Farewell, Washington Post

The oligarchs bend the knee

So much for that.

Most of my readers know that I lived in Turkey for the decade during which Recep Tayyip Erdoğan rose to power and slowly crushed, or arrogated to himself, all of Turkey’s formerly independent centers of power.

When it became clear in 2015 that Donald Trump was a serious political force, I expect that only a very small number of Americans had the response I did, to wit: Not this again. Most Americans saw Trump as something entirely unfamiliar to in their political experience and thus wholly unpredictable. I didn’t.

Erdoğan and Trump are unalike in important ways. Erdoğan has memorized the Quran. Trump has memorized a stupid poem about a snake. Erdoğan is far more intelligent than Trump. But in the most critical way, they are alike.

I’ve called the political phenomenon they represent the New Caesarism, and I’ve written a great deal about that here. If you’ve read what I’ve written—or read any of the other books about the subject that have since been published—you should be able to identify what we’re seeing now. You will know that authoritarian capture happens in stages. It’s not as if you elect the guy and then, bingo, the next day you wake up in an autocracy, clicking your heels and barking, “Jawohl, mein Führer.” As people were always telling me in Turkey, you get boiled slowly, like the frog in the pot. You get a little more used to it every day.

Every so often, we cross a new threshold, one that I saw in Turkey and remember as if it was yesterday—and it wasn’t that much longer than yesterday, really. Then I again feel sick that I’ve found no way to make people who haven’t lived through this understand what I saw. Perhaps it’s impossible to communicate this, but I don’t know why it should be. So I tend to think I just haven’t made this clear enough.

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What’s eerie is the fidelity with which we tend to replicate the Turkish experience, as if someone who knows that history as well as I do, someone with a vindictive and very dark sense of humor, is trying to recreate it. I’ll never understand, for example, how the term “Deep State” entered our lexicon and came to be used exactly as it is in Turkey, even though we have no Deep State.

No one in America knew the term “Deep State” in early 2015. I know this for sure, because whenever I used the phrase in an article about Turkey, an editor would flag it and ask me to explain what it meant. I’d dutifully reply that the deep state—the derin devlet—is said to be an ancient, anti-democratic hidden core of power, nested within the overt political structures of the state, composed of elements from the intelligence services, the military, and the mafia.

There are many terrible, unsolved crimes attributed to the Deep State. Turks are very partial to conspiracy theories about it. The thing about the Turkish Deep State is this: It exists. The evidence for this is excellent. And a lot of those conspiracy theories are true.

The United States has a bureaucracy, not a Deep State. It is an absolutely unexotic bureaucracy, the kind Weber described, the kind every functional modern state has, with big bland office buildings all over Washington DC. Everyone who works in them is listed in the phone book. They’re all funded in a budget that’s approved openly in Congress by our elected representatives. Any citizen can learn everything about what these bureaucrats do all day long without leaving his couch, but no one wants to, because it’s so damned boring. Congress openly supervises our very shallow state in stultifying hearings in the Subcommittee on Digital Assets, Financial Technology or the Committee on Chemical Safety and Waste Management. Most of the time, our bureaucracy works well enough that it hasn’t prevented the United States from being the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country.

Not a Deep State

There is absolutely no evidence that a clandestine cell, nestled within in our government, is collaborating with the mob to, say, murder separatist Native Americans. But the term, which was utterly obscure in the United States until Trump’s arrival, is now used to denote the better part of our dull, plodding, lawful civil service—and our judiciary, too. How did that happen? Who introduced it and why?

Here’s the weirdest part: Trump deploys “war on the Deep State” rhetoric exactly the way Erdoğan did, and to the same end: to discredit the independent centers of power in our government and prime the public for their destruction.

The thing I just don’t understand is this. Turks had a reason to find this rhetoric persuasive. They knew that yes, there was a Deep State, and it was profoundly sinister. They had experienced this. People had been disappeared. Murders that should have been easy to solve went unsolved. Mob figures, politicians, and a senior security officials could on occasion be found together—dead—in a crashed car in a remote highway where none of them should have been.

This doesn’t happen in the US. But Trump has appropriated Erdoğan’s language about the Deep State, verbatim. Did someone tell him about it? Who?

And astonishingly, it has the same effect on Americans as it does on Turks. Can you imagine how strange it’s been for me to see Americans baying in agreement when their bawling strongman vows to “clean up the Deep State?”

So we seem doomed to go through every stage of it. We just crossed another important threshold, one I remember very well.

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Heavy-handed censorship isn’t really necessary in this kind of regime, although sooner or later, it happens, because the leader cannot bear an injury to his vanity, and then—at a much later stage, when the regime has become something else—it becomes very necessary. But at first, you really don’t need to throw all the journalists in the clink to get a censored press. You just need to provide the right kind of incentives for the press to censor itself.

