Donald Trump: We will not forget our country, we will not forget our Constitution, and we will not forget our God.

Brooke Gladstone: Donald Trump's second White House boasts more confidence and resolve than his first. Results unknown. From WNYC New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Also on this week's show, a very different media landscape greets this new Trump White House as we saw at the inauguration.

Oliver Darcy: None of the CNN anchors pointed out that Donald Trump is the first convicted felon to take that office. They didn't point out that he was twice impeached.

Brooke Gladstone: Plus, what's the deal with Trump's love of President McKinley?

Chris Lehmann: In some ways, Trumpism is McKinleyism dialed up to 11. It's exuberant imperialism and it's exuberant protectionism.

Brooke Gladstone: It's all coming up after this. [music]

Micah Loewinger: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. Donald J. Trump has entered the building.

Donald Trump: There's never been a first day like yesterday, as you know. I signed a sweeping slate of executive orders to stop the invasion of our borders. I launched a government-wide effort to defeat inflation and bring down the cost of daily life and bring down [crosstalk]--

Brooke Gladstone: He signed the first flurry of executive orders live on stage-

Donald Trump: We declared a national energy emergency to drill, baby, drill. We ended destructive DEI mandates across the federal government--

Micah Loewinger: -and more-

Donald Trump: We permanently stopped government censorship and restored free speech. That was signed yesterday. We renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Sounds so beautiful, the Gulf of America.

Micah Loewinger: -and much, much more. Here's a random selection in no particular order. He signed an order to grant top-secret security clearances to White House staff without the usual vetting and orders to begin withdrawing us from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. In fact, he signed a ream of orders attacking efforts to slow climate change and end current incentives to build green energy. He even rolled back energy-efficient regulations for gas stoves, dishwashers, and those weak shower heads that piss him.

He signed a directive pressuring states to carry out the death penalty and one ensuring an ample supply of lethal injection drugs. He proclaimed the nation would recognize only two genders, which must be reflected in passports and visas. He signed one to overturn the 14th Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship, but a judge found it unconstitutional, so he'll have to appeal. No doubt he'll have trouble pulling off quite a few of the hundreds of orders, proclamations, and memos he signed, many of dubious legality and some pockmarked with weird typos and unnatural language that legal experts said bore the marks of AI.

It all reminded me of a scene from the Woody Allen film, I Know, Bananas, where rebels take over the made-up nation of San Marcos and start issuing decrees.

Esposito: I am your new president. From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence. In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check.

Brooke Gladstone: There is an element of the absurd in all of this, but each one of those orders, even the least consequential, carries a heavy message. Take renaming the Gulf of Mexico. After a lifetime slapping his name on everything from stakes to government checks, he sees his brand and America's as having merged, so by renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, he's also rendering it the Gulf of Trump. Every stroke of our president's pen compels us to view the world through his prism. For instance, how he sees the rule of law-

Donald Trump: It fails to protect our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals.

Brooke Gladstone: -and how he'll right that wrong.

Donald Trump: The scales of justice will be rebalanced.

Brooke Gladstone: He undermines our lived experience with radical reinvention. January 6th an insurrection? No. A day of peace and love.

Donald Trump: This was a political hoax. You know what? Those people, and I'm not saying in every single case, but there was a lot of patriotism with those people.

Brooke Gladstone: Mr. Trump had previously said recipients of pardons would be determined on a case-by-case basis. They weren't.

Peter Alexander: You would agree that it's never acceptable to assault a police officer?

Donald Trump: Sure.

Peter Alexander: So then, if I can, among those you pardoned, DJ Rodriguez, he drove a stun gun into the neck of a DC police officer that day. He later confessed on video to the FBI and pleaded guilty for his crimes. Why does he deserve a pardon?

Donald Trump: Well, I don't know. Was it a pardon? Because we're looking at commutes and we're looking-

Peter Alexander: It was a pardon.

Donald Trump: -at pardons. Okay. Well, we'll take a look at everything, but I can say this, murderers today are not even charged.

Brooke Gladstone: Anyway.

Donald Trump: Most of the people were absolutely innocent.

Brooke Gladstone: Which brings us to God.

Donald Trump: Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin's bullet ripped through my ear, but I felt then, and believe even more so now, that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.

