Donald Trump and maga Republicans have not yet explained why the American military must be put in harm's way in Iraq

Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder have become reliable prophets in predicting how Donald Trump continues to pursue the dismantling of American democracy.  Cox Richardson compared Donald Trump's demonic intentions to the actions of Adolf Hitler, as she published in November 2024 in the Milwaukee Independent:  "Adolf Hitler’s, on January 30, 1933, took an oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the constitution, and in three months he dismantled that constitution. By March, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler’s prominent political opponents. By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for those who did it."

This echo opinion published in The New Yorker describes the evil result of that and other dire predictions about Donald Trump.

The First Casualty of Trump’s War in Iran Was the Truth

(Donald Trump has no idea what the five letter  one syllable word means.)

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation and then threatens freedom of the press back home. By David Remnick editor of The New Yorker magazine.

In war, truth is the first casualty.” It’s a line often attributed to Aeschylus, and it has never lost its relevance. Sometimes the culprit is the observer—the propagandizing correspondent, the mythologizing historian. Now, three weeks into a war of choice, the chief offender is the President of the United States.

On February 28th, at two-thirty in the morning, the White House press operation released a prerecorded video of Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago standing at a lectern in dim light. Wearing an oversized U.S.A. ball cap and no tie, the President announced that he had ordered American bombers to commence destroying targets throughout the Islamic Republic of Iran. Trump made a claim of preëmption. He was acting, he said, to “defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” (This was confusing. Hadn’t Trump declared last June that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program? Hadn’t the Omani foreign minister, a mediator between the U.S. and Iran at negotiations in Geneva, just told “Face the Nation” that “a peace deal is within our reach”?) Trump went on to counsel the Iranian people to find refuge somehow—“It’s very dangerous outside, bombs will be dropping everywhere”—but then, at some unspecified moment, they should “take over” their government. “Let’s see how you respond.” And to his American listeners, he admitted, “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.”

For a narcissist obsessed with the projection of strength and grandeur, Trump gave a peculiarly gravity-free performance. The bill of his ball cap obscured his gaze. He raced and rambled through his text. And, rather than hustle back to the White House, he lingered at his country club. He had a fund-raising dinner to attend. It was left to the communications director, Steven Cheung, to provide clear instructions on how to react to the prospect of another American war in the Middle East. “NO PANICANS!” he wrote on X. “TRUST IN TRUMP!”

Donald Trump, together with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were soon over heard lauding the precision with which they had “decapitated” the Iranian leadership and flattened military, police, and intelligence installations. And yet, as the late Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once blithely said, in the thick of America’s catastrophic misadventure in Iraq, “Stuff happens.” 

(Hmmm, turns out the Rumsfeld decisions cost Americans 2,400 military lives in his failed Afghanistan war and another 4,400 were killed in the Iraq disaster. Donald Rumsfeld died on June 29, 2021 in Taos, New Mexico.) With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces. But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. 

Donald Trump's need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shit-posting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained? 

Donald Trump's cult advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, (aka "Whiskey Pete") who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too. Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” 

Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.” 

Carr’s saber rattling threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975, book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.” 

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of the Iranian security hierarchy, would not survive the first day of bombing; neither would about a hundred and seventy-five innocents in the southern city of Minab, most of them children. When asked about a girls’ school there, which was struck by what was likely an American cruise missile, Trump blamed Iran. “They are very inaccurate, as you know, with their munitions,” he said.

Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren’t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren’t.) Israel forced America’s hand. (Marco Rubio.) “No, I might have forced their hand.” (Trump.) It’s all about regime change. (Trump.) It’s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all Donald Trump's cult of men followed his lead: they just blamed the media.

With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump’s good graces.

But, while Donald Trump has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President’s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.” At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration—“If you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.” Are you not entertained?

His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with “influencers” and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN’s coverage of the war as “fake news.” He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.

Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, “running hoaxes and news distortions.” Trump pronounced himself “thrilled” with Carr’s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused “Highly Unpatriotic ‘News’ Organizations” of airing “LIES.” Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on “Charges for TREASON.”

Carr’s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley’s 1975 book about wartime journalism, “The First Casualty,” wrote, “A liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self‐censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.”

The cruelest irony is that Donald Trump, who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. 

Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What’s at stake is democracy’s oldest promise—that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name. ♦








Published in the print edition of the March 30, 2026, issue, with the headline “The First Casualty.”

Cassidy Hutchinson went to the American people and bravely raised her right hand

Opinion echo letters published in The New York Times:

‘Thank You, Cassidy Hutchinson’: Drama at the January 6 Hearings. Reactions to the White House aide’s testimony before the House committee's important investigation about the insurrectionists that attacked on the US Capitol.

Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, is sworn in to testify as the House select committee investigating the January 6, attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of the year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, June 28, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

To the Editor: Re “Enraged Trump Encouraged Violence and Sought to Join Mob, Aide Testifies” (front page, June 29):

Thank you, Cassidy Hutchinson, for testifying before the January 6 House committee. History will remember you just as it has the former White House counsel John Dean, whose testimony rightly helped to bring down Richard Nixon, nearly 50 years ago.

If only your former boss, the White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, as well as (slime bag!) Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman — all of whom reportedly sought presidential pardons for their roles leading up to the insurrection at the Capitol — had your guts! Americans who believe in the rule of law and the Constitution are indebted to you, Ms. Hutchinson.

From Denny Freidenrich, in Laguna Beach, California

To the New York Times Editor: Remember the women, especially the (seemingly) invisible ones hear and see everything. Their bosses often think that loyalty is their only quality, along with efficiency. It turns out many of them have brains, a conscience, integrity and courage.

It was true during the Watergate scandal. The secretaries and bookkeepers spilled crucial beans to reporters and prosecutors.

Likewise, it was also true on Tuesday, at the January 6 hearing in the testimony given under oath by Cassidy Hutchinson, who told the House committee: "The president wanted to eliminate security so his followers’ weapons would not be detected as they went to the Capitol to defend his Big Lie. The president reportedly tried to grab the steering wheel of the car driven by a Secret Service agent in effort to be driven to the Capitol".

#TrumpInPrison  #CassidyHutchinsonSpokeTruthToPower

Donald Trump is a failure who provides taped evidence of incompetence

Echo report by Josephine Harvey published in The Huffington Post

Carl Bernstein Says Latest Trump Tapes Are ‘Far Worse’ Than Watergate-  Audio of the president trying to persuade a Georgia official to change election results is “the ultimate smoking gun tape,” the Watergate journalist said.

The leaked tapes of Donald Trump trying to pressure Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the president’s election defeat are “far worse” than what occurred in the Watergate scandal, journalist Carl Bernstein said Sunday.

Bernstein, whose reporting of the 1972 political scandal led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, said the bombshell tapes of Trump were evidence of an attempted coup.

“It’s not déjà vu. This was something far worse than occurred in Watergate,” Bernstein told CNN. “We have both a criminal president of the United States in Donald Trump and a subversive president of the United States at the same time in this one person.”

In audio recordings published by The Washington Post Sunday, Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” exactly enough votes to overturn his loss in that state to President-elect Joe Biden in the Nov. 3, election. Trump repeatedly insisted he had won. At one point, Trump seemed to threaten legal consequences if Raffensperger did not investigate his baseless claims.

“This is the ultimate smoking gun tape,” Bernstein said. “It is the tape with the evidence of what this president is willing to do to undermine the electoral system and illegally, improperly and immorally try to instigate a coup.”

In any other presidency, this tape would be evidence enough to result in impeachment, a conviction in the Senate and a call by members of Congress ― Republicans included ― for the president’s immediate resignation, Bernstein said.

