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The Paramount-Warner Merger Would Give the Trumpers Even More Control of the Media
The merger would allow Paramount to merge CBS’ newsroom with Warner-owned CNN, which would presumably mean arch-Trumper Bari Weiss would be in charge of CNN.
Jul 15, 2026
Until a couple of months ago, we could get a dose of humor to help us get through the craziness, cruelty, and corruption of the Trump administration. But CBS pulled Stephen Colbert off the air, and not because of bad ratings—he had by far the most widely viewed network show at that hour.
The problem was President Donald Trump is too thin-skinned to put up with a comedian poking fun at him regularly. As a result, he had Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, imply that the Ellison family’s effort to take over Paramount, CBS’ parent company, would be blocked if Colbert wasn’t fired. The Elliot family includes prominent Trumper Larry Ellison, one of the richest people in the world, and David Ellison, his equally right-wing son who most immediately controls Paramount.
But taking over one of the country’s major broadcast networks wasn’t enough for the Ellisons. They also control TikTok, the fifth most widely used social media platform, which Trump wrestled away from a Chinese company and put in Larry Ellison’s hands.
And now, Paramount is looking to take over Warner Brothers. In addition to giving them control over two major Hollywood studios, the merger would allow Paramount to merge CBS’ newsroom with Warner-owned CNN. This would presumably mean arch-Trumper Bari Weiss would be in charge of CNN.
Stories about the upward redistribution of income over the last half-century, and anti-worker practices by businesses, tend to get short shrift. But there is no doubt they would get even less attention in a Trumper-controlled media universe.
David Ellison put Weiss, who has long-established right-wing credentials, in charge of CBS News soon after taking over the network. In this role, she has already fired or driven away many serious reporters and repeatedly censored "60 Minutes," its highly regarded and widely watched investigative news show. We can expect more of the same at CNN if Paramount’s takeover of Warner is allowed to go through.
While Trump’s Justice Department’s antitrust division has green-lighted the Paramount-Warner merger, there is still a possibility it can be stopped. California and 11 other states sued to stop the merger on antitrust grounds. In addition to merging two of the major news networks, it would also consolidate two massive Hollywood studios.
An analysis by the Media and Consolidation Research Organization Lab at the University of California San Diego found that the resulting reduction in competition would almost certainly mean fewer new movies are produced and less employment in the industry. It also would likely mean higher streaming prices for consumers. This is in addition to the problem of giving Trumpers even more control of the media.
There is at least some chance that the courts will block this merger on the merits. However, if it goes through the appellate process, the Republican Supreme Court may find the opportunity to provide another gift to Trump supporters irresistible. Still, the prospect of a years-long delay could persuade Paramount to compromise and offer at least partial divestment of some of Warner Brothers holdings to facilitate the merger. In any case, the antitrust lawsuit raises the possibility of blocking the merger in its current form.
While further consolidation of the media and placing ever more of it in the hands of Trumpers is definitely bad news, it would be wrong to imagine that we previously had a golden age of media. News outlets owned and run by rich people tend to present news in a manner that is acceptable to the bosses. Stories about the upward redistribution of income over the last half-century, and anti-worker practices by businesses, tend to get short shrift. But there is no doubt they would get even less attention in a Trumper-controlled media universe.
However, we should be looking for something better. One route is a system of individual tax credits, say $100 per person, to support a person’s favorite news outlet(s). This would be a credit, not a deduction, and fully refundable, so even the poorest person would get a $100 to support the news outlet of their choice.
The model is the tax deduction for charitable contributions, except that everyone would get the same amount. There are many design issues that would have to be ironed out, but such a system could create a large pool of money to support news reporting in various forms that is not controlled by rich people.
This system also has the advantage that it can be done at the state or even local level. That means that cities run by progressives, like New York and Seattle, could pave the way by putting this sort of system in place. (Seattle’s new mayor, Katie Wilson, is a big supporter of this sort of system.)
It is hugely important to do what we can to block further consolidation of the media in the hands of the Trumpers. We also need to do other things, like reforming Section 230 to take away the special protection it gives the huge social media platforms. But the most important longer-term measure to protect a free press is to set up an alternative funding mechanism. An individual tax credit system is a promising route, but we need to get these alternatives on the table and start moving forward with them.
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Scott Pelley Details Weiss' Push to Air 'State Propaganda' on CBS News
"She was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president."
Jun 08, 2026
Days after being fired from the CBS News program '60 Minutes' for speaking out against the dismissal of several top correspondents and declaring that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss was "brought in to kill" the show, veteran journalist Scott Pelley described in detail the right-wing former opinion columnist's efforts to push for political coverage that centered the White House's point of view—regardless of the facts.
"There was a thumb on the scale for the president’s version of events that I felt was a level of political influence that I had never seen in 37 years at CBS News," Pelley told The New York Times' Lulu Garcia-Navarro Sunday.
Pelley was interviewed after he and his former colleagues spoke out against what fired correspondent Cecilia Vega called "censorship" at the 58-year-old program since Weiss took the helm of CBS News last year. Weiss was installed following a White House-approved merger of parent company Paramount and Skydance Media, owned by the son of President Donald Trump backer Larry Ellison.
The new editor-in-chief, who first gained notoriety as a student at Columbia University when she led a campaign against pro-Palestinian professors and later railed against "cancel culture," arrived at CBS last fall with promises to promote "journalism that reports on the world as it actually is" and that is "fair, fearless, and factual."
But in his interview with the Times, Pelley expanded on his earlier accusation, made in a statement released last week after he was fired, that Weiss had demanded that he "inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story"—revealing that the coverage in question dealt with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis in January.
Good was shot in her car by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent after several officers gave her conflicting instructions, and footage of the shooting showed an agent approaching the front of her vehicle as she turned the wheel to the right. Pretti was shot by Customs and Border Protection agents in another incident, after he approached a woman one officer had thrown to the ground. Top administration officials accused both victims of being violent and called Good a "domestic terrorist" while barring state officials from investigating the killings.
Pelley said that before Weiss intervened in the coverage of the fatal shootings, he had pushed to use images "in which we see the protesters acting aggressively."
"I felt it was very important to identify that the protesters themselves were being very aggressive and that they were half of these confrontations," he told Garcia-Navarro. "We also included a picture of Alex Pretti before he was killed kicking out a taillight on a police car and made a point of saying, this is Alex Pretti and this is what he did."
But Pelley's push to get ahead of any criticism that '60 Minutes' was being biased against the agents or the Trump administration didn't stop Weiss from emailing the show's executive producer hours before the story was set to air, asking that producers "make the protesters look more violent" and even promote a false claim about Good that was pushed by the White House.
Pelley said the message from Weiss was, "You need to describe her as driving toward the officer."
This is a devastating interview.
Scott Pelley tells the NYT that Bari Weiss directly put a “thumb on the scale” for Trump over the killing of Renee Good.
Here’s his explanation of exactly what happened. pic.twitter.com/Kh56P1q7rM
— Niall Stanage (@NiallStanage) June 7, 2026
"This is not what you see on the video," Pelley told Garcia-Navarro. "On the video, you see the officer standing slightly off the front of the car. And you clearly see Ms. Good’s wheels turned completely as far as they will go, away from the officer. But he shoots her in the head, kills her."
Pelley said he refused to make the changes, and did not hear from Weiss about the piece after it aired. A CBS spokesperson told the Times that the suggestions Weiss had made "had no political motivation and were proposed solely to make the piece as strong, fair, and accurate as possible."
Pelley told Garcia-Navarro: "My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president. We’re reporting those views. There’s nothing wrong with reporting those views, but it was never enough."
The story on Pretti and Good came weeks after Weiss pushed the show's producers and correspondents to change a segment on Trump's deal with El Salvador under which hundreds of immigrants have been deported to the country's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center after being falsely accused of being gang members.
Pelley's revelation about the exchange with Weiss was called "devastating" by The Hill reporter Niall Stanage, while the grassroots progressive group Our Revolution said Pelley had described "a CBS News editor demanding reporters change facts to match Trump’s version of events to help justify the murder of a US citizen.
"That isn’t news. It’s state propaganda," said the group. "Bari Weiss is not a journalist. She is an asset of the Trump administration. She should be sued and removed and Paramount should answer for installing her."
Scottish historian William Dalrymple added that Pelley's interview revealed Weiss as "a major threat to truthful journalism."
The chaos at CBS has intensified as Paramount Skydance has pushed for a merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN—raising alarm that the cable network could soon see a significant shift toward reporting that blatantly centers the White House's viewpoints.
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Fight the Trump Media Takeover With Tax Credits for Independent Reporting
If 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media.
Jun 05, 2026
It is terrible to see Bari Weiss, under orders from Trumper owner David Ellison, dismantle "60 Minutes" and the rest of CBS News. CBS was never close to being a paragon of unbiased reporting; the rich always had a disproportionate voice, but the network, and especially "60 Minutes," did much excellent investigative reporting.
The Weiss-Ellison team is explicitly saying that this will no longer be the case under their leadership. Any investigative reporting this crew does will most likely be on President Donald Trump’s political opponents. And the material they present will likely be as distorted as the lies that Trump spouts on a daily basis.
The problem goes well beyond CBS. The Ellison family is also planning to take over CNN through its acquisition of Warner Bros., the parent company. The Trumper trio of Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk own TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, and X, respectively. They do not hide their efforts to use their control of these social media platforms to push their political agenda.
And it goes beyond just outright control. Trump and Brendan Carr, his chair of the Federal Communications Commission, have said that they would use the federal government’s regulatory powers to punish outlets that broadcast material they don’t like. Trump used this threat to extract tribute from both ABC News and CBS News (pre-Weiss) over absurd lawsuits.
The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing.
All in all, this is a really bad story. But there are things that can be done other than whine. First, the Ellison’s takeover of Warner is not a done deal. People can protest this monopolization of both movie production and news. Even Trumper politicians can be forced to respond to public pressure. Note the seeming retreat from Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for his criminal friends. Giving tax dollars to Trump’s chosen criminals was too much for people to stomach, and the Republicans in Congress were forced to nix it.
There are also a large number of independent outlets that continue to do solid reporting. I would put ProPublica at the top of that list, but there are many others. I would also include The New York Times and NPR, despite my many criticisms of both outlets over the years. And there are dozens of smaller publications, way too many for me to list, that people should look to support. Instead of buying something you see advertised on CBS or any other corrupt media outlet, send the money you would have spent to The Nation, In These Times, Payday Report, or any of a number of other independent outlets.
But we really need to go beyond what people cough up out of goodwill. The billionaires have endless money to push their Trumpian nonsense. The nickels and dimes that ordinary people can afford is not a match. We really need to have government support for independent media, and I’m not talking about going back to the old days with the federal government coughing up $500 million a year (0.007% of the budget) for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
We need an individual tax credit or voucher, modeled on the charitable contribution tax deduction. The difference is that this money would be designated for news outlets, and that it would be a credit (say $100), available to everyone, not a deduction from taxes. This way the money would go to the outlets that people find valuable, not the ones the government has chosen. (There is a question of eligibility, but this has generally not been a major problem in qualifying for tax-exempt status with the Internal Revenue Service.)
This route can make a huge amount of money available to support independent reporting. If it was set up nationally and 150 million people took advantage of a $100 credit, that would make $15 billion available to support independent media. That is roughly 300 times ProPublica’s annual budget.
Needless to say, not everyone will use their credit to support media progressives will like. Some may support tabloid-type reporting on Hollywood figures. Some of it will go to support right-wing Fox News- type propaganda. But if even 20% went to support real news, it would be an enormous boon for independent reporting.
And the great thing about this credit is that it can be done at the state and local level, so we don’t have to wait for the forces of good to retake Washington. There have already been some efforts in this direction around the country. In this respect, it’s worth noting that Katie Wilson, Seattle’s new progressive mayor, is a big proponent. If Seattle or some other progressive city or state led the way, it could set an example for others to follow.