Brooke Gladstone: And so sayeth the clergy at his inauguration. Fair enough. That's the view through the prism of Trump and his supporters. That was Monday. Unlike the Capitol riot, which everyone could see in real life, God's reality has long been debated. As they say, faith is antithetical to proof and vice versa. The nature of God is viewed variously as well. There's a long tradition among some evangelicals, dating back at least 100 years, of seeing Jesus as a warrior and the faithful as his troops, fighting to impose their way of life on America. They see the Jesus of the gospels, helping the poor, turning the other cheek, as effeminate.

As for those who follow the prosperity gospel favored by the president, which holds that God rewards the worthy with wealth in this life, they would dismiss the claim that Jesus ever said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. In today's parlance, they'd probably call the Gospel of Matthew fake news. Anyway, then came Tuesday, at the pulpit, the voice of the party that favors the more empathetic Jesus of the Gospels, enunciated by Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, the leader of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington. She was nearing the end of her sermon, Trump and Melania, JD and Usha sat up front.

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde: Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you, and as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here.

Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger for we were all once strangers in this land.

Brooke Gladstone: The President was asked for his reaction.

Donald Trump: Did you like it? Did you find it exciting? Not too exciting, was it? I didn't think it was a good service, no. They could do much better.

Brooke Gladstone: Just after midnight, the New York Times reported, "The President doubled down on his criticism on Truth Social, calling for Bishop Budde and her church to apologize." "She brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way," he wrote. "She was nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart." Huh. As was the case last time, the anxiety that President Trump engenders in many Americans emerges from the chaos he generates.

His iron-willed refusal to back down in the face of irrefutable evidence. No, the election wasn't stolen, or even the proof of our lying eyes. We saw the violent attack on the Capitol, organized to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. We saw it. Why won't it stop?

Micah Loewinger: The Shepard tone, a sound illusion always sliding upward, yet never quite resolving. Like the stripes on a barber's pole, as this sonic mass moves up and up and up, the tension rises until nothing. It just keeps going. In the first Trump administration, we used the Shepard tone as a metaphor for what the news felt like for those four years when every breaking news update held the promise of consequences that never arrived.

No one can predict how effectively this administration will deliver upon its promises this time around but what's near certain is the nonstop, frenzied news that will accompany their efforts. Scandals, trolling, deregulation, abuses of power, breaking of norms, threats against minority groups, attacks on the media, media outrage building, building, building, building. Some will try to escape it by tuning it all out. Others will gorge upon it, submitting themselves to the anxiety it produces, but neither of these tactics will help you navigate the media onslaught of the next four years.

Jamelle Bouie: Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death. Be not afraid.

Micah Loewinger: This is Jamelle Bouie, a New York Times opinion writer, speaking to his 237,000 followers on TikTok about their feelings about the second Trump administration.

Jamelle Bouie: A lot of you responded, "Actually, Jamelle, it's all over. Hope is gone. Hope is lost. There's no way to ever dislodge them, and don't you know they control the Supreme Court? They can end elections forever." I think this is being hysterical.

Now let's get to the practical element of all this. There's no button the executive branch, the White House can press that's going to end elections, not even by Congress. If Republicans wanted to cement themselves so that they could not be moved, they would have to essentially win power in every single state of the Union and then pursue a similar set of rules, assuming the state constitutions allow them to do so and most state constitutions cannot be unilaterally amended.

The reason why I urge people not to fall into panic and fear is because panic and fear will overwhelm your critical faculties. Once you begin using your critical faculties, you start asking questions like, "Well, how exactly are they going to do X or Y or Z?"

Micah Loewinger: Bouie, of course, believes there are legit things to be concerned about. In other videos, he's discussed how the Trump administration will likely do awful things for bodily autonomy, food and water safety, labor protections, the social safety net, and so on.

Jamelle Bouie: There are threats, and there are dangers. They are real, but a threat and a danger is still something that could happen. This is the word I want you to remember. It's contingent. A lot of you, in my observation, are treating the threat, the danger, as if it's an accomplished fact, fait accompli, but it isn't. That means it is within the capacity to change it, to make it less worse, to make it such that it doesn't happen at all.

Micah Loewinger: Take, for example, one of Trump's marquee agenda items.

Donald Trump: I will declare a national emergency at our southern border. All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which--

Micah Loewinger: This week, Trump issued a series of immigration executive orders, some performative, some that have already meaningfully affected the lives of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers hoping to enter the US. ICE also began conducting warrantless raids, but mass deportation on the scale that Trump and his allies have promised is far from inevitable and probably not possible in the near future.