“We’re not going to hear that,” Bernstein added. “We might from a few Republicans, but that’s what’s really called for here. And the one thing we should recall from Watergate was that the heroes of Watergate were Republicans who would not tolerate Richard Nixon’s conduct.”

Donald Trump must explain what he knew and when did he know it? #RussianBounty is beyond shameful!

St. Louis Post Dispatch echo editorial: "What did Trump know about Russian bounties, and when did he know it?" #RussianBounty

Since the Watergate scandal era, presidential sculduggery has often boiled down to two questions: What did Donald Trmp know and when did he know it? 

Those questions are especially urgent regarding reports that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers there.

Donald Trump claims he wasn’t told of that allegation by U.S. intelligence. If he’s lying — always a strong possibility with this president — it means he has continued his kid-glove treatment of Russian leader Vladimir Putin even knowing his culpability in targeting Americans. If Trump is telling the truth, it means his own administration withheld information from him that any president should immediately have been told.

There’s a third scenario that, knowing this president, actually sounds the most likely: That Trump was indeed informed about the bounties, via the daily written intelligence briefing that presidents receive, and that he simply failed to read it. That would constitute a gross dereliction of duty but would be completely in keeping with Trump’s well-known aversion to reading. Whatever the case, Congress must not stop pressing for answers. (Maine Writer: In other words - Congress must get to the bottom of this treasonous outrage!  Where have those ugly Republican Benghazi zealous windmill chasers gone to?  Why are they hiding?)

The New York Times late last week first reported that Russia secretly offered bounties to militants to kill American troops in Afghanistan, and that the administration has known about it since early this year. Subsequent reporting linked those alleged bounties to the deaths of three U.S. Marines in an April 2019 car bomb attack.

Even while Trump continued to deny he’d been told anything, the Times on Monday cited two unnamed officials who said the information about the bounties was in the President’s Daily Brief as early as late February.

If it seems unlikely that officials would put such explosive information in writing for Trump, yet fail to verbally point it out to him, consider two well-documented foibles of this president: his bizarre, consistent fealty to Putin (even over U.S. intelligence, as Trump so shamefully demonstrated in Helsinki in 2018); and such a stubborn refusal to delve into written documents that it has spawned speculation about Trump’s literacy. Some have suggested that the Russian bounty might well have been intentionally buried in Trump’s intelligence briefing because, as New York Magazine recently put it, “everybody knows he doesn’t read,” and his staff knew from experience “not to broach the topic of Russian misconduct with the boss.”

Horrifying as it is that American lives may have been put at risk due to such executive leadership incompetence, it’s actually the least-damning explanation. If Trump did in fact know about the bounties, and still failed to punish or even call out Putin, that’s stronger grounds for removal from office than even the ironclad case already made against him during his impeachment.

What did Trump know, and when did he know it? Congress, and America, must have answers.

Republicans who support the Rule of Law

Pleasantly surprised to find this website! Today is December 25, 2019....a nice Christmas Internet surprise.

Republicans for the Rule of Law is a group of life-long Republicans dedicated to defending the institutions of our republic and upholding the rule of law. We are fighting to make sure that the laws apply equally to everyone, from the average citizen to the president of the United States.

We believe in fidelity to the Constitution, transparency, and the truth.  https://www.ruleoflawrepublicans.com/about-us/

Republicans for the Rule of Law is a coalition of Republicans who believe law enforcement investigations should be completed without political interference, the laws apply equally to everyone, and the Constitution needs to be followed.  Republicans for the Rule of Law is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit and a project of Defending Democracy Together. Contributions are NOT tax deductible.

This letter was published in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, a Texas newspaper.  

With the start of public impeachment hearings, Congressional Republicans should look to their predecessors from the last time a Republican president was impeached.

Rep. M. Caldwell Butler, Republican from Virginia, said, “It is we, not the Democrats, who must demonstrate that we are capable of enforcing the high standards we would set for them.”

