The war on the press escalates

The media has been Donald Trump’s favorite scapegoat for a decade now, and as the president confronts the return of political gravity and the inevitable weakening of his hold on power, he will lash out — and no better target than journalists.

Some of these attacks will be familiar: We’ve seen how litigation warfare can take down entire newsrooms, and how regulatory threats (“nice merger you got there”) can cause CEOs to cower. But there are plenty of other tools in the toolbox. We should not be surprised if the first (and perhaps the second or third) prosecution of a U.S. journalist under the Espionage Act begins in 2026, or if the administration includes a few journalists among the “extremists” holding “anti-American views” that Attorney General Pam Bondi has instructed the FBI to identify. Individual journalists have already become targets of smear campaigns (most recently at Mother Jones, where I work) and nonprofit newsrooms could see their tax-exempt status threatened (also something Mother Jones experienced, during the Reagan administration).

Some of this will feel like mere posturing and messaging, like the “Media Offender of the Week” page that the White House has launched.

But words have consequences. The president has conditioned his followers to believe — genuinely believe — that journalists are traitorous enemies of the people. We can expect to see him to dial up the violent fantasies in 2026, and no one needs help imagining what that kind of language can lead to.

One way or the other, there is now a clear and present danger to the work of journalists that, previously, was familiar to our colleagues in Italy investigating organized crime, or Russia going after government corruption, or any number of countries where the two overlap: You go after the guys in charge, you should expect to pay for it.

U.S. journalists will need all the defenses we can muster — and a clear-eyed understanding that they may not always protect us.