Dara Lind: They don't necessarily need a whole lot in terms of changes to law. They need a lot in terms of changes to capacity. The federal government has never tried to deport 11 million people before.

Micah Loewinger: This is Dara Lind, who spoke to me from a bustling cafe near Penn Station in Manhattan. She's a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, where she helped author a report that estimates that deporting 1 million people a year would cost taxpayers $88 billion annually, money required to find and round up all these people, to build new detention facilities, to buy plane tickets for deportees, to hire more immigration judges, a whole lot of infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.

Dara Lind: There are so many boxes that are going to have to get checked. If you're going to deport a million people a year, much less 11 million people, that's a lot of opportunities for people to say no.

Micah Loewinger: In an op-ed for the New York Times in November, Lind addressed readers who see mass deportation as a foregone conclusion, encouraging them instead to support immigrant legal services, to document when the government may be breaking the law, and to ask local officials to not collaborate with federal removal efforts, writing, "This work will require, particularly for those who are not themselves immigrants, a promise not to let pessimism do the Trump administration's job for it."

Dara Lind: We're talking about doomerism, right? If you personally, as an individual, find something morally abhorrent and you are willing to tell politicians that you find it morally abhorrent, we have evidence that that has worked. I think that mass protests are really what stopped the Trump administration on family separation. They did back down ish on the first travel ban. There is some willingness to respond to public opinion.

Micah Loewinger: The energy that powered the Women's March and other day-one protests doesn't seem to be there this time around.

Speaker 1: The resistance on the ground's petering out. You won't see any of these pink hats marching on the Capitol.

Speaker 2: Trump has been normalized in many ways. We are not seeing the same level of resistance that we saw last time.

James Billot: The era of resistance in 2017 has basically given way to an era of resignation. I think credit has to go to Trump for that. He has sucked the life out of this movement.

Micah Loewinger: It may well be true that Democratic voters are feeling pretty deflated right now, but even when they were motivated, were they as effective as they could have been? In 2018, Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, asked a random sample of 1,000 Americans how much time they spent on political activities. A third of them said that they spent two hours or more each day on politics.

Two hours a day devoted to politics, to civic engagement? Whoa. Wait, four out of five said that that time was not spent on any real work like organizing or volunteering. In other words, they considered reading the news and scrolling on social media to be their activism. Hersh, who spoke to Brooke in 2018 about his book Politics Is for Power, called those people political hobbyists.

Hersh: They read the newspaper, they listen to NPR, and then they could listen to a bunch of podcasts or watch MSNBC or Fox News for hours. Even if the stuff they're learning about is gossip and minutia, they'll say, "Ah, it's my civic duty to be informed."

Brooke Gladstone: You found political hobbyism is a bigger problem for Democrats?

Hersh: It's a big problem for people who are college-educated news followers. Right now, those people are overwhelmingly Democratic. They think about politics as their civic duty, and they're in a social network where people talk about politics, but if you ask them, "Oh, can you come to this community meeting where we're going to do something?" They would say, "Ah, I don't really have time for that."

Micah Loewinger: The fact is, news consumption, especially in the age of Trump, is exhausting. Keeping up with everything feels like work, but it isn't. If your sole relationship to politics is just mainlining the news every day, you will burn out and get nowhere, so stay informed, but take breaks. If you can, get involved. It's the best way to actually affect change and it might make you feel better.

Hersh: I think politics seems so sad online often because we follow these news stories, and they're big news stories, at least at any time they seem big. The Mueller Report seemed so big, and an impeachment. These are big historical moments, but my role as a citizen in those moments is not important. I'm not important but I am important if I place myself in a community.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, can fact-based media come up with new ideas to meet this moment? How?

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Since Donald Trump began his second term, he's resumed one of his favorite pastimes.

Donald Trump: Stop interrupting. We won this election in a landslide because the American public is tired of people like you that are just one-sided.

Speaker 3: Do you think that the war should be frozen currently along [crosstalk]--

Donald Trump: The war should have never started if you had a competent president, which you didn't. All right, go ahead. Yes, please.

[crosstalk]

Speaker 3: Do you have TikTok on your phone?

Donald Trump: No, but I think I might put it.

Laura Ingraham: I love this. This is so awesome.

Micah Loewinger: Laura Ingraham on Fox News.

Laura Ingraham: He loves sparring with the press.

Micah Loewinger: He wasn't just arguing with the media. He was busy reshaping it. This week, the president announced L. Brent Bozell as his pick to head the US Agency for Global Media, an independent body that's considered an arm of US Diplomacy.

Juana Summers: President Trump has picked a conservative critic of mainstream media to lead the US Agency for Global Media. That is the parent agency of federally owned international broadcasters like Voice of America.

Micah Loewinger: Also this week, Trump declared on Truth Social that MSNBC, "shouldn't even have a right to broadcast," and that the outlet "is even worse," he said, "than CNN." Oliver Darcy, who formerly covered the press for CNN, now writes a newsletter about the media called Status. I asked him if outlets, including his former employer, are rising to the occasion of covering a second Trump presidency.

Oliver Darcy: There's a very stark difference in the way CNN is covering Donald Trump and politics compared to the way it did under a previous owner. One of the noticeable things, for instance, during the inauguration coverage was that none of the CNN anchors pointed out that Donald Trump is the first convicted felon to take that office. They didn't point out that he was twice impeached. You had a lot of right-wing extremists and a lot of right-wing conspiracy theorists stuffed in the Rotunda. People like Tucker Carlson, an extremist; Marjorie Taylor Greene, an extremist; Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a conspiracy theorist. On and on it went.

In the previous iteration of CNN, you would have seen that called out pretty forcefully that at the Rotunda four years after January 6, you have a lot of people who pushed the Big Lie, who even in Tucker Carlson's case suggested that the insurrection was a false flag, that you have them now gathered at the citadel of American democracy welcoming Donald Trump back to power and Jake Tapper was pretty tame.

Micah Loewinger: You argue that Jake Tapper's limp coverage embodies a larger trend that we're seeing in the news media, which is a retreating from aggressive coverage of Donald Trump. You likened the phenomenon to the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the 1956 horror film.

Oliver Darcy: Yes.

Speaker 4: A cursed, dreadful, malevolent thing was happening to those he loved. I never saw one like it.

Oliver Darcy: I thought it was interesting that there are all these television news anchors who saw their star rise during the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, because they were tough-as-nails interviewers and anchors.

Micah Loewinger: You pointed to a kind of blistering sermon, as you describe it, from 2020, just after Donald Trump had lost the election and Joe Biden was being sworn in.

Oliver Darcy: That used to be the Jake Tapper that CNN viewers knew and I think CNN viewers liked.

Jake Tapper: Now the Trump presidency is coming to an end, with so many squandered opportunities and ruined potential, but also an era of just plain meanness. It must be said, to paraphrase President Ford, for tens of millions of our fellow Americans, their long national nightmare is over.

Oliver Darcy: Watching this second term begin, those anchors were still physically present on my screen, Jake Tapper was still there, but it felt like a very different Jake Tapper.

Jake Tapper: The president talking about ushering in a golden era of the United States. He certainly said a number of things that I'm sure outgoing president, Former President Biden didn't care for. We saw Hillary Clinton's head shaking no at one point, but it was the agenda that he was elected on.

Oliver Darcy: That's not an accident. That's the direction that new network chief Mark Thompson wants to take the network. Jeff Zucker, who was the network chief when AT&T owned the company, he encouraged anchors to be relentless, to be vocal about the lies that Donald Trump is pushing. Mark Thompson had his anchors gathered for a Sunday afternoon meeting and he made it very clear that he did not want to focus on those things. He wanted to look forward. He said that the network should be open-minded about Trump and show him a little deference. It's just a very different CNN and tone than it was four years ago.

Micah Loewinger: He really said, "Show him some deference"?

Oliver Darcy: That's not a quote from him, but, yes, that was the thrust of what he was saying, that this is a new president, CNN should not prejudge him, and that he should be given basically an opportunity to govern. Those days where you saw viral clips of CNN anchors really holding Trump's feet to the fire, those days have largely come to an end.

Micah Loewinger: Last week, as you reported, Jim Acosta, who historically has boasted some of the strongest ratings for CNN, got a call from Thompson informing him that his show had been abruptly moved to the midnight time slot, which is not exactly prime time.

Oliver Darcy: No.

Micah Loewinger: Do you think this had anything to do with Jim Acosta's past interacting with and reporting on Donald Trump?