Rep. Lawrence Hogan, Republican of Maryland and father of the current governor of Maryland, told his colleagues, “For our system of justice and our system of government to survive, we must pledge our highest allegiance to the strength of the law and not to the common frailties of men.”

They were right. The Republican Party needed to divorce itself from the shame of Nixon and Watergate so it could reinvent itself. In a prediction of our current moment, Connecticut Republican Lowell Weicker said, "If we try to play coy or to be less than extremely forceful in getting the truth out, people are going to impute to us this rather sordid succession of events." 

Republicans, take note.

Stan Twardy, legal adviser to Republicans for the Rule of Law

Mueller is doing right by "following the money"

Ann echo opinion by Carl Hisiro, a retired attorney, and an occasional PennLive Opinion contributor. He writes from Susquehanna Township in Pennsylvania.

Watching the legal travails surrounding Donald Trump and his inner circle over the past week in the ongoing investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller over Russian tampering in the 2016 election, it’s tough not to be reminded of the Watergate scandal and the last days of President Richard Nixon’s White House.

In the past few days alone, we’ve seen former Trump fixer Michael Cohen’s guilty plea; the collapse of a plea agreement between Mueller and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and Tuesday’s release of a heavily redacted sentencing memo suggesting former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn cooperated extensively with Mueller’s office to avoid jail time for lying to Congress.

History reminds us that Nixon’s ultimate downfall began when then White House Counsel John Dean decided to testify to Congress about his knowledge of the Watergate break-in and the subsequent cover-up.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Trump’s fate is tied to Cohen’s decision to cooperate not only with Mueller’s ongoing investigation, but with three other law enforcement agencies, by providing some 70 hours of testimony. Based on news reports, it appears that Flynn’s cooperation could be of similar impact.

Before the election, I wrote that Trump would be the most conflicted president ever elected, and that these conflicts could threaten our national security. I remain as convinced as ever that is the case.

My position has only been reinforced by allegations that Trump continued to pursue efforts to build a new property in Russia well into the 2016 campaign.

We’ve since learned that that the Trump Organization had offered Russian leader Vladimir Putin a $50 million Penthouse in the Trump Tower as part of a kickback to get the deal approved by the dictator. And while all of this was going on, Trump repeatedly denied on the campaign trail that he had “any business dealings with Russia.”

In sum, while Trump was campaigning for president in 2016, he was secretly interacting with a hostile foreign government to close on perhaps Trump’s largest business transaction ever.

The American public was entitled to know about this enormous conflict of interest, but were denied the truth before the election by Trump’s repeated denials on the subject.

With Trump, Mueller is doing the right thing by “following the money” to connect the dots on Russia. With Trump everything is about the money.

The Trump Organization is a family business where Trump micromanages everything. It is hard to imagine anything happening within the company, especially meetings with top Russian officials right under Trump’s nose in his NYC Trump Tower, that he didn’t know about at the time it occurred.

The other fascinating fact that is hard to ignore is how Trump often acts more like a Mafia boss instead of the chief law enforcement officer of the country when he reacts to any negative news involving the Mueller investigation.

We saw it with Manafort when Trump praised Manafort for not cracking when he first refused to cooperate with Mueller and instead went to trial. Now, we see it again when Trump last week called Cohen “a weak person” when Cohen decided to cooperate fully with Mueller’s probe and his concurrent praise of Trump insider Roger Stone for his refusal to cooperate with Mueller.

The larger question is whether Trump’s base will stick with him as these revelations continue to mount; as Mueller releases his final report, and as the 2020 campaign draws ever nearer.

Like Nixon more than 40 years ago, Trump has repeatedly taken steps to interfere or otherwise obstruct ongoing. That’s included his purges at the Justice Department.

History is definitely repeating itself as we slowly grind to the finish line. However, there is one difference between now and the Watergate scandal. What Trump is being accused of relating to Russia and his other business dealings, if proven true, makes Nixon look like a nickel and dime crook by comparison.

