Our leading papers failed to stand up to Trump's criminal justice authoritarianism

The Washington Post and The New York Times editorial boards failed this week to hold Trump accountable for his attack on D.C. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

If one thinks, as appears likely, that President Donald Trump is not going to stop moving forward on his authoritarian path until he is stopped from doing so, then the stories told by the mainstream media this week in response to Trump’s attack on Washington, D.C., suggest that they are more likely to play the role of accomplices than truth-tellers.

It started, perhaps most embarrassingly, with The Washington Post’s editorial board.

The very day that Trump announced he was going after D.C. on August 11, the Post’s editorial board served its audience: Donald Trump.

The appalling editorial opened, essentially, with an implication that the board agreed with Trump’s action.

President Donald Trump is putting on quite the show to project strength on crime after the foiled carjacking of a staffer in his administration. On Monday, he took control of the D.C. police and deployed the National Guard.

It’s one thing to get tough, but it’s also essential to enact sustainable fixes. Crime is a serious problem, and fighting it requires a serious commitment — from this administration, as well as federal lawmakers, the mayor, the D.C. Council, prosecutors and local judges.

As with others, the Post’s editorial board just went along with Trump’s overstated claim about what he was doing — and what federal law lets him do. It’s not a takeover, as I explained on August 11 and as D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb eventually made clear with his lawsuit later in the week.

But, right away with that day’s editorial, the Post’s editorial board didn’t do the hard work of confronting the powerful. Instead, they paved the way for what has happened since with this sort of pablum: “Violent crime has fallen over the past few years, as city officials note, but many residents still do not feel safe.“

Even when the board acknowledged the fundamental problems with Trump’s “plan,” such as it is, the Post’s editorial board half-assed it: “National Guard troops are not trained to police urban settings. Their prolonged presence could agitate residents.” Lord forbid the editorial board directly say that any presence of the military on their city’s streets in this sort of a scenario — let alone their “prolonged presence” — would be inappropriate.

And yet, as the Post’s editorial board leadership — from Jeff Bezos on down — has made clear, Trump is their audience — not the people who call Washington, D.C., our home.

“However unpopular he might be in the deep-blue District, Trump is trying to deliver on the law-and-order message of his presidential campaign,“ the editorial board of D.C.’s paper actually wrote in a conclusion that acknowledged Trump’s effort isn’t going to do much to actually address crime.

Never to be outdone when it comes to criminal justice misreporting, however, The New York Times followed up on August 14. Its editorial board did what the paper does with crime — publishing a lengthy piece that pretended to be deep and investigatory when it was actually just a lot of words.

In its only editorial addressing Trump’s August 11 effort, the board — to its credit — acknowledged, “Crime is down in Washington, D.C., too, contrary to President Trump’s claims this week that it is a hotbed of violence.” Of course, it immediately followed that up by asserting that “the city’s murder rate remains far too high,” albeit by noting that “it is now comparable to what it was before the pandemic.“

Did the Times editorial board then continue down the path of its two immediately prior editorials — addressing “Trump’s Assault on Facts“ and Trump blatantly ignoring federal law (regarding the TikTok law) — by discussing how Trump was assaulting facts to misuse federal law in D.C.?

No.

Instead, the Times editorial board immediately moved on from that, ironically, to criticize “America’s leaders” for “rush[ing]” away from a crisis:

America’s leaders typically rush to move on from a crisis once it is over, but we want to pause on the recent surge of violent crime and its reversal. We see two central lessons from this period that can help policymakers reduce crime even further and make progress against other societal ills.

Oh no.

Instead of a critique of Trump, we get the Times’s favorite topic: crime! It’s just the Timesian version of the Post editorial.

The first lesson — “the importance of public trust and stability“ — would be harmless enough if its presentation wasn’t so offense. The New York Times editorial wrote a sentence that completely whitewashed January 6 (not to mention the cause of George Floyd’s murder) in an editorial the emerged from Trump’s effort to claim that D.C. is “a hotbed of violence.“

After noting the upheaval of the pandemic, the board wrote:

“A close presidential election eventually led to a violent attack on Congress.“

Whoever wrote that sentence found a way to fail journalism’s fundamental purposes multiple times over in a brief, single sentence.

But, in any event, the first lesson really is just an effort by the board to set the scene for its real purpose for this editorial: The alleged “second lesson” of the reduction in crime since restrictions of the pandemic have dissipated. Per the board, “The second lesson involves the importance of law enforcement.“

The first sign that this is bullshit is that it’s an awful topic sentence because it says nothing. If “involves” is the best verb you can muster you’re either making no point or you’re not willing to say your point. I suspect here it was the latter, because the six paragraphs that make up this section of the editorial because are essentially a rehash of the 2020 attacks on “Defund the Police,” including a step-by-step reminder of the path trod by those who railed against “Defund the Police” efforts.

The second sign that this is bullshit is the six paragraphs are all vibes. It is, to use a term the Times editorial board might understand, an assault on facts. It is Times policy, apparently, that — despite writing that “police funding did not decline much, if at all, in most cities“ — law enforcement were the real victims here, not George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, or the others whose murders propelled the 2020 protests and defund efforts.

Look at how this is worded:

It is, essentially, an effort to blame the “protesters” for the “effect” of police quitting rather than facing accountability and the “effect” of police stopping doing their jobs.

Then, with the vibes set, the editorial goes on to credulously repeat statements out of the Times’s consistently bad criminal justice reporting over the past five years — as the paper consistently sought to attack criminal justice reforms and reformers while defending overcriminalization. It highlights public drug use, homeless encampments, and shoplifting — doing the industry’s work by stating that “store owners [were] locking up items to reduce theft or simply closing their shops.”

All vibes. Not facts — as many, many, many sources apparently unavailable to The New York Times editorial board have made clear. (Just one example: “Even San Francisco—which has often been cited as having a “shoplifting epidemic”—saw a 5% decline in shoplifting between 2019 and 2023.“)

Then, the board sticks in the knife: “The defund movement is considered a failure, and many of its old backers have distanced themselves from it.” More vibes. Whatever you say.

Finally, all of that vibes-based damage done, we get to the Times editorial board’s point: “With crime falling, however, there is a risk that public officials will once again become complacent. Democratic leaders, in particular, should remember the pandemic-era crime spike. … [R]eformers should move carefully and avoid undermining the policies that prevent disorder.“

It’s hard to imagine that editorial board standing up to Trump’s authoritarianism, especially given that “policies that prevent disorder” sounds like a euphemism used by backers of Trump’s D.C. efforts over the past week.

It’s not just the editorial boards, of course, although I focused in on them here.

As Republican governors announced over the weekend that they were sending members of their states’ National Guard units to D.C., the Associated Press fell down on the job, as I discussed earlier Sunday on Bluesky.

Things are not getting better — and are not going to get better until something changes — and our current leading journalistic institutions are making it clear that they are not planning to be a part of that change.

---

Closing my tabs

For those who don’t what this is, it’s my effort to give a little thank you to paid subscribers. “Closing my tabs” is, literally, me looking through the stories open — the tabs open — on my computer and sharing with you all some of the stories I was unable to write full reports on during the week but that I nonetheless want to let you know that I have on my radar. Oftentimes, they are issues that will eventually find their way back into the newsletter as a case discussed moves forward or something new happens that provides me with a reason to cover the story more in depth.

This Sunday, these are the tabs I am closing: