It crept in overnight, while we were sleeping. Fascism showed its face not with jackboots and concentration camps…not yet, anyway…but rather as just another day in Capitalist America. Two major media companies, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, made decisions to capitulate to the man they fear will be elected president before a single vote has been counted. They decided not to run editorials endorsing their preferred candidate for president, Kamala Harris, because the owners of the companies, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, are afraid if they anger Donald Trump, he will hit them where it hurts: In their pocketbooks.
Bezos sees himself as particularly vulnerable to the wrath of Donald Trump. Before he left office in 2021, Trump appointed a puppet to run the United States Postal Service (USPS): Louis DeJoy, a long-time Republican fund-raiser and major Trump contributor who was appointed as one of three deputy finance chairmen of the Republican National Committee shortly after Trump took office in 2017.
The USPS prioritizes package delivery for Amazon and sets the price it pays for the service. Trump has threatened Bezos with jacking up his Amazon delivery prices before, in 2018. The postmaster general was then Megan Brennan, appointed during the Obama administration, who resisted Trump’s demand to raise delivery prices, but such resistance is unlikely to happen if Trump is elected and DeJoy is there to carry out his wishes.
This is the way it happens. An autocrat like Donald Trump, with his history of impulsive decisions and threats against perceived enemies, has two billionaires cowering in fear, and he didn’t even have to pick up the phone.
Fascism is not an all-at-once transformation. We’ve already had our brownshirt day, on January 6, 2021, when Trump’s MAGA army stormed the Capitol waving Confederate and Nazi flags and assaulting police officers and attempting to hunt down and kill Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence, all of it, we now know, with Trump cheering them on from the White House. Fascism uses symbols – MAGA this time, swastika last time – to rally followers, and then it feeds them fear and lies and the demonization of minorities and others perceived as not like us.
I don’t even know that you can name the period of fascism we’re in right now. Giving it a name doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is happening right in front of our eyes, and little if nothing is being done about it, other than fascism finally being called out by political leaders such as Kamala Harris and other Democrats, and some news organizations have at last crossed the Rubicon of using the “F” word of fascism and the “H” word of Hitler in the same sentences with Donald Trump.
What can we do? We can all vote for Kamala Harris and whatever Democrat is running for whatever office in your district and state.
Journalists everywhere, but particularly at the Washington Post and LA Times, have a crucial role to play right now. It is journalism about Donald Trump’s crimes and political extremism that has revealed him as not just a totalitarian politician, but as a man consumed with a fascist lust for absolute power. It has been people like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson who have put Trump’s rise in historical perspective and compared what is happening right now in this country to what happened nearly a century ago in Germany with the rise of Hitler, when German corporate titans of the day bowed down to him in fear.
Now the reporters and editors at the Post and the LA Times can help show the world what contemporary fascism looks like by refusing to countenance the craven subservience of their owners. There are leaders at the Washington Post, in particular Bob Woodward and Eugene Robinson and David Ignatius and Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty, who can show the way for their colleagues by leading a newspaper-wide walk out. With what we are seeing every day from Donald Trump, they can call it a “Strike Against Fascism,” or “A Call to Arms.”
You might accuse me as a freelancer of not taking seriously the possibility that people at both papers might lose their jobs for leading or participating in a walk-out. But people have already resigned in protest at both papers. This isn’t a time to show fear. It’s a time to stand up to power. The writers and editors have a lot to lose, but they have already been treated as expendable, and they’ve been told they are in danger of losing their jobs anyway.
The guy Bezos put in as publisher of the Post, former Murdoch hitman Will Lewis, bluntly told Post staffers when he was appointed, “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.” He could have been talking as well to the staffs of the New York Times and the three major television networks and cable news like CNN and MSNBC. All of them are in an existential crisis at this crucial moment in our history. Newspapers are closing across the country. Television networks and cable news shows are hemorrhaging viewers.
The arrival of Bezos and Soon-Shiong to “rescue” two major American newspapers has shown us how hollow were any hopes that billionaires will or even can make a difference in today’s economic and political climate.
But workers can make a difference. With ten days to go until the election, let’s see if a day with no newspaper in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles can make a difference. Maybe a strike will teach reporters and editors and the rest of us that we are beyond the point of being able to affect our lives and the lives of others. Or maybe rallying against the fascism that has been stealing our national politics will help to send more people to the polls to vote for Kamala Harris on November 5.
I do know this: When you are bullied, you STAND UP or you lose your self-respect and your dignity and your right to life. The fascism of Donald Trump would take away all three.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.