Journalism in history - investigating "truth" in the age of social media

Excerpt from the book Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism and the Threat to American Democracy by Marvin Kalb published in History News Network

In the context of the press’s struggle to cover the world of Trump and beyond, it’s important to recall that Murrow, in his memorable 1954 See It Now broadcast about Senator McCarthy, helped bring an end to a political crusade that was frightening the American people and undermining American democracy. He exposed McCarthy as a lying charlatan who deserved the Senate censure he was to suffer a few months later. 

Although many other reporters covered the same story, only Murrow will likely be remembered as the one who had the courage to take on a senator widely considered to be a danger to the republic. In American history, few other reporters have played so prominent a role in ending a national nightmare.

Cronkite, Stalemate, and the Vietnam War 

Walter Cronkite, another of CBS’s twinkling stars, whose even- handed anchoring of the CBS Evening News won him the title “the most trusted man in America,” did a commentary about the Vietnam War in February 1968 that helped persuade a president not to run for reelection and a nation to change its war policy and, ultimately, begin to withdraw.

A month earlier, the North Vietnamese had launched their consequential Tet Offensive. From one end of South Vietnam to the other, they attacked South Vietnamese and American troops and bases, even invading the once- hallowed grounds of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. To say President Lyndon Johnson was stunned by the news would be a glaring understatement. His intelligence chiefs had assured him that the communists were losing the war. General William Westmoreland, U.S. commanding general in Vietnam, had told Congress a few months earlier that he saw “the light at the end of the tunnel.” When, after Tet, Westmoreland approached Johnson with a request for an additional 206,000 troops, Johnson, who had always said yes to his commanding general, now snapped “no,” not only to the request but to his own plans for reelection. The war proved to be too much, even for this rugged Texan, and he decided on the spot to end all political games— he would not run! Behind his fateful decision was the amazing story of a Cronkite commentary and the impact it had on a president.

It could be said that Cronkite was “disillusioned” with the war from the very beginning. “Disillusioned” was the word he used in his memoir, published years later. But, on air, when he anchored the top-rated CBS Evening News, he was always meticulously fair, the impartial newscaster, never an editorial grimace or nod of approval, never a word suggesting an opinion. Eric Sevareid did the commentary. “Uncle Walter” did the news. “And that’s the way it is,” was Cronkite’s closing signature every evening. That was what many viewers had come to expect.

With the Tet Offensive still hot news, splashed all over the front pages, Cronkite asked CBS president Richard Salant if he could go to Vietnam and do an “assessment” of the war as someone who had not “previously taken a public position.” Salant nodded, and Cronkite left that night. This was not his first war; Cronkite had covered World War II. In Vietnam, after talking to American and South Vietnamese generals and to the troops, he found he could reach only one conclusion: “There was no way that this war could be justified any longer,” he said.

After a few days, Cronkite flew back to New York, where he anchored a special report, aired on February 27, 1968, about the effect of the Tet Offensive on the war. He was gloomy, clearly disturbed by what he had seen, and he closed his report with a commentary, so labeled. Only twice before had he done a commentary, and the anchorman justified both by saying they focused on a defense of a free press. This one was different. This was Cronkite giving his personal opinion about one of the most controversial issues of the day— the war in Vietnam. 

Salant warned America’s “most trusted man” that he could be jeopardizing his reputation, CBS’s as well, and, given the public’s sharply divided opinion about the war, he could also be risking the loss of many viewers, thereby hurting CBS’s bottom line. (Murrow had considered the same possibilities when he did his McCarthy broadcast fourteen years earlier.) Cronkite listened carefully to Salant but decided he had to go forward and express his opinion about the war. It was his journalistic obligation, he felt.