Donald Trump: I think you should let me run the country. You run CNN. If you did it well, your ratings would be much--

[crosstalk]

Micah Loewinger: Who listeners might remember revoked Jim Acosta's press credentials after the two sparred in a famous White House Press Briefing Room moment in 2018?

Donald Trump: Sit down, please.

[background talk]

When you report fake news-- No. When you report fake news, which CNN does a lot, you are the enemy of the people. Go ahead.

Micah Loewinger: Which ultimately led to CNN briefly suing the Trump administration to try to reinstate Jim Acosta's press credentials.

Oliver Darcy: It's very, very, very hard to see this as them not banishing Jim Acosta because of the way he has covered Trumpism over the years. It's unheard of, first of all, to have an anchor at midnight to 2:00 in the morning hosting a show. No other cable news network has anyone in that time slot. No one plays in that time slot. That's usually when viewership is really at its lowest. This move is coming as Donald Trump comes back into power, right?

Across the media and technology sectors, you're seeing companies throw Trump bones and bend the knee to Donald Trump. It's happening with Jeff Bezos blocking the endorsement of Kamala Harris and signaling that he wants that paper to be more accepting of the MAGA movement. It's happening at the LA Times with Patrick Soon-Shiong refiguring the opinion side of that newspaper.

Micah Loewinger: He has reportedly started reviewing and clearing opinion headlines after the LA Times ran a piece titled, "Elon Musk bought himself a starring role in Trump's second term. What could go wrong?" What's wrong with that headline? It's an opinion piece.

Oliver Darcy: When I first heard about this, I couldn't believe that was the piece that drew his ire, but apparently, he was upset about it. I think he wants to be buddies with Elon Musk, so he didn't like that piece. Now he asked his opinion people to send him the articles so he can review them before they go live on the site. These are things that typically don't happen at news organizations. Rupert Murdoch is a hands-on owner, it would be wild if he was personally approving headlines.

Micah Loewinger: Among the laundry list of troubling moves from media executives in their dealings with the Trump administration, there was, of course, Disney's $15 million settlement with Trump in the lawsuit that Trump filed against ABC News. Tell me how that lawsuit and settlement was different from, say, reports that executives over at Paramount are considering a settlement with Trump over CBS News's "controversial editing" of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris.

Oliver Darcy: Each case is different, but the through line is that these major media companies don't want to be at war or in a feud with the sitting president, particularly a sitting president who has made no secret about the fact that he will wield the powers of the federal government to punish perceived critics. If you are Bob Iger over at Disney, or if you're Shari Redstone who owns Paramount and is trying to complete this deal with David Ellison who is the owner of Skydance, you don't want to be poking the eye of the president.

Donald Trump has a long history filing nonsensical lawsuits against these news organizations. The fact that they're now not fighting them, the fact that they're seemingly willing to just settle these lawsuits, I think is worrisome if you care about the press freedoms.

Micah Loewinger: Yes. $15 million might not register so much on a spreadsheet for Paramount or Disney, but it might really screw up a nonprofit newsroom, a local newspaper. Right? These types of lawsuits can be devastating for news organizations.

Oliver Darcy: It's also embarrassing, right? It certainly hands Donald Trump some sort of win to say, "Look, I sued them and I got some money out of them. They settled with me. They didn't want to go to court because they knew they were going to lose.

Micah Loewinger: Echoing this larger move towards "neutrality," last week, we learned that the Washington Post had adopted a new internal mission statement, "Riveting storytelling for all of America." Post-election surveys showed us how strongly a vote for Donald Trump correlated with a voter's apparent apathy for legacy media. I guess putting aside the journalistic ethics of all of this for a moment, is in your mind chasing less liberal audiences a good business strategy for these outlets.

Oliver Darcy: This has been the dream of owners. They wish they could live in 1995 where Republicans and Democrats gave their spiels. You heard from the right, you heard from the left, and people made up their mind. That might somewhat work if both parties are committed to basic principles and the truth but when you have a party that undermines the rule of law, when you have a party that is engaged in lying about basic, fundamental things like an election outcome, it's very difficult to imagine serving both audiences.

The reality-dwelling public will certainly consume information from outlets like the New York Times, but the MAGA base, they don't not only dislike those outlets, they would celebrate if they shut down. They hate those outlets. They despise them. They think they're the enemy of the people. I don't know how they're ever going to win over a good chunk of this audience. I don't think there's anything they can do that's going to win them over outside just pumping out pro-Trump propaganda like Fox News, and then you're going to alienate the reality-dwelling base and you're going to be doing bad journalism.