To many, this sort of media tax credit will be a new idea. We all know the old line about intellectuals having a hard time with new ideas. But it is really important that people overcome their difficulties. The media matter hugely for democracy, much more than campaign financing. (Sorry, but it’s a bit nuts to think that campaign ads affect voting, but not what people see between the ads.)
I’ve pushed this scheme for a long time, and maybe it’s not the best plan. But if people have better ideas, put them on the table. Whining over the right’s takeover of the media is not a political strategy.
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Lessons in Resistance From Scott Pelley
We can gain courage from our heroes of this moment: Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump.
Jun 05, 2026
I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capitol city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.
The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of Michigan State University Students for a Democratic Society.
I did the news there for years, and nobody ever told me how to spin it or what to insert or delete. I knew that I couldn’t bias it to reflect my own opinions: the news—accurate, factual, honest information—was sacred.
It was also the cost of our broadcast license, and we all knew it. The widely misunderstood Fairness Doctrine’s main demand was that radio and TV stations “program in the public interest” and that was widely understood to mean straightforward, reliable, faithful-to-reality news at the top and bottom of every hour on radio and an hour-long news block in prime time on TV.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
We did this—and embraced the Fairness Doctrine—because we knew it was part of the price of freedom, of democracy in our republic. When Thomas Jefferson said he’d rather live in a country with newspapers and no government than in one with a government but no newspapers, he wasn’t knocking government; he’d help create ours and was its president for eight years. He was talking about the vital importance of an honest and free press.
Part of that honesty came from the competition; there were multiple stations in Lansing and most had an in-house news operation like ours, and the ones that didn’t ran the CBS or AP radio newscast twice an hour. Honesty and clarity were essential to get and maintain an audience, as well as hanging onto our license.
Then-President Ronald Reagan ended the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, and now President Donald Trump and his oligarch enablers are trying to bury the entire concept of honest, straightforward news.
Over the past year and a half we’ve watched Brendan Carr, Trump’s hitman at the Federal Communications Commission, go to Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) conferences and brag about how he’s going to assault stations that say things he and Trump dislike. He’s trying to intimidate ABC affiliates into muzzling Jimmy Kimmel—again. And he succeeded in taking down Stephen Colbert.
And a Trump-adjacent billionaire nepo baby has acquired CBS and is systematically stripping it of its journalistic integrity, starting with the evening news and now gutting the nation’s No. 1 news magazine show, "60 Minutes."
Storied journalist and "60 Minutes" reporter Scott Pelley isn’t taking it lying down, even though it’s a virtual certainty that he has the standard non-disparagement clause that most media operations now require for talent, which forbid them to ever speak ill of their former employer should they leave for any reason. He’ll probably get sued for it, but he’s a man committed to the truth.
Trump, David Ellison, Bari Weiss, the billionaire owners of Sinclair, the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News,” the 1,000+ billionaire-owned radio stations across the country, the billionaire-subsidized podcasters, and billionaire-owned social media sites like Facebook and X that have apparently been algorithmically slanted toward Trump’s neofascist movement are all following an ancient script.
Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, and Francisco Franco all seized control of the news in their countries in their first year in power. It took both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán two or so years, because they wrote a new script for the takeover: Sue the news outlets and reporters into bankruptcy for “defamation” or “slander,” then have friendly oligarchs take over the outlets.
Orbán even came to CPAC in Dallas to tell Republicans that they should do the same thing as he had done by turning America’s media over to right-wing billionaires. He also told the American CPAC conference in Budapest four years ago, during the Biden administration, that they should do the same in America when Republicans next seized control of the US government.
“Have your own media,” he said. “It’s the only way to point out the insanity of the progressive left. The problem is that the Western media is adjusted to the leftist viewpoint. Those who taught reporters in universities already had progressive leftist principles.”
He added:
Of course, the GOP has its media allies but they can’t compete with the mainstream liberal media. My friend Tucker Carlson is the only one who puts himself out there. His show is the most popular. What does it mean? It means programs like his should be broadcasted day and night. Or, as you say, 24/7.
Thus, this is now the Putin-Orbán-Trump formula:
- Manufacture a crisis.
- Declare an “emergency.”
- Seize powers the Constitution doesn’t grant.
- Bypass Congress.
- Bully or ignore the courts.
- Use masked, secret police and the military against your own residents.
- Send people to foreign concentration camps.
- Build concentration camps within the United States.
- Prosecute lawyers and judges.
- Assert control over universities.
- Merge corporate and state interests.
- Cow the media into silence about your corruption and crimes.
- Then call it all “law and order.”
Trump is 18 months into his project, and he’s already taken down the Voice of America, defunded PBS and NPR, seen the Washington Post and LA Times acquired by sycophantic billionaires, and turned CBS over to a nepo-baby billionaire who’s going after CNN next. As Jefferson pointed out, this is how democracies are fatally corrupted, which is apparently Trump and his billionaire enablers’ goal.
Combine that with a capture of the police and prosecutorial agencies of the government so, like in Putin’s Russia, they can harass and prosecute anybody who dares speak up against their destruction of our way of life and you have the classic formula for turning a democratic republic into an oligarchic dictatorship.
The classic symbol of authoritarian governance dating back to ancient Rome and Caligula—violence as entertainment—will come to the White House as musclebound men will beat each other bloody and senseless for spectacle and the amusement of our 80-year-old “president” on our nation’s birthday.
Masked thugs snatching people off the street without warrants and putting them into concentration camps in violation of the Fouth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments also plays well for the fascist Klan-remnant Republican base, so long as the people they beat, pepper spray, or murder are either dark-skinned or “liberal agitators.”
We’re now way down the road to the complete destruction of America, all in less than two years, as I wrote and warned of in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy in 2020.
The courts are packed with Trump toadies; thousands of lawyers have been purged from government; the FBI is now weaponized against Americans; Blacks and women are being pushed out of senior military commands by an openly white supremacist defense secretary; our history is being whitewashed in national parks, museums, and every federal property; and Trump’s face hangs, 60 feet tall, on multiple federal buildings.