Cronkite explained on air that he was doing a “commentary” on the war. He wrote it himself. “To say that we are closer to victory today,” he said solemnly, “is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.” Cronkite paused, looked into the camera lens, and, in an uncharacteristically soft voice, concluded, “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Cronkite clearly implied that if a stalemate was the “best” we could hope for, after having lost so many troops, spent so much money, and torn the country apart, then it took no special insight to believe that the United States could not possibly win this war, and therefore we ought to pull out of it.

The public reaction to Cronkite’s extraordinary broadcast was amazingly unenthusiastic. Those who supported Johnson and the war were critical of Cronkite, but not overly so. Those who opposed the war applauded Cronkite, but again not overly so. It seemed as if the public was simply tired of the war, and Cronkite’s commentary did not move the needle decisively one way or the other. He didn’t call for an immediate withdrawal of American forces or for a dramatic escalation of the war. His instincts as a network anchor kept him close to the middle rail— a call to negotiate in the face of a stalemate. In this respect, even someone as revered as Cronkite probably came through as just another voice in the crowd.

But, at the White House, Cronkite’s voice, always special, carried a powerful message. Johnson listened intently; what he heard stunned him. George Christian, his news secretary, and Bill Moyers, his personal assistant, were present when a shaken Johnson watched the program. “The President flipped off the set,” Moyers later recalled, “and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’ ” Five weeks later, Johnson went on television in prime time to announce that he would not run for reelection and would begin to negotiate an end to the war— if possible on America’s terms. But Hanoi had other plans. Journalist David Halberstam, thinking about the impact of Cronkite’s commentary, later wrote that it was probably the first time in history that a network anchor declared a war to be over. But the war would not be over until 1975. Johnson did not live to see the end. He died in 1973.

Woodward and Bernstein—and Watergate
On June 17, 1972, a team of burglars was arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington. Two young reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, soon began covering the story that led, in August 1974, to the first resignation of an American president and to profound changes in the nation’s politics. Would Richard Nixon have resigned anyway, even if Woodward and Bernstein had not applied their considerable investigative skills to breaking the Watergate story? I doubt it. Their remarkable run of one exclusive story after another kept a steady spotlight on the puzzling break- in: Who were the burglars? Who paid them? Why the Democratic headquarters? Was the Nixon White House involved? What was Nixon’s role? These questions framed the Watergate scandal, which will always be associated with the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein.

Within a matter of weeks, the reporters learned that the grand jury investigating the break- in had sought testimony from two men who had worked in the White House— former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy—thus linking the break- in to the White House. Soon Bernstein discovered in Miami that a $25,000 check for Nixon’s reelection had been deposited in the bank account of one of the burglars, suggesting the White House paid the burglar. How else would he have obtained the check? A White House lawyer, John Dean, observing the illegal shenanigans around him, privately told Nixon that, in his judgment, there was “a cancer on the presidency.” At first Nixon did not believe him. When he finally did believe Dean, it was too late to save his presidency.

Watergate had quickly become a hot story, and, with Woodward and Bernstein, the Post had struck gold. Their diligent, carefully researched stories, leading to journalistic prizes and a Hollywood movie, touched off a series of investigations involving Congress, special prosecutors, federal judges, the FBI, and the CIA that, by the summer of 1974, led to the inescapable conclusion that the president had lied in attempting to obstruct justice, and, if he wanted to escape impeachment, he would be wise to resign, which is what Nixon did on August 9, 1974.

The possibility must be acknowledged that the Nixon administration might have been toppled even without the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein. Too many loose ends were being investigated. Too many insiders were talking. Perhaps more important, the Democrats controlled Congress, and they did not like Nixon. Other news organizations, including the New York Times and CBS, were also digging into the Watergate scandal and producing their own exclusives. “What did the president know and when did he know it?” was a question for discussion on Capitol Hill and across the country. Everyone was into Watergate. Everyone had an opinion. Well before Nixon announced his resignation, his days seemed to be numbered.