I wrote this about the Turkish media in 2010, when it had already been obvious for years, to anyone who cared to see, that the Turkish press was no longer free. (It was never that free, truth be told. But it was no longer “free-ish.”) Turkey was not yet setting world records for imprisoning its journalists—that comes at the later stage—but the press already took care, voluntarily, to ensure that Turks didn’t see anything that might displease Erdoğan. As I wrote,

When Western journalists note in a casual aside that press freedom has experienced certain setbacks under the AKP, they are failing to do justice to the severity of this calamity and its ramifications for Turkey and the region. The calamity is exacerbated by the tendency of the foreign media to repeat, without scrutiny, the very idiocies peddled in the Turkish press, where the range of opinion on offer has become severely limited. The result is the growth of a grossly distorted and dangerous consensus about Turkey, here and abroad — to wit, that Turkey under the AKP has become more democratic and politically healthier, even if it is a bit up the duff with Islamism.

When the AKP took power, four large private groups owned almost all the country’s media—a concentration of power already far too dense for political health. The largest was the Doğan group, which controlled some 70 per cent of the nation’s print and broadcast outlets. The group enjoyed warm relations with the AKP until 2007. Then its outlets began reporting details of the Deniz Feneri scandal, the biggest charity corruption case in German history. Billions of dollars raised by this Islamist charity, Doğan newspapers announced, had found their way into AKP coffers. Soon thereafter, the Turkish Ministry of Finance began investigating the group, then levied upon it the largest tax fine ever assessed on a Turkish company. The company is appealing, but if the appeal fails, it will be annihilated.

Then there is Sabah, the second-biggest media conglomerate, which controls the largest-circulation daily in Turkey and the powerful ATV television channel. Facing bankruptcy in 2007, it went up for sale. Curiously, all but one bidder dropped out at the last minute. The bidder left standing was the Calık group, whose CEO is Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law, Berat Albayrak. A Qatari company, al-Wasaeel, mysteriously swam up from nowhere to partner Calık’s bid—in defiance of Turkish law, which forbids the foreign financing of the media—and two state banks led by figures close to the AKP, Halk and Vakif, lent Calık US$750 million to finance the transaction, even though private banks in Turkey and abroad had declined. …

The AKP has by this means brought under its influence most of the media in Turkey, and what it hasn’t purchased or neutered, it has terrified. Since taking office in 2003, Erdogan has launched an energetic series of lawsuits against Turkish journalists and cartoonists for character defamation. No one knows how many have been sued, though the number is probably in the hundreds, and Erdogan has refused to answer this question when asked in parliament.

The news that both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have declined to endorse a candidate in this election does not, therefore, come as a complete surprise to me. It’s a terrible sign, but also a very predictable one. As in Turkey, the owners of these two papers are oligarchs whose business interests range across the economy. They stand to lose a great deal if the federal government becomes hostile to them.

Journalists at the Post are uniformly outraged. They’re also said to be shocked. (They wouldn’t be so shocked if they’d actually read the reports I sent them from Turkey.)

Marty Baron, the former executive editor, gave this statement to NPR:

This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

The Washington Post was forced to report on the story it had become:

The decision, announced 11 days before an election that most polls show as too close to call, drew immediate and heated condemnation from a wide swath of subscribers, political figures and media commentators. Robert Kagan, a longtime Post columnist and editor-at-large in the opinion department, resigned in protest, and a group of 11 Washington Post columnists co-signed an article condemning the decision. Angry readers and sources flooded the email inboxes of numerous staffers with complaints. …

Within hours of the announcement, a group of Washington Post columnists, including Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson and former deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus, called the decision “a terrible mistake,” writing, “This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them—the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020.”

Washington Post legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement saying: “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 12 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”

… The Post plans to continue issuing endorsements in other races, including local contests, a spokeswoman said.

That’s my emphasis, and I emphasize it because I know there are always some who try to explain away the evidence before their eyes. “Surely the Post just wants to let readers make up their own minds! We could use less bias at that left-wing rag!”

Don’t be a fool. Bezos is preemptively surrendering. This is how a free press dies (in broad daylight, note, not in darkness). I’ve seen it. Please trust me. You will regret it if you don’t. Perhaps you don’t care about The Washington Post—or a free press—but I promise that you will care a lot when Trump does to our economy what Erdoğan’s done to Turkey’s, and by then there will be no goddamned way to get rid of him.

Robert Kagan is precisely right:

We should just see clearly that this is the beginning of how Donald Trump is going to control the media, especially the media controlled by corporate interests. Because all of corporate America has been bending the knee to Trump.

