This posting has two main topics that are quite related. Our current occupant attacks the press. It’s a campaign to remove the protection of the Fourth Estate; and it’s intended to silence not just the press, but to silence you through intimidation. We can stop it. By refusing to succumb to fear.
Press Attacks – Why? A recent article detailed the accumulated and constant Trump “administration” attacks on the press. Yes, it’s quite intentional. Yes, the attacks are directed at both institutional press organizations and at individuals. What’s important to understand about this constant barrage is that dedicated journalists are our only defense (along with the non-Supreme-Court courts) against the sheer, lying pronouncements of this gaggle and their ongoing attacks on our democracy.
These people have positioned themselves, through Trump, to destroy the government our democratic processes have developed over 250 years. They have a Congress they’ve bought and paid for, one that remains silent and inoperative – also intentionally – as well as a Supreme Court rife with people of the same political stripe as the current Congressional majority. This is not a small thing and, ominously, the destructive troops don’t care that most of the country does not want them doing what they’re doing.
Don’t be distracted by the sheer foolery of those in the top jobs in this congeries of imbeciles. Those who are doing the hacking and slaughtering operate out of sight of those flacks. While headlines blare about Hegseth this, Trump that, Kennedy the other thing, the Russell Voughts, Stephen Millers and their hives of devoted army ants are doing their best to dismantle every program and civil protection we’ve come to cherish. And they’re not in the slightest interested in conversing with you about it. They don’t care what you think. They are driven, monomaniacal, and without a scintilla of remorse.
Do these miscreants know that most of what they’re doing or have done is illegal? Possibly. But they don’t care. They’re on a mission. They feel protected, at least for now. Will they face a criminal comeuppance? We shall see.
All we can do is to keep the bright lights of journalists focused on them, exposing them, keeping a record, taking names. We have to wait until we have the machinery in place to go after them. Then, my friends, we should go after them with everything we can muster to bring them to account.
Sadly, that accounting will not extend to the voters who put the current occupant back in office. While we could wish it so, that’s not how our electoral society works or should work. However, public scorn does work. I’m for bringing back formal shunning.
Fear and Trembling. Despite the above, I implore all of you to abjure the temptation to fear the process of the coming mid-terms. That colony of ants working to destroy the government does not have an analog in the states. Mostly. They do exist in the red states that have been gerrymandered all to hell, but even those structures are beginning to crumble, so stay tuned.
The current occupant threatens all the time, via legislative initiatives and empty executive orders, to impose his will on state election processes. A combination of sharp-edged weapons cut his attempts to pieces all the time, never mind that the Senate, in fine passive-aggressive fashion, went home for summer vacation without acting on his “Save” BS. He’s demanded voter names from many states and has been rebuffed by the states themselves or by the courts. And he knows that he’s progressively (you should pardon the expression) losing the mid-term elections worse every day. It’s bad enough that his “endorsements” for Republican candidates are sinking those candidates. His “base” is abandoning him, some of them either deciding not to vote all or to vote for the (gasp!) opposition. In the process he’s spinning out of control, is more and more random, and is less and less coherent.
Some of his, um, team have tried to putty the breaks in the walls, but their machinations are inconsistent, lame and even risible.
See, beyond minds mostly occupied with hating government in general and really hating government of the people, for the people and by the people, these folks have little intellectual capacity for or patience with complexity, nuance, or the gray between the black and white. Are they actually mindless? No. Instead, they are the truest of true believers. And they do not form subtle plans, for the most part, though their puppet masters do (vide: Miller and Vought). But out there on their own, without direction, they run afoul of political resistance for which they have little or no mental equipment. Need proof? Just watch how the captive U.S. Attorneys have come a-cropper.
They do succeed with operatives who have guns and clubs, such as I.C.E. agents, of whom they’ve deployed many. This is, indeed, a problem, but not an electoral one – though it could be if those brownshirts are loosed on our voting public – an eventuality I don’t foresee.
Thus it is that I say: stop with the fear and despair. Stay vigilant, yes. But you, personally, are in control of this narrative, not a potential victim waiting for the axe to fall. Pay attention to the real effects of the attempted actions of this “administration,” not to the perceived threat. You have friends and protectors out there. Focus on them and on reality. And work, where you can, to drive them into the ground in the mid-terms. It’s vitally important.
Edmund J. McDevitt
©2026