Woodward and Bernstein deserve their pages in the history of American journalism. Their reporting contributed to the unraveling of the Watergate scandal, but, for the sake of argument, what if there had been a Fox News channel in the early 1970s? Dan Shelley, executive director of the Radio Television Digital News Association, has wondered whether Nixon, protected by a chattering conservative cable news channel, might have survived the scandal. Every evening, a Sean Hannity would have been arguing the president’s case. A Laura Ingraham would have been challenging the Post’s patriotism and criticizing Woodward and Bernstein as “liberal puppets of the anti- Nixon Democratic cabal.” GOP senators would have had a soapbox of their own to question press and TV coverage of Nixon. 

Fox would happily have joined with Breitbart and Limbaugh to create a dark Wagnerian opera of right-wing commentary that likely would have changed the political conversation and softened the impact of front-page Woodward- and- Bernstein stories. The embattled president would have enjoyed a measure of support from conservative media that in 1974, he surely did not have. And the result of the Watergate scandal might have been different. We’ll never know.

Trump Capitalizes on Media Revolution

What we do know is that much has changed in American journalism and politics since Murrow’s anti-McCarthy broadcast in 1954 (that’s sixty-four years ago), Cronkite’s broadcast in 1968 (fifty years ago), and Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting of the Watergate scandal from 1972 to 1974. In the intervening years, we have experienced at least two major revolutions that have transformed the practice of journalism— one on the business side and the other in technology.

Since the 1980s, local newspapers and radio and TV stations, once owned by local businessmen and their families, have been snapped up by national media corporations far more interested in short-term profits than in public service. In the past, broadcast news was not expected to make much money, and it rarely did. Today’s economics, however, requires profitability, and this fundamentally changes the dynamics of the news business. Now it must make money or be discarded as a rusty wreck. Ratings (and profits or losses) now dominate conversation in and about the news business. CNN popped onto the scene in the early 1980s, disparaged in those days as the Chicken Noodle Network. It didn’t make money then; it does now— an estimated $1 billion in 2016. Fox and MSNBC joined the cable hit parade in the mid- 1990s. Within ten years, they too began to make money; within twenty years, lots of money. Since Trump arrived on the political scene, they’ve made tons of money. He has been their meal ticket— they knew it, and he knew it. Money, not quality, became the measure of journalistic success. Even journalists who knew better bent to the pressure. They had no choice.

The other revolution, in technology, changed everything, so much so that now the broadcast networks have yielded to cable for most political news and commentary, especially in the evening, and newspapers have had to face the real prospect of soon terminating their print editions and then surviving, if possible, as websites in the new and highly competitive internet worlds of web and social media. Who would have imagined, even a few years ago, that a president would discuss vital issues of war and peace on his Twitter account? A president who would watch cable news four to eight hours a day? A president who would see a day at the White House as a reality TV show? A president who would turn a State of the Union address into a television show? Or a president who would attack the press as an “enemy of the American people”?

Not Murrow, nor Cronkite, nor Woodward and Bernstein could possibly be re-created to cover the political wars of the Trump era. In one lifetime we have lived through lightning changes in standards and morality, affecting our journalism and our politics; and if we are all left a bit bewildered, that can be excused. In many respects, I add most reluctantly, journalism has become a form of entertainment, especially on television. Murrow could not survive today— probably not Cronkite either. There are many investigative reporters, maybe not as good as Woodward and Bernstein, but very accomplished nonetheless. Those who work for the New York Times and the Washington Post now perform the role Murrow played in the early 1950s. Other news organizations, such as Politico, McClatchy, MSNBC, CNN, and occasionally the Wall Street Journal, also come up with their exclusives, but they often follow the two print leaders. Murrow took on McCarthy, and won the day. Now, the Times and the Post take on Trump, though their editors deny that is what they are doing. “Just covering the news,” they say. In any case, the battle for truth is far from won, partly because journalism as an ongoing enterprise is so fragile (and yet so essential to American democracy) and partly because the story focuses on the most important yet most erratic politician in the country and perhaps the world.