And now they’re coming for the news. If it falls, recovering our republic will be possible—the examples are Hungary with Peter Magyar and Volodymyr Zelenskyy being elected in Ukraine—but very, very difficult. It will take years and cost a fortune both in work, cash, and probably blood, as it did in those two countries.
But we can gain courage from our heroes of this moment. Scott Pelley is unintimidated, telling us bluntly that the new owner and management of CBS tried to force him to lie to us on the air and spin stories so they could please wannabe-Emperor Trump. When they tried to lie their way out of the PR mess Pelley created for them, he immediately called out their falsehoods.
This crisis isn’t limited to CBS: the same nepo-baby billionaire who’s taken over that network also, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), now owns, controls, or soon will control:
TikTok, Warner Bros., Paramount, DC Studios, The Discovery Channel, CNN, CBS, HBO, BET, Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes, Nickelodeon, MTV, Cartoon Network, Food Network, Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Comedy Central, Showtime, TBS, TLC, HGTV, and more.
Oligarchy and monopoly are two sides of the same anti-democratic fascist coin. They’re always tied together.
As anti-democracy billionaires continue their march across the American media landscape and pour billions into elections, it falls to us to resist.
To register our discontent with those outlets. To boycott them. To demand that our politicians start breaking up the monopolies that Reagan legalized when in 1983 he ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission, FCC, and Federal Trade Commission to stop enforcing the antitrust laws that went all the way back to the 1890s (leading to three decades of “merger mania”).
Monopolies are destructive, but media monopolies are pure Putin-style poison.
We all must become truth tellers, regardless of whether our platforms are, like mine, on radio, TV, and Substack, or if the place we can make our mark and speak our voice is on social media, the local newspaper’s letters to the editor, financial or volunteer support for a fighting progressive politician, or the town square with a protest sign.
We are all Scott Pelley.
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CBS Firings Called 'Straight From an Authoritarian Handbook' and Preview of Paramount-Warner Bros. Merger
The pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger "represents an existential threat to the free press, independent media, and free speech in this country and beyond," warned several press freedom groups.
Jun 02, 2026
A coalition of nine press freedom groups on Tuesday warned that last week's firings of top journalists at CBS News' "60 Minutes" were a "grotesque effort taken straight from an authoritarian handbook"—but emphasized that the dismissal of reporters who had pushed back against the Trump administration signaled danger for journalists across the media, particularly as a pending merger would hand control of CNN to the same billionaire family that how runs CBS.
The Coalition for Women in Journalism, Common Cause, Freedom of the Press Foundation, and Reporters Without Borders were among the groups that released a statement saying the firing of "60 Minutes" correspondents Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega—as well as two top executives—were meant to "appease a sitting president and dismantle one of the loudest voices in investigative journalism."
But the groups emphasized that "this is only the beginning," considering the fact that Warner Bros. Discovery recently voted in support of a $110 billion proposed merger with Paramount Skydance, owned by David Ellison, the son of President Donald Trump megadonor Larry Ellison. The deal could be finalized as soon as July.
Warner Bros. Discovery owns CNN, and media critics have warned the network could be headed for the same loss of editorial independence that CBS has faced since right-wing former opinion columnist took the helm of the latter network last year following the Paramount Skydance merger.
Since then, newly appointed editor-in-chief Bari Weiss has pulled from the air a "60 Minutes" segment that questioned the Trump administration's explanation for the deportation of hundreds of immigrants to an El Salvador prison, personally booked guests for news programs, and called for programming that appeals to "centrist" viewers.
"Bari Weiss’ shameless actions fulfill the Ellisons’ commitment to President Trump to remake CBS to his liking," said the groups on Tuesday. "Larry Ellison has reportedly promised to do the same at CNN if allowed to take control through the pending Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. Not because it makes any business sense, but because they seek to control the public discourse."
"We have to make the story heard. It’s what '60 Minutes' would have done; it’s what the Fourth Estate is tasked with doing; it’s what Trump and the Ellisons want to prevent. Don’t let them.”
The groups noted that the firings of Alfonsi, Vega, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich came as more than 200 journalists and documentarians signed an open letter opposing the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger, citing concerns that the deal "would open the door to improper political meddling in journalists’ editorial decisions," and noting that according to The Wall Street Journal, David Ellison has "promised President Donald Trump 'sweeping changes' at Warner-owned CNN—a frequent target of Trump’s ire."
"Ellison will likely alter CNN’s editorial direction (not to mention meddle with HBO’s documentaries) to be more friendly to the administration, threatening press freedom," said the signatories, including Wajahat Ali, Mehdi Hasan, and Alfonsi.
A separate letter organized by Democracy Defenders Fund has garnered signatures from over 1,000 actors, producers, directors, screenwriters, and other entertainment professionals.
"This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries—and the audiences we serve—can least afford it," reads the letter, which calls for state attorneys general to block the merger. "The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world. Alarmingly, this merger would reduce the number of major US film studios to just four."
On Tuesday, the press freedom groups warned that the merger "represents an existential threat to the free press, independent media, and free speech in this country and beyond, and should not be allowed to move forward."
"We cannot let this blow to the bedrock of our democracy be lost in the constant barrage of scandal, corruption, and abuse of power," said the organizations. "We have to make the story heard. It’s what '60 Minutes' would have done; it’s what the Fourth Estate is tasked with doing; it’s what Trump and the Ellisons want to prevent. Don’t let them.”
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The Fight Over Worst-Case Climate Scenarios Reveals a Science Communication Failure
When articles imply a scientific model was wrong when it was merely updated to reflect new data, they sow unfounded distrust in science and create space for climate disinformation.
Jun 02, 2026
After a new scientific paper advanced a climate modeling framework that replaced an old extreme climate scenario with a less severe one, President Donald Trump posted to social media that climate scientists had admitted to being “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” But it wasn’t a science mistake. It was a communication one.