By the way, even Fox News gets criticized nowadays for being too soft, for apparently not being sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump.

Micah Loewinger: To your point about Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post, after he helped quash the endorsement for Kamala Harris, we saw some 200,000 Washington Post subscribers cancel their subscriptions. I guess I understand why some people are tuning out outlets that they feel are too compromised, but, by and large, I believe that rank-and-file reporters at many of the outlets we've just talked about hold the principles of journalism and truth in high regard. They do see value in adversarial coverage of whoever's in power. I wonder, is it possible for good journalism to thrive under leaders who appear to be cozying up to the Trump administration?

Oliver Darcy: I think you're right that most reporters, the vast majority of them, are committed to the truth. They want to tell the truth. They want to do good journalism. I do think it's difficult to underestimate, though, the impact that leaders have. Good leaders can bring out the best in reporters. They can make stars out of reporters. They can push them in the right direction, encourage them, support them, back them. Bad leaders can suffocate good journalism. Just as it would be difficult to maybe grow vegetation in the desert, it's not to say it's impossible, it's difficult, I think, for good journalism to thrive in an environment that's not conducive to it.

When you have people like Patrick Soon-Shiong or Jeff Bezos signaling very clearly where they want their newspaper to go, it does create somewhat of a chilling effect in these newsrooms. I was talking to a reporter at the LA Times who was saying, "For the first time, I'm thinking about how Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner, might react if they read my story."

Micah Loewinger: Oliver, you've told me a lot of things that have me feeling not so great about the next four years. Can you tell me something about the media landscape today that brings you some hope?

Oliver Darcy: I think one upside is that it's never been easier for people like me to start independent media companies and to be able to do reporting without being constrained. As the legacy press struggles, I think you are seeing some really interesting outlets also pop up. 404 Media, for instance, is a news outlet that covers tech. They're doing tremendous work, and they're entirely independent.

You have platforms like Substack, beehiiv, which I use, that allows journalists to be able to do this. I couldn't have started Status 10 years ago because these things didn't exist. I would have been reliant on using the distribution pipes that an outlet like CNN offered. Today, I can be entirely independent and I can distribute my journalism on my own. I think that gives me some hope. I think it's exciting to see outlets pop up and do good work, I hope to see more of it.

Micah Loewinger: Oliver, thank you very much.

Oliver Darcy: Thank you so much for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Oliver Darcy writes Status, a newsletter about the media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, why is Donald Trump so enthralled with William McKinley, and what can that tell us?

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. By now, you've probably heard who Donald Trump's favorite president is. Well, second favorite. It seems to be William McKinley. He praised the 25th president's business acumen and his system of tariffs in his inaugural address on Monday.

Donald Trump: President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent. He was a natural businessman.

Brooke Gladstone: He signed an executive order to re-rename the Alaskan mountain Denali.

Donald Trump: We will restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs.

Brooke Gladstone: Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau Chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. In a recent Nation piece titled Donald Trump is Building a Bridge to 1896, he wrote that, "For at least two decades now, social critics and commentators have been proclaiming that America is in a second Gilded Age." For Lehmann, the late 19th century's frenzy of freebooting capitalism is not a perfect analogy for the rip-roaring inequality of our own time but he does agree that right now, as Donald Trump embarks on his second term, one major aspect of the Gilded Age echoes this moment pretty well, and that's the presidency of William McKinley.

Chris Lehmann: It's an interesting bit of history in and of itself because when McKinley was in Congress in 1890 and was chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, he pushed forward a major tariff of 50% on foreign imports. What happened in dramatic fashion was there was a massive financial panic. The Panic of 1893 was, in significant respects, a direct response to McKinley's 1890 tariff, because that tariff did what most tariffs tend to do, prices rose dramatically and it constricted demand in the economy and triggered a bank panic.

Brooke Gladstone: My understanding is that McKinley lost his seat in 1890 because tariffs were so unpopular. In fact, it blew out the whole GOP.

Chris Lehmann: Yes. None of this gets much attention because America and culture in general is history-challenged, our political press in particular is, but the original tariff that McKinley got through Congress was an economic and political disaster.

