, and now Trump, with Elon Musk and other innovators at his side, is taking the startup route.

I don’t believe in miracles. Truth be told, I don’t believe in revolution. But we must inch in one direction or the other, forward or back, free or fettered, and I promise that in the coming months my reports will try to assess, to the best of my ability, which way we are headed.