What's the Right Way to Cover the Trump Presidency?
It's clearly a new day in Washington, but will change reach the rest of the country?
Six and a half years ago, in August of 2018, Facebook announced it was removing 652 pages for “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” This began a series of content “purges” that mostly impacted small indy sites like Reverb Press, The Free Thought Project, Cop Block and Counter Current News. The first announcements came weeks after Infowars head Alex Jones was kicked off YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and Facebook, a seemingly coordinated act universally praised in media.
I thought both stories were major developments. They seemed even more alarming after I learned the “purges” had been conducted in partnership with the Atlantic Council, a huge international think tank Facebook brought in just after CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified, shakily, before two hostile Senate Committees.
Donald Trump was president, but this all appeared Senate-directed, and the optics were troubling. Since when did Senators from the Judiciary Committee cheer apparent antitrust violations, in the form of ostensible competitors like Apple and Google teaming up to remove figures like Jones? And when did it become okay to wipe out small media businesses in batches, at the recommendation of a think tank funded by Northrup, Goldman, and USAID?
It was likewise puzzling to find media colleagues universally considered the “purges” a non-story. A few independent outlets raised a fuss, but from specific angles. Reason’s headline was “Libertarian and Police Accountability Pages Deleted in Facebook Purge,” while the World Socialist Web Site went with, “Facebook’s purge of left-wing media: A frontal assault on freedom of speech.” Ironically, as developments unfolded to disclose a broader pattern of digital censorship, the story gained the most traction with Trump Republicans. I didn’t think of it as a political story of any kind, but simply thought such a dramatic new approach to speech had to be leading somewhere dark, and would sooner or later become a central national controversy.
It’s forgotten now, but there was a schism within the Republican Party on the censorship issue. Ted Cruz stepped up, noting he was “no fan of Jones” because he’d “falsely and absurdly” accusing his father of “killing JFK,” but still he demanded to know “who the hell made Facebook the arbiter of political speech?” Jones himself zeroed in on Republicans who were quiet. He called future Secretary of State Marco Rubio a “frat boy” and a “snake.” A fight nearly broke out when Jones pulled an Earl Weaver and made contact with the Florida Senator, who said, “Don’t touch me again, man.” When Jones asked if he would be arrested, Rubio said that wouldn’t be necessary, because “I’ll take care of you myself.” A lot of weird things happen in Capitol hallways, but this was up there:
I thought about all of this Monday, as Zuckerberg occupied “billionaires’ row” at in Donald Trump’s indoor inauguration. Zuck stood in front of Rubio and next to Jeff Bezos, whose Washington Post was a lead media cheerleader for the removal of “conspiracy theorist” Jones, and Sundar Pichai of Google, whose YouTube became the Internet’s most aggressive censor of video content after the Jones incident. Tim Cook of Apple, perhaps the lead figure in the banning of Jones, took a place behind J.D. Vance, Trump, and Melania’s hat. All of these CEOs’ companies were and are Atlantic Council sponsors.

These images led most of the formerly “mainstream” coverage Tuesday, as the anti-Trump enterprise was rebranded. “Threat to democracy” was replaced in DNC circulars with a series of anti-billionaire memes and catchwords, some humorously (ironically? disturbingly?) lifted from Trump himself. I was amused to see “rigging the economy” amid the Democrats’ Tuesday talking points, alongside a number of new phrases that were plugged straight into news copy: billionaire “buddies” with a net worth “over $1.2 trillion,” an “oligarchy” that was “front and center,” supporters left “literally in the cold,” and so on:
I don’t for a moment buy the Democrats’ wailing about a “tech industrial oligarchy,” or the sudden conversion to the church of class politics. That’s just the guilt-ridden bleating of a party that spent a decade playing dominatrix to the same pod of bootlicking tech firms, leaving behind an extensively documented effort to turn the Internet into a giant groupthink machine. Not only are Democrats insincere, they’ll almost certainly be more insufferable than usual in the next months, once the reality of being in the political wilderness kicks in, accelerating a drift toward AOC-style “I don’t endorse Luigi Mangione, but…” attention-getting gimmicks.
Nonetheless, I have a bad feeling about the “billionaires’ row” scene:
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