Brooke Gladstone: You say that Trump's McKinley nostalgia is centered around a completely mangled historical reference, that the 1890s only produced unprecedented wealth for the 1% and broad immiseration for the country's working majority. In fact, you note that in 1897, the 4,000 families representing the top 1% of wealth in asset management controlled more of the economy than the country's 11.6 million remaining families, so not a great time for the lower 99%.

Chris Lehmann: What's also really interesting and cuts against one of the dominant themes in Trump coverage since 2016 is that the Panic of 1893 galvanized the capital-P Populist movement, which was a third-party movement that organized farmers and workers who had been left out of this top-heavy drive for wealth and were seeking to break the grip of monopolies and railroads. They proposed an ambitious agenda to fight the forces of monopoly capital. A lot of reforms that eventually got enacted like the income tax, the direct election of senators, McKinley, significantly, was recruited by big business to face down this uprising.

Brooke Gladstone: How did McKinley resurrect his political career? Going back to the Trump comparisons, you say that Trump had the financial backing of the technocrats of our time and McKinley, the private business titans of his, right?

Chris Lehmann: Oh, absolutely. McKinley's 1896 campaign is a landmark in our politics because it represented the first organized mustering of this new class of robber baron capitalists into the political arena. It was orchestrated mostly by McKinley's de facto campaign manager, who was head of the Republican National Committee at the time, Mark Hanna. His famous quote is that, "There are two important things in politics. One is money, and I forget what the other one is."

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] I guess the robber barons felt the same way. We're talking about Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller.

Chris Lehmann: The Populist insurgency had been brewing for some time now, and they understood that this was big trouble, so McKinley was sold by Hanna to protect their interests.

Brooke Gladstone: This was in response to what you call the capital-P Populist movement that gained a great deal of steam after that panic of 1893. What did McKinley say he would do for his backers, and what did he say he would do for the people?

Chris Lehmann: He ran in 1900 under the slogan a Full-Dinner Pail, arguing that the economy was booming, it had recovered somewhat. He did mildly restore tariffs during his first administration. This is what Trump misleadingly says was the cause of a booming economy. In point of fact, the Democrats had completely rescinded the 1890 tariffs when they took power in Congress. McKinley partially restored some of them to protect the interests of manufacturers like Carnegie and Rockefeller.

The Democrats who had repealed the tariff were misleadingly held responsible for the '93 collapse, which was not their doing, but they wound up losing seats. Then, in 1896, McKinley does capture the presidency because he is the candidate of the robber barons. They control everything else and they now control our politics to a degree that hadn't been seen before.

Brooke Gladstone: Staying with our comparison of McKinley with Trump, where does this populism fit in?

Chris Lehmann: I've been decrying for 10 years now the lazy use of populists to describe Trump and the Trump movement. Look at the people mustered in the front row of Trump's inauguration. They were Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg in much the way that William McKinley did. He was running on a Full-Dinner Pail and he was fattening the bottom lines of robber barons in reality. That's exactly what Trump is doing.

You'll see it when he gets his next tax cuts that will overwhelmingly benefit the people who financed his campaign, just as McKinley produced tariffs and imperial conquests to benefit the people who financed his campaign. This lazy characterization of Trump as a populist has always been misguided because, among other things, the original Populist movement was designed to expand direct participation in our democracy. That's why you had direct election of senators. Compare that to Trump who tried to overturn an election and wants to drastically limit ballot access. That is the opposite of populism.

Brooke Gladstone: Another Trump tribute to McKinley is our president's ambition to empire build. Annex Canada. That's a joke, I guess. Greenland, not a joke. Along with reclaiming US sovereignty over the Panama Canal. Tell me about McKinley's evolution into an imperialist.

Chris Lehmann: It should first be stipulated obviously, America was always a territorial empire. It expanded westward in far-from-pretty fashion, but yes, the idea that it would be a global empire was a hard sell in the politics of the 19th century because it would mean that America would join the old world in Europe as a begetter of upheaval in foreign countries and a profiteer off of the labor of far-flung populations. There is a fundamental conflict between seeing yourself as a republic and operating as an empire.

McKinley was ambivalent about entering the Spanish-American War, so there was this effort to sell, in particular, the conquest of the Philippines as a liberation movement on behalf of that subject population. Also, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaii, the US acquired after the Spanish-American War. All became colonial plantation enterprises for the new American empire. It's striking in Trump's inaugural speech, he talked about planting the flag on distant horizons, even used the term manifest destiny.

Donald Trump: The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.