Climate scenarios are not predictions. They are tools to understand how the climate would respond to different human actions, from rapid emissions cuts to current policies to backsliding into more fossil fuels. The most extreme widely-used pathway, called RCP8.5, studied a world with no climate policy and exceptionally high fossil fuel use through the rest of the century. Though always meant as an unlikely outlier, RCP8.5 has become far less plausible after a decade of accelerated clean energy deployment, to the point that this new paper proposed replacing it in future research. That should have been a climate win: Humans avoided the worst pathway and scientists revised models accordingly.
That this story could be so easily recast as scientific failure should be a wake-up call for science communicators. For years, journalists have favored alarm over nuance and problems over solutions, leaving the public poorly equipped to understand how uncertainty works or how climate action has improved future prospects. Without that context, every averted disaster can be mistaken for proof that the danger was made up at the outset.
Contrary to the president’s post, this pathway revision did not originate at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It came from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), which convened an international group of scientists to devise an updated set of climate scenarios for future study. The group didn’t just toss RCP8.5. It published a new framework that removes implausible outliers at both extremes, includes more pathways where the world uses carbon removal technologies, and centers human emissions decisions more explicitly. In a news release, the IPCC clarified that CMIP is not under their umbrella, though the research will likely appear among the tens of thousands of studies analyzed for the IPCC’s next major report.
RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.
Yet in addition to Trump, the New York Post and Daily Caller falsely presented this shift as an IPCC scandal. The New York Times and Washington Post also implied in their headlines that scientists got something wrong. These framings defy the logic of climate scenarios. Scenarios are not future predictions. Rather, they consider several possible human actions and study how the climate system would respond to each.
The uncertainty in these scenarios is a feature, not a bug. To scientists, uncertainty does not mean knowing or not knowing, but rather how well something is known. In the case of a climate model, scientists know pumping more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will warm the planet, but they cannot know exactly how much humans will emit; how strongly clouds, water vapor, surface reflectivity, and other feedbacks will amplify or dampen additional warming; or how oceans, forests, permafrost, and other natural systems will absorb or release carbon as the planet changes. Knowing this, scientists use ranges, error bars, assumptions, and confidence levels to communicate what a model can and can’t assert.
Like scientists, journalists seek the truth. However, journalists must hit far shorter word counts with far tighter deadlines. As such, they prefer hard facts and snappy quotes from authorities to convey information. They may see “uncertainty” as describing something unknown and thus irrelevant, not realizing how this thought process diverges from scientists'. Editors even less familiar with the topic may use the most conflict-charged framing or the scariest number in a range when they write headlines, favoring clicks over accuracy.
Typically, these issues are not nefarious. But when articles imply a scientific model was wrong when it was merely updated to reflect new data, they sow unfounded distrust in science and create space for climate disinformation.
In this case, changed human behavior is the new data point. When the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015, the world was projected to warm by nearly 4°C, not much better than the RCP8.5 nightmare scenario. Today, based only on current policies, that projection is down to 2.6°C. While that trajectory still presents major cause for concern, these improvements are substantial, drastically reducing the risk of reaching several tipping points this century including East Antarctic glacier collapse, northern permafrost collapse, and a West African monsoon shift.
If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward.
That progress comes largely from the fact that solar costs have fallen about 90%, onshore wind about 70%, and batteries by more than 90% in the last decade, now routinely besting fossil fuels on price. Several other clean technologies have emerged and scaled, many businesses have adopted more sustainable practices, and thousands of climate policies have been enacted globally. With these achievements, what was once a plausible outlier in RCP8.5 no longer makes sense as the upper bound for climate scenarios.
Had Americans encountered frequent climate solutions reporting over the past decade, scientists setting aside RCP8.5 would have made complete sense. Yet solutions journalism remains a growing but still niche practice. Many editors worry solutions stories could look like advocacy, garner less readership, or fail to qualify as news. Evidence demonstrates the opposite: Audiences view, share, and trust solutions stories more than problem stories, and climate solutions stories specifically increase readers’ self-efficacy relative to problem-oriented alternatives.
Journalists play an essential role in showing which solutions are driving progress, where they fall short, and how best practices can be replicated. Without that news, audiences are more likely to believe climate deniers were right than understand that substantial climate progress has been happening for years, just without the sustained attention it merited.
None of this reduces the urgency of climate change. A 2.6°C world would still be incredibly costly, unjust, and catastrophic. But urgency without context leaves communities unable to assess risk and recognize which actions work. RCP8.5 is not wrong science. Rather, science provided a map of perilous futures, people changed course, and the map refreshed accordingly.
If journalists want audiences to trust science, they must tell the whole story: the danger, the uncertainty, the progress, and the paths forward. Otherwise, every hard-earned climate win risks being twisted into a scandal.
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'She Was Brought in to Kill' 60 Minutes: Scott Pelley Unleashes on Bari Weiss at CBS Meeting
The journalist confronted newly installed executive editor Nick Bilton over the recent firings of two reporters and two top executives.
Jun 01, 2026
Veteran "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley took aim at the qualifications and intentions of CBS News' right-wing editor-in-chief, Bari Weiss, on Monday at an explosive staff meeting that was meant to introduce employees of the 57-year-old news show to its newly appointed executive producer days after several journalists were fired in what Pelley referred to as "Black Thursday."
Weiss, a former New York Times opinion columnist who first gained notoriety for campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors at Columbia University and went on to rail against "woke" progressives and "cancel culture," appointed tech journalist Nick Bilton to lead the program last week after firing two executives and two top correspondents.
Bilton opened the meeting by reading some prepared remarks, but Pelley quickly cut in to tell the new producer that he had "many questions" about the dismissals of reporters Cecilia Vega and Sharyn Alfonsi, executive producer Tanya Simon, and executive editor Draggan Mihailovich.
"I guess you wandered in expecting to read a statement off?" Pelley asked Bilton, his voice reportedly "shaking in anger" at times. "What was wrong with Sharyn Alfonsi?"