Moreover, adding complexity to the coverage is the eruption of social media websites that convey, among other things, information as “news” or something vaguely resembling news— sites such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and the like. These sites do not provide all of the news people need and use, but more people now depend on these sites for their news than on more traditional mainstream sources, such as local TV, national newspapers, and cable and broadcast news networks. 

It is unclear whether people who depend for their news on, say, Facebook are as well read and informed as those who depend on the Times and the Post, but, for the people who set the national agenda, whether politicians or journalists, the Times or the Post—or both—still are must reading. It is a safe bet that both the strategist who sits on the National Security Council and the editor of BuzzFeed or even Breitbart starts his or her day by reading the Times, the Post, or both.

Iowa opinion Press-Citizen letter - Republicans selling out the USA

Politicians backing Trump are selling us out for their own gain- An "echo" letter to the editor published in the Iowa City ~ Press-Citizen

Jacqueline Smetak, Writers' Group ~ Iowa

Jacqueline R. Smetak

Back in 1972, when Watergate dominated the news, The Washington Post published a political cartoon depicting the sinking head of President Richard Nixon surrounded by a multitude of boats and swimmers frantically heading off in all directions.

The image was clear. The ships were fleeing the sinking rat.

That image was recently recycled in an article in Esquire (and no, I can’t remember the title or the author). This time around it’s far more precise and sinister. It’s “the ratlines off the listing ship are filled with fleeing rodents.”

“Ratlines” is not an idle turn of phrase. It has a history. It refers to the escape routes taken by Nazis and fascists getting out of Europe in the closing days of World War II. 

Most of these Nazis were higher-ups and wanted for war crimes. Most of them ended up in Latin America. And they had help. Lot’s of it. But that’s a topic for another day.

The older image focused on Nixon as the rat and therefore the problem. The newer image focuses less on President Donald Trump and more on those whose actions enabled this disaster to take charge of this country. What the metaphor says is that Trump, the listing ship, is not the problem. It’s those who support him, vote for him, make excuses for him, think they can use him for their own purposes. They are the problem.

And here is where the metaphor fails. (Sadly)...They're not leaving. Steve Bannon, who didn't leave of his own free will, aside, Trump's supporters are digging in. It doesn't seem to matter how awful he is. They knew what he was all along. They simply don't care.

Conservative Evangelical Christians, apparently 80 percent of them, believe Trump was sent by God to bring on Armageddon, End Times, the Rapture and the Second Coming. 

Evangelist Anne Graham Lotz made it clear that she thinks America is wicked, that God is on the verge of unleashing his wrath to rattle us into repentance with a series of cataclysms that includes nuclear war. And white supremacists of all stripes are tickled pink. Bannon may have been banished from the White House but Steve Miller is still there. And when Trump dismissed the entire continent of Africa as "shithole" countries, The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website, posted that his comment was “encouraging.” Trump, it said, “is on the same page as us.”

And the filthy rich 1 percent got their enormous tax break.

Incumbent Republicans in the House are quitting in alarming numbers. Many are citing “dysfunction.” Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona, one of three senators quitting, was more blunt. He cited “threats against principles, freedoms and institutions ... flagrant disregard for truth and decency”.

Twelve are running for another office, but 24 are just quitting. So what about the other 200 who are staying. And especially those who were critical of Trump until he got elected. What do they hope to gain?

They can't be deluding themselves into thinking Trump can be controlled, because he can't. And he can't be trusted. A man as willfully ignorant, unpredictable, deceitful and vindictive as Trump doesn't belong in any position of power and certainly doesn't belong in the White House. So why? Are they afraid of him? 

Or is it that these elected representatives are selling us out for 30 pieces of silver?

Writers' Group member Jacqueline R. Smetak is a Lone Tree resident.