The article in the Post continues:

The Post’s editorial board was informed Friday by Opinion Editor David Shipley in a tense meeting. Multiple members of the board expressed vehement opposition, according to two attendees who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The timing of the announcement was especially jarring because it came just one day after two Post opinion writers—editorial board member David Hoffman and contributing columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza—received Pulitzer Prizes at a ceremony in New York. Hoffman’s series of articles was called “Annals of Autocracy.”

It was the same story at the LA Times. The owner of the paper, oligarch Patrick Soon-Shiong, a South African immigrant who is close to Elon Musk, vetoed an already-written endorsement of Harris. Within hours of the story breaking, a happy Trump campaign began fundraising off the decision, explaining it to the gormless base like this:

In Kamala’s own home state, the Los Angeles Times—the state’s largest newspaper—has declined to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades. Even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job.

On seeing this, Mariel Garza, the editorial editor, resigned. In her resignation letter, she pointed out that the decision “makes us look craven and hypocritical.”

How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger—who we previously endorsed for the US Senate? The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races.

Soon-Shiong’s fortunes rise and fall with the favor of the federal government, as this article makes entirely clear. It’s just a terrible idea, if you’re Soon-Shiong, to get on Donald Trump’s bad side.

But it’s likewise a very good idea to curry favor with Trump, if you’re an American oligarch. Like Erdoğan, Trump rewards loyalty, and he will assuredly reward his friends handsomely. There will be no limit to what the federal government can do for our oligarchs once Trump has fired everyone who foolishly believed he was there to serve the American people. There will be defense contracts galore for Elon. Amazon will get to buy the whole Post Office for a dollar. Soon-Shiong will get so many federal research grants for his new Soon-Shiong Ivermectin-Hydroxychloride Research Center that he’ll hardly know what to do with all the money (though I’m sure he’ll figure it out), and he won’t get the IRS and the FDA crawling up his bell end the way they are now, so it’s a double bonus.

Bezos and Soon-Shiong are not the only ones, as Oliver Darcy notes. They’re “part of a larger trend amongst business leaders.”

The last wish of anyone in the business community is to land on Trump’s so-called enemies list, given that he has made it abundantly clear he will weaponize government if he wins office to punish those who spoke out against him.

Many of these businesspeople have lucrative government contracts and/or foresee M&A deals that will fall before the Justice Department in the coming years. In other words, if Trump emerges victorious at the ballot box, he could—and likely would—use the power of government to make their lives miserable, potentially harming their companies to the tune of billions of dollars.

And so, in advance of a possible Trump presidency, a fair swath of society's most powerful have already begun to assume defensive stances, choosing to stay silent to avoid falling in Trump’s crosshairs. Instead of sounding the alarm about the Adolf Hitler-praising candidate who publicly talks about jailing Americans who speak out against him, they have chosen to self-censor.

Trump hasn't even been elected to office yet and the powerful have already chosen to bow to pressure. Which raises an important question: What will happen if Trump actually ascends once again to the White House? How far will they bend the knee?

Oh! I know! I know! Pick me, Oliver! This will just get worse. Ordinary people will keep looking to these oligarchs, thinking, “They could stop this. Surely they will. They know this is wrong.” But they won’t. They’ll be too busy getting rich, or too busy enjoying their retirement in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States. The oligarchs are never as brave as you’d think having all that money would allow them to be.

This is the thing: Everyone who’s sucking up to Trump right now is poised to get so rich, and to have so many of his problems solved, that it’s no wonder our oligarchs are salivating even as they’re soiling themselves. They didn’t get where they are today by being oblivious to a massive moneymaking opportunity, did they?

They’ll all be very happy. But you, ordinary American, will be screwed. They’ll keep you amused with bread and circuses and show trials and Breitbart until they’ve actually destroyed the Golden Goose—the corruption- free, stable business environment that causes people to create wealth and the reputation that causes talented people to come to America to create it—and then, you will discover, things go downhill very quickly.

That’s when things become a lot more repressive. No more light touch. The happy times are over. Because they all know, at this point, that if ever they lose power, they’re going to jail. Trump and his entourage know this already, of course, but within a few years, there will be a hell of a lot more government officials and oligarchs with dirty hands. They aren’t going to let that happen. By then, if you get a little of the old “color revolution” in your heads, believe me: It won’t go well for you.

You can tell me I have “Trump Derangement Syndrome” all you like, but the Erdoğan crowd told me I was nuts—and much worse—in Turkey, too. I know what I’m seeing.

Some of those people later told me, very quietly, that I had been right. But by then it was far too late.