As of this month it’s been one year of Keeping ScOR. I wasn’t sure what this newsletter would be when I birthed it at the start of 2025. I only knew I wanted another avenue of connection with you all and figured I’d have some things to say in this surreal time. The vague plan, given my already full plate, was to write once a month. I’ve written somewhat more — 18 pieces in 12 months.

In contrast to what we do on Scene on Radio I’ve found myself reacting more immediately to stuff in the news — often tying those reflections to the big themes we’ve explored on the podcast. So I’ve written about Trumpist outrages against democracy, decency, economic opportunity and history, and a couple of takes on toxic manhood in these toxic times. I also wrote about Zohran Mamdani, public broadcasting, my hometown — and my mother, whom we lost this year.

I’m humbled by the almost 1400 of you who’ve subscribed and spread the word about Keeping ScOR. Thank you.

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HNY?

Around New Year’s Day I was thinking I’d write a few thoughts on the coming year, and that those thoughts would lean optimistic. Better days ahead in ‘26, I was feeling — though I planned to add the caveat that things would likely get worse before they got better. I didn’t even find the time to write that piece before things got worse. Much worse.

On January 3rd, Trump ordered an illegal military invasion of Venezuela and seized its leader, killing dozens of people and asserting gun-to-the-head control of the country and its oil. Of course, the U.S. has often thrown its weight around across the globe, invading here, launching a “police action” there, but has typically claimed to do so for noble reasons. Not this time. The administration hauled the Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro, to a Brooklyn jail to face drug charges, but pretty much dropped the flimsy pretext that the invasion was about drugs. And yes, Maduro was an autocrat who apparently stole an election or two, but his removal didn’t seem to be about that, either; Trump brushed aside the opposition leader whose movement got more votes and would have democratic legitimacy in Venezuela. Instead there was much talk of oil and much chest-thumping. “American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again,” Trump said. The maniacal Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, went on CNN to say this: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

A few days after that, an ICE agent killed Renee Nicole Good in my home state of Minnesota. The President, Vice President and Homeland Security chief uncorked a stream of ridiculous lies about what happened, calling Renee Good a terrorist and declaring the shooting justified despite videos showing otherwise. The administration can’t control the narrative but it’s trying to commandeer the legal process, blocking Minnesota officials from the evidence that would allow them to do their own investigation of the killing. (The Hennepin County Attorney in Minneapolis, Mary Moriarty, is pursuing the case anyway. She asked the public to send video or other evidence to her office. “We do have jurisdiction to make this decision with what happened in this case,” she said.)

With these actions in the first days of the new year, the Trump regime is making its most brazen statements yet that it can do what it wants, full stop, inside and outside the borders of the United States. Under this president, America can and will take what it wants from other nations. (Trump’s casual musings have suggested that Greenland could be the next target, or perhaps Cuba, Columbia, Iran, or Mexico.) There are no limits on Trump’s power, he told the New York Times, other than “my own morality. … It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Meanwhile here at home, the message from Minneapolis is that this government can kill anyone who stands in its way, U.S. citizen or not, and there will be no accountability or recourse. There will, however, be shameless gaslighting. If you can watch this performance by Kristi Noem and not feel you’re losing your mind, you’re tougher than me.

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By the end of 2025, after the massive No Kings protests and the Democratic sweep of off-year elections, among other signs of democratic life, it seemed possible that we had already experienced peak Trump — that his drive toward dictatorship was slowly petering out. Here in January, it’s easier to see two competing trends, two progressions on a collision course.

On one hand, Trump is politically weak and getting weaker. In conventional terms, he and his henchpeople lack the political capital they’d need to consolidate and hold power, let alone to push for permanent authoritarian rule. At the same time, Trump and his allies remain entirely unchastened by their unpopularity. So this cabal, while it holds the levers of the executive branch, is simply going for it.

2026 will be pivotal. The opposition is growing larger, louder, and angrier — witness the protests after Renee Good’s murder. The midterm elections seem almost certain to hand Democrats control of at least the House of Representatives. But that outcome, if it arrives, won’t necessarily stop a regime that couldn’t care less about congressional prerogatives. And it’s hard to imagine that Trump and Stephen Miller will simply allow the elections to go ahead in normal fashion. As Lydia Polgreen points out, this administration has shown it can concoct “national security emergencies” to bulldoze just about any check or balance.

How will the administration deploy the National Guard, the military, and its expanding force of masked ICE agents to U.S. cities come election time? What will be the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act? If and when that happens, how will we the people respond?

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A short addendum to my last post about the news media in the time of Trump 2.0. The immediate response to the Venezuela offensive was revealing, especially as it relates to legacy news organizations and their posture toward Trump and his off-the-chain foreign “policy.”

Let’s focus for now on America’s three leading newspapers, the consensus “newspapers of record” — the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post — and their editorial boards.

On January 4, a Times editorial made a clear statement captured in its headline: “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela is Illegal and Unwise.” It called the invasion “latter-day imperialism” that “represents a dangerous and illegal approach to America’s place in the world.” In the Times’s news pages, Steven Erlanger wrote about the global reaction: “shock, outrage and skepticism from international leaders, many of them troubled by an exercise of American gunboat diplomacy.” The paper later published an explainer on the term gunboat diplomacy and its history.

By contrast, the other two big papers celebrated the invasion and the takedown of Maduro. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, long known for its right-wing posture, called the operation “justified” — “an act of hemispheric hygiene against a dictator who spread mayhem far and wide.” It did point out that “Whether he admits it or not, Mr. Trump is now in the business of regime change that he’ll have to make a success,” and declared it “odd” that Trump was dismissing the Venezuelan opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, whose stand-in is widely believed to have won the last election in a landslide.

Most noteworthy, though, is Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post. Its post-invasion editorial, titled “Justice in Venezuela,” dubbed the action a “major victory for American interests.” The board went full cheerleader, boasting that “what happened in Caracas was a clear reminder that America’s military, intelligence and cyber capabilities are second to none.”

You’ll remember that Bezos, the Post’s owner, killed the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in October 2024, then joined a bevy of billionaires at Trump’s inauguration — for which Bezos had donated $1 million. During Trump’s transition to the White House, Bezos’s Amazon announced that it had paid $40 million to stream a Melania Trump documentary. Last February, after Trump took office, Bezos announced a sweeping change to the Post’s editorial page. No longer would it offer a range of opinion from left, right and center, as it had for decades. Now, Bezos wrote, the opinion section would write every day “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

All of this represented a remarkable, pro-Trump pivot by Bezos and his newspaper. Eight years prior, after Trump’s first election, the paper had sent a different signal. In early 2017, the Post unveiled a new slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” At the time many saw the slogan, however clunky, as a statement that this storied Washington newspaper — the paper that published the Pentagon Papers and took down Richard Nixon — was committed to standing in the breech against the coming authoritarian onslaught.

That’s the newspaper whose masthead now celebrates the unprovoked invasion of a neighboring country — an action the president is not even bothering to claim has anything to do with advancing “democracy.”

Many have observed that the Post’s slogan is not only clunky but factually false. Democracy dies in plain sight. Dutifully chronicled, and sometimes even celebrated, by the best and brightest in journalism.

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