Alfonsi and Vega won a prestigious journalism award for a story on President Donald Trump's deal with El Salvador to send immigrants to the country's notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the abuse detainees have suffered there, and the fact that many of those deported to the prison have not been convicted of crimes and have been falsely accused of being members of violent gangs.
The story was pulled from the air last December after Weiss complained that it hadn't covered the Trump administration's perspective, garnering accusations of censorship, and eventually aired with some editing.
Pelley suggested on Monday that such decisions revealed Weiss' intentions for the broadcast as a whole.
“She’s murdering ’60 Minutes.’ She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it—and she’s doing exactly that,” Pelley told Bilton. “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job."
"The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic," he added, "so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”
'CBS Evening News' has had declining viewership, "often below 4 million viewers a night," according to NPR, with the broadcast "flagging" since Weiss installed Tony Dokoupil as anchor.
Media critics have warned that Weiss appears to be "running the Trump playbook" at CBS, as Sophia Tesfaye wrote at Salon last week: "Take an institution that still commands public trust, install loyalists with no relevant experience in positions of authority, fire the people who push back, dress the whole operation in the language of reform—fairness, innovation, a new direction—and you dare anyone to prove that what you’re really doing is building a protection racket."
Weiss took the helm of CBS after parent company Paramount's merger with Skydance, owned by the son of tech billionaire and Trump backer Larry Ellison.
Charles Forelle, the managing editor of CBS News and a close associate of Weiss, repeatedly attempted to steer Monday's meeting away from Pelley's criticism of Bilton and the new direction "60 Minutes" appears to be taking, saying at one point that Pelley's line of questioning was "not actually productive."
"It's working for me," replied Pelley.
After Pelley said the network's leadership had been "cruel" in firing veteran journalists from the show, Forelle accused him of being "rude."
"I'm not being rude," he shot back. "You know what was rude? Black Thursday. That was the absolute definition of rudeness. Telling Tanya Simon she had to be out of here at 5:00. Sending Draggon Mihailovich to HR to get fired, because no one could look him in the eye. Not talking about Sharyn Alfonsi's contract. Not talking about Cecilia Vega's contract. Just calling them up and telling them they were fired. That's rude."
"This is a conversation," Pelley added. "That is rude, and you were part of that."
Alfonsi's contract with "60 Minutes" was not renewed; Vega was dismissed despite her contract not being up until 2027. The two journalists spoke out about their firings, with Alfonsi saying, "Journalists willing to challenge authority are being pushed aside in favor of those who will not."
Vega said that "in recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories."
"60 Minutes" employees applauded Pelley on Monday after Bilton left the meeting, and observers praised the veteran journalist for defending the show and the work of its staffers.
"Scott Pelley told the truth today," said Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket. "We need independent media the right wing can't buy."
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When Trump Targets the Media, the World's Autocrats Are Taking Notes
Trump's words and actions against the news media at home are inspiring copycat behavior by authoritarians and dictators around the world, fueling a growing global crisis of press freedom.
May 21, 2026
Only a day after President Donald Trump spoke of unity following a gunman’s abhorrent attempt to kill him and members of his administration at the White House Correspondents' dinner, the president quickly returned to his regularly scheduled programming of berating members of the press that ask him unwanted questions.
In a "60 Minutes" interview with CBS correspondent Norah O’Donnell taped and aired the day following the assassination attempt, Trump repeated many of his now-tired insults about the press, referring to the media in general as “horrible people,” and calling O’Donnell a “disgrace” who should be “ashamed” of herself for raising excerpts of the alleged gunman’s manifesto in a question to the president.
At this point, understandably, many of us have simply begun to tune out Trump’s now-frequent diatribes against the press. Nearly a decade since Trump first tweeted the now-ubiquitous phrase “fake news” and infamously labelled the news media the "enemies of the American people," such insults just don't land like they used to.
Yet Trump's words do in fact matter. While many of Trump’s rhetorical attacks against the press during his first term were dismissed as bluster from a president known for his flair for the dramatic, they laid the groundwork for the broad attack on the media that we’re seeing under Trump 2.0.
Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes.
Under his second presidency, the Trump administration has waged a multifaceted campaign against free speech and independent journalism, characterized by retaliatory lawsuits against major media outlets; legal harassment and intimidation of journalists; slashed budgets for public broadcasting; and regulatory pressure, taking aim at reporting not to the administration’s liking.
Even as the First Amendment comes under unprecedented pressure in the US, the impact of the Trump administration’s attacks on the news media hasn’t stopped at the US border. The linguistic framing Trump popularized to villainize the press (and justify executive action against them) has also contributed to a growing crisis of press freedom worldwide.
Trump’s attacks on the media have inspired copycat behavior from press freedom pariahs around the world. From Hungary to Turkey, authoritarian or illiberal leaders have echoed Trump’s hostile rhetoric against the press, adding their own spin in remarks designed to discredit the news outlets and journalists intent on exposing corruption and holding their leaders accountable to their people.
Autocratic regimes in Russia, China, and Egypt have seized on to Trump’s “fake news” framing with actual legislation barring the spread of “false” or “misleading” news and information. What actually defines fake news usually isn’t clear—the vague, ambiguous wording of many of these laws gives the government wide latitude to decide how they are applied.
Amid a rise in global conflict, governments around the world are increasingly using “national security” as a pretext to censor critical war reporting. Only weeks prior to the Correspondents’ dinner, Trump threatened to jail an unnamed journalist from an unnamed media outlet if they did not reveal the identity of the government source who gave the press information about a US military operation to rescue a pilot whose plane was downed in Iran.
While Trump hasn’t yet followed through on this particular threat, other countries have not hesitated to lock up journalists that report inconvenient truths about the conflict. In early March, the government of Kuwait arrested Kuwaiti-American journalist Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a day after he shared a verified CNN video depicting the downing of a US F-15E fighter jet by the Kuwaiti military during a friendly fire incident. Luckily, after a wave of international pressure on the part of the press freedom community, Shihab-Eldin was released and was able to safely leave Kuwait—at the cost of his citizenship.