Chris Lehmann: In some ways, Trumpism is McKinleyism dialed up to 11. It's exuberant imperialism and it's exuberant protectionism. One side effect of McKinley's dalliance with imperialism was he became less of a protectionist and more of a free marketer. I guess Trump just contains multitudes. I think there is a sense in which Trump's imperial rhetoric is largely bluster, meant to intimidate Canada and Greenland.

Brooke Gladstone: He really seems to care about the Panama Canal.

Chris Lehmann: Which, again, goes back to the McKinley White House. Teddy Roosevelt helped the construction of the canal and brokered US control over it.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump talked about all those thousands of lives lost in the building of the canal. Those were not American lives.

Chris Lehmann: Yes. That's how imperialism works.

Brooke Gladstone: McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and as you mentioned, Theodore Roosevelt inherited McKinley's empire in the making. He certainly was an imperialist himself, a fan of Rudyard Kipling, a believer in the white man's burden, who loudly and repeatedly declared white Anglo-Saxons to be a superior race. Now, you make a rather uneasy comparison here to Trump's vice president, JD Vance.

Chris Lehmann: Yes. For me, the most terrifying prospect in this whole analogy is that JD Vance becomes our generation's Teddy Roosevelt. He already has a similar natalist obsession with keeping the pure American population.

JD Vance: We need more American children. They make our economy more dynamic. They make fathers more empathetic, more invested in their communities. The thing I'm always met with is accusations of racism. There's just no comparison between the positive effects of children and the positive effects of an immigrant. I'm like you. I love the people who want to come to the country, but you can't have so many people coming to the country at a time when our own families aren't replicating themselves.

Brooke Gladstone: What do you think we should take away from these comparisons we just discussed?

Chris Lehmann: Not to sound like a broken record, but I think one big takeaway is that Donald Trump has never been a populist. He never will be a populist. He is like William McKinley, the helpmeet of the oligarchy. He will do nothing in practical policy terms to advance the interests of working people in this country. I think all of this talk of Trump is a populist has done a lot of harm in that respect.

It's allowed him to operate in this two-faced way to say, "I alone can fix it. I will bring back our manufacturing economy and the good paying jobs." None of that happened in his first term. None of that will happen in his second term. The other salient McKinley comparison, Trump, during the campaign, had a gathering of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago, where he said, "If you give me $1 billion, I will do whatever you want."

Chris Hayes: Last month, Donald Trump summoned a who's who of top lobbyists and executives from the oil and gas industry to [sound cut] as Mar-a-Lago and proceeded to solicit $1 billion from the fossil fuel companies to get him elected, as multiple outlets have now reported. In exchange, the Washington Post reports, "He vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Biden's environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted."

Chris Lehmann: We've already seen in his initial flurry of executive orders that he's going to open up oil drilling. Even though Biden had already greatly expanded oil, he's made the same de facto pitch to all of his major donors.

Brooke Gladstone: Did McKinley offer similar promises?

Chris Lehmann: This is why I say Trump is McKinley turned up to 11. In McKinley's time, there was probably more of a gentleman's agreement. Obviously, he was going to serve the interests of the people who elected him president. I guess it's a half-virtue of Trump that he makes all this explicit. Mark Hanna certainly was forthright about that. Mark Hanna was where the power was in the McKinley years.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you see conditions for the rise of another populist movement, or do the way people get information today and many other things make that very unlikely?

Chris Lehmann: There was what I regard as a capital-P Populist movement in the candidacy of Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. I think Democrats face a big moment of reckoning right now. They have a sclerotic leadership and an institutional party structure that is deeply allergic to delivering serious reform on behalf of working Americans. Kamala Harris spent more than $1 billion in campaign money and there are lots of conflicts having to do with corporate money in the Democratic Party.

It's certainly possible. To the extent that there is populist sentiment that's been shamefully demagogued and exploited by Trump, it does have to do with outrage over how economic elites have damaged the livelihoods of ordinary Americans. That, in my world, should be a prime opportunity for a Democratic Party that cares about workers, but we're not there yet.

Brooke Gladstone: Chris, thank you very much.

Chris Lehmann: Thank you. It's been a great pleasure.

Brooke Gladstone: Chris Lehmann is the DC Bureau Chief for The Nation and a contributing editor at The Baffler. His piece for The Nation is called Donald Trump is Building a Bridge to 1896.

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Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

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