Despite the bad news, there are still a few bright spots as journalists and independent media outlets in places like Hungary have demonstrated remarkable resilience and strength in the face of sustained political and economic pressure.
Perhaps no one has better mastered the art of media capture than Hungary’s now-ousted prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Despite Trump’s ill-fated bid to save Orbán’s reelection campaign, the Hungarian people in April proved that government pressure on the media has its limits, and that public interest reporting that holds leaders responsible for corruption and abuses of power cannot be so easily silenced.
At this critical time for democracy around the world, we must not become complacent to rhetorical threats against the media, no matter how banal or flippant they may seem. As history has proven, over and over again, attacks on the press are a harbinger of broader crackdowns on civil liberties and personal freedoms.
The US is not immune to democratic backsliding. Under Trump, attacks on the media have been a leading contributor to the US’ year-over-year tumble in global democracy indexes. We must not make the mistake of normalizing Trump-style attacks on the press. When the president makes a threat against the media, we should listen to what he says. The world’s autocrats certainly are.
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Trump Admin Claims of Cuban Plans for Drone Attacks Denounced as 'Ludicrous Pretext' for War
"Like any country, Cuba has the right to defend itself against external aggression," said the Cuban embassy. "It is called self-defense, and it is protected by International Law and the UN Charter."
May 17, 2026
Cuban officials said the Trump administration is making "increasingly implausible accusations" against the country as it pushes to justify, "without any excuse, a military attack against Cuba," after an unnamed White House official told the news outlet Axios that the Cubans have been "discussing plans" to launch drones against the US.
"Cuba is the country under attack," said the Cuban embassy in a statement, months into a ramped-up oil blockade by the US that has left the island's electric grid in a "critical state" and forced frequent rolling blackouts as well as causing a healthcare crisis, with tens of thousands of people waiting for surgeries.
But in Axios' article, the Trump administration official took pains to push the notion that the US, with its nearly $1 trillion-per-year military, could face attacks from the tiny Caribbean nation 90 miles south of Florida because officials there have been preparing defensive capabilities.
Axios reported that, according to classified intelligence it viewed, Cuba has acquired more than 300 drones and has been considering plans to attack the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, various US military vessels, and Key West, Florida.
The country has been acquiring drones from Russia and Iran since 2023 and has sought more aid from Russia in recent months, according to the report. Intelligence intercepts have also shown Cuba is "trying to learn about how Iran has resisted us," the official said, referring to Iran's use of unmanned aircraft, its closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and its attacks on US military outposts in the Middle East in response to the US-Israel war on the country that began in February.
The Cuban embassy further responded with a reminder that "like any country, Cuba has the right to defend itself against external aggression."
"Those from the US who seek the submission and, in fact, the destruction of the Cuban nation through military aggression and war, do not waste a single moment fabricating pretexts, creating and spreading falsehoods, and distorting as extraordinary the logical preparation required to face a potential aggression," said the embassy.
Journalist José Luis Granados Ceja, who is based in Mexico City and covers Latin America for Drop Site News, emphasized that "Cuba has the right to self-defense."
"It would be arguably be wise for Cuba to incorporate a tool that has proven to be an extraordinary effective weapon and a powerful tool of dissuasion as part of its self-defense strategy," said Granados Ceja.
Axios said the classified intelligence "could become a pretext for US military action" that President Donald Trump has expressed an interest in taking numerous times, before acknowledging toward the end of the article that "US officials don't believe Cuba is an imminent threat, or actively planning to attack American interests."
Rather, the intelligence showed that Cuban officials "have been discussing drone warfare plans in case hostilities erupt as relations with the US continue to deteriorate"—suggesting they could use drones in self-defense if attacked by the US.
The reporting carried echoes of Secretary of State Marco Rubio's rationale for attacking Iran in February. He stunned legal experts days after the war began by explaining that the US had decided to wage war on the Middle Eastern country because it feared Iran would retaliate after Israel began attacking it.
"The imminent threat was that we knew that if Iran was attacked, and we believed they would be attacked, that they would immediately come after us," Rubio said.
The claim that Cuba's reported preparations make the island a threat to US security "is a lie—with purpose," said David Adler, co-general coordinator of Progressive International.
"Marco Rubio and his stenographers at Axios are manufacturing consent for the invasion of Cuba," said Adler. "To fall for this flimsy propaganda is to fail the most basic test of civic literacy. And the stakes are millions of Cuban lives off our coast."
Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants, has long sought regime change in the socialist country.
Axios' reporting came days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Cuba to pressure officials into complying with US demands, likely including political and economic reforms, heightening fears that the US could be planning a military attack unless the country complies.
White House officials also told CBS News Friday that the Department of Justice is preparing to criminally indict former Cuban President Raúl Castro for shooting down planes that belonged to a US group that had flown into Cuba's airspace in the 1990s. In January, US forces invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro, bringing him to the US where he was charged with drug trafficking, and pleaded not guilty.
Former Obama administration staffer and Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor said Sunday that "lots of signals pointing towards an imminent US regime change operation against Cuba."
"The latest," he said of the Axios article, "is this blatant effort to launder a pretext for war through the media."
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Extra! Extra! All the News the Media Won't Print
Maybe you can help explain the following examples of editors and reporters going AWOL and suggest how they could overcome their jaded inaction.
May 09, 2026
Editors of newspapers like to say that they cover the newsworthy events “without fear or favor.” Sure. But how can they cover events without the requisite curiosity, without deeply feeling for the public’s right to know, and without breaking through their “comfort zone”?
Maybe you can help explain the following examples of editors and reporters going AWOL and suggest how they could overcome their jaded inaction.
1. You’ll recall the criminal enterprise, led by felon Elon Musk, in 2025 called “The Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE. Trickster Trump allowed Musk to rampage through one government agency after another. In fact, DOGE ushered in a regime that set records in government waste yet received insufficient media attention. By shuttering, dismantling, or closing programs and whole agencies serving people’s needs—health, safety, and economic support and protections—the Musk-Trump DOGE left crumbling agencies doing little or nothing with hamstrung staff.
There is sprawling corruption and waste inside the government, causing devastating and real waste by not preventing sicknesses and injuries, and forcing consumers deeper into personal debt for necessities such as healthcare, housing, food, and transportation.
With declining polls and rising majorities of Americans wanting Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office, more civic power, that is laser-focused on Congress and receives mass media, is needed.
Since DOGE began to wind down last summer, after Musk exited as a hyper-wealthy fugitive from justice, there have been no thorough investigations by Congress nor by the inspectors general, most of whom President Donald Trump illegally fired very early on in his dictatorial regime.
Not a day goes by without Trump unilaterally wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on his White House ballroom, on further larding runaway Pentagon spending. Wasteful and unnecessary military attacks, and the firing of government auditors, watchdogs, irreplaceable experienced managers, and first responders to disasters all contribute to freezing vital government services.
2. Why has the media not covered the legislative drive in New York’s state legislature to end the 45-year-long rebate of a tiny sales tax on stock transactions? Minimally estimated at $15 billion a year collected and electronically rebated back to the brokers, the bill S01237-A allocates the revenues to mass transit, education, healthcare, and the environment (visit greedvsneed.org for more information on the campaign to pass this legislation). Two years ago, the sponsoring lawmakers led a demonstration before the New York Stock Exchange building. No coverage. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani needs this money for his people-serving programs, yet he has been totally silent about ending the rebate. No reporters are asking him why?
Over the last eight years, I have spoken to seven reporters and two business editors, who say that it is a good story, recently made better by Mamdani not speaking out about this proposal. The journalists said they would get back to me. None have. That’s not indifference from the top; that’s silent censorship! Only the Amsterdam News wrote a long feature on this topic. The rest of the New York City media balked. Shame on The New York Times and the New York City daily newspapers.
3. The vast death undercount in Gaza (over 600,000, not the reported 75,200) is explained away by both the mainstream and independent media. Reporters say they have no reliable estimate of the enormous death toll. Nonsense. Dig in and investigate! Various disaster casualty specialists have estimated deaths at hundreds of thousands resulting directly from Israeli military genocidal violence and indirectly from the related absence of food, water, healthcare, medicine, fuel, and electricity, blocked by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. One expert on bombing casualties, professor emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, calculated that the TNT volume of Israel’s bombs, missiles, and artillery was the equivalent of six or more Hiroshima atomic bombs and more devastating because of today’s precision targeting of this tiny enclave of crowded, defenseless civilians.
What other ethnic group would have its death toll underestimated by nearly 90%? (See my March 28, 2025 column “The Vast Gaza Death Undercount—Undermines Civic, Diplomatic, and Political Pressures” and my February 21, 2025 column “Stop Repeating the Vast Undercount of Gazan Deaths. It Is Ten Times Greater.” Also see “Exposing the Gaza Death Undercount” in the August-September 2024 issue of the Capitol Hill Citizen.) A more accurate estimate matters morally and intensifies the political, diplomatic, and civic pressure to stop the killing and to compel the Israeli regime to fully allow sufficient humanitarian aid into Gaza to help the starved, sick, and dying in this ravaged land. (See Dr. Feroze Sidhwa’s report, “The Truth About Gaza’s Dead”). The calculating media plays dumb.
4. The Democrats on Capitol Hill have been very willing to oust their colleagues accused of sexual harassment or assault. Pushed out were Congressman John Conyers in 2017, Senator Al Franken in 2018, and Congressman Eric Swalwell in 2026.
Yet when it comes to the far greater order of magnitude of offenses by the craven, sadistic, sexual abuser of women (over 60 women have dared to provide credible experiences of Trump’s abuses, and one woman has won a tort lawsuit against him). Since 2016, the congressional Democrats have largely looked away.
In early 2020, I delivered personally to over 100 Democratic members of Congress, most of them women, a lengthy letter detailing the case for congressional hearings on Trump’s felonious aggressions (See the OPEN LETTER TO THE WOMEN IN CONGRESS, February 24, 2020). I met staff who agreed that some action was necessary, but said it was up to Speaker Nancy Pelosi or that hearings would have little impact on Teflon Trump and be ineffective. Suffice it to say that only two members of Congress formally acknowledged receipt of the letter without comment. The rest ignored the letter, as did several women’s groups known for focusing on sexual harassment and assault against women. No media coverage. No interest at all in this contradiction by reporters. Read the letter; your observations are welcome.
5. With declining polls and rising majorities of Americans wanting Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office, more civic power, that is laser-focused on Congress and receives mass media, is needed. Fast-rising tides could occur were the retired presidents, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and even G.W. Bush, to come out of their luxurious lairs and mobilize pressure to impeach Trump. The serious entry into this struggle to save the Republic and the Constitution for which it stands would electrify the mainstream media and the frustrated citizenry. Such an effort could quickly and easily attract the requisite funds needed to mobilize such an effort to every congressional district. Feeling the heat, Democrats in Congress would commence publicizing “shadow hearings” and further splinter the once iron-clad sycophancy for Trump by the GOP, who are terrified by their prospects in November.
Trump himself daily provides more vivid evidence of impeachable offenses. (See, H.Res. 1155). He can’t help himself, believing he can continue to get away with everything he does, no matter how extreme.
We know why there is reluctance by the ex-presidents. They would be assailed by Trump and the Trumpsters. They would be accused of having committed many of the same or similar crimes when they were in the White House. True for G.W. Bush in Iraq and Joe Biden in Gaza, for starters. However, this is an occasion for declared regrets and redemption as they pursue the removal from office of Donald Trump, a dangerously unstable, megalomaniacal tyrant who is perilously wrecking, endangering, and weakening our country. MOREOVER, WITH TRUMP, THE WORSE IS YET TO COME, MUCH WORSE AND SOON.
Do the former presidents want to stay on the sidelines and have their inaction on their conscience for historians to record? The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said wisely: “Duty arises from our potential control over the course of events.”
Why don’t the reporters ask the former presidents the obvious questions? How about some editorials? Or op-eds?
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