As President Donald Trump proceeds with his seemingly endless attacks on laws and democratic norms, the question for many has become: What will turn the tide? They may imagine that conditions are ripe for a major scandal—some transgression, previously hidden but then revealed, that is so outrageous, so beyond the pale, that it will rally even those across the political divide.

In the past, that is the work that scandal often did. Exposure of serious official misconduct, the lifeblood of scandals, would create openings for reform. As bad as these scandals were—and the underlying story was usually bad, sometimes very bad—scandals contained within them the germ of change. But today, old-fashioned scandals are harder and harder to come by.

Watergate is in many ways the textbook example of a scandal and its reforming potential. It had it all: covert and illegal actions by a president in contravention of laws and norms, the revelation of the scandalous activities, and, eventually, bipartisan agreement on corrective action and reform. Those reforms included extensive new regulation of money and politics, protection against the abuse of surveillance power to spy on American citizens, and authority for independent investigations of possible executive-branch criminal misconduct.

[Jonathan Rauch: One word describes Trump]

This cycle of scandal and bipartisan reform is hardly imaginable today. In the Trump administration, what might have been deemed scandalous at another time, in another presidency, is instead a governing program. The components of the program—“radical constitutional” claims about presidential power, White House direction of investigations against political opponents, the abandonment of constraints on profiting from the office—are openly avowed and openly pursued. What was hidden until exposed in the Richard Nixon years is proclaimed in these Trump years as a show of presidential resolve and as the vindication of an electoral mandate. Nixon had resigned and left his office before he told an interviewer that, by definition, no presidential action can violate the law. Trump expressed the same view—that no president can violate the law if he is striving to save the country—in the first weeks of his second term. He is redefining the presidency, resetting expectations of his office.

The death of scandal is a blow to the mechanisms for defending a democracy. More than periodically useful in uncovering corruption, scandal is an essential feature of liberal democracy. It is certainly, the sociologist John Thompson writes, “more common [in such systems] than in authoritarian regimes or in one-party states.” This is because, in democracies, scandal is possible only because there is intense electoral competition, a free press, and protections from reprisal for news organizations, the political opposition, and others that allege and often expose corruption in the government in power. But when democratic norms fray or collapse, scandal collapses with them. In this way, the collapse of scandal is both cause and effect of democratic decline: It makes reform less possible, and it indicates erosion of the conditions that made such revelations possible in the first place.

Trump is directly attacking those conditions. He is maintaining and in some instances escalating lawsuits against news organizations. He has fired inspectors general who serve as “watchdogs” in 17 executive-branch agencies. Trump has fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, whose responsibilities include enforcement of the whistleblower statutes, and replaced him with a former Republican member of Congress who is also the secretary of Veterans Affairs—effectively making it a part-time position. He is exploiting the fractured and polarized media environment to create alternative realities, rendering it very difficult for any sort of unified narrative of scandal to emerge and take hold. A sterling example is his redefinition of the January 6 assault on the Capitol as “a day of love,” complete with pardons for most of those convicted for their involvement.

The corrective power of scandal was already weakened during the first Trump term. In those years, Trump did not hide his pursuit of profit while in office, and he made efforts to control the Department of Justice for his own personal and political purposes—though nothing like what we are seeing today. These and other actions of the time ignited major controversies and led to two impeachments, but none entailed revelations of actions he was denying. He proclaimed “perfect” the call to the president of Ukraine at issue in the first impeachment, and in the second, his rally and video communications related to the attack on the Capital could not have been more public. After Trump left office, reforms to constrain his version of the presidency were proposed in abundance but went nowhere.

Even where scandal does not yield statutory reform, it can serve to reinvigorate weakened norms. An example that may now seem quaint is the furor over the George W. Bush administration’s midterm firing of nine U.S. attorneys. The firing was public; the motive was the stuff of scandal: It emerged that the White House had been deeply involved in the dismissals, acting on concerns that these law-enforcement officials were insufficiently committed to rooting out alleged Democratic Party voting “fraud.” The attorney general denied any questionable motivation and agreed that “it would be improper to remove a U.S. attorney to interfere with or influence a particular prosecution for partisan political gain.”

But the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility jointly took up the matter and concluded, “The Department’s removal of the U.S. Attorneys and the controversy it created severely damaged the credibility of the Department and raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecutive decisions.” The Office of the Inspector General further judged that there was “significant evidence that political partisan considerations were an important factor” in the dismissals. It affirmed that department officials had a “responsibility to ensure that prosecutorial decisions would be based on the law, the evidence, and Department policy, rather than political pressure.” In part because of this scandal, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resigned.

This was not all. A special counsel was appointed to consider whether the firings involved any violations of criminal law. She concluded that no violations had occurred but that the law did prohibit some forms of political interference in law enforcement. And she roundly affirmed department “principles” against “undue sensitivity to politics.” The Obama administration advised Congress of these findings and put a strong emphasis on the point: Its attorney general was committed to “ensuring that partisan political considerations play no role in law enforcement decisions of the Department.”

[Read: Trump says the corrupt part out loud]

There is little reason to imagine that we would see a “scandal” concerned with “undue sensitivity to politics” in this presidency. The norms at the center of the U.S.-attorney scandal are not honored even in the breach, because the breach has been transformed into policy. As the legal scholar (and my collaborator on the Substack newsletter Executive Functions) Jack Goldsmith has noted, the Trump White House’s proclaimed policy of avoiding “‘the appearance of improper political influence’ in law enforcement is doublespeak for the reality of heavy political influence in law enforcement, just as the Justice Department’s ‘Weaponization Working Group,’ which builds on Trump’s ‘Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government’ executive order, is in reality a playbook to weaponize DOJ law enforcement like never before.” Officials appointed to high positions, including the U.S. attorney in D.C. and both the FBI’s director and its recently named deputy director, have appeared eager to investigate those who were involved in investigations of Donald Trump.

In this environment, there seems to be one potential opening for scandal on the old model: the role of Elon Musk. Some of the elements of scandal are present in this case of a businessman, situated both inside and outside the government, who has been provided with apparently massive but undefined authority. It’s never quite clear when Musk speaks for himself, for his businesses, or for the government. The administration has given varying accounts of his role in the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk himself has made the extraordinary claim that voters are at least an indirect source of his authority. Last month, he reposted on X: “Dems keep saying ‘No one elected Elon Musk.’ Yes we did. Elon was very visible with Trump and we elected Trump to utilize Elon.” Polls show that even among Republicans, Musk is a controversial figure. It is not impossible to imagine a reform at some point designed to impose limits, or at least greater accountability and transparency, on a president’s use of a private citizen to assume major government functions.

Perhaps the picture for reform even without the propulsive force of scandal will brighten if the administration fails to deliver on issues that bread-and-butter voters care most deeply about and they become less tolerant of “long live the king” presidential leadership. Monarchical ambition can founder on the price of eggs and bacon. It can also eventually run aground in conflict with a defining element of American political culture: distrust of government, a belief that it is, as the historian Garry Wills has written, a “necessary evil, one we must put up with while resenting the necessity.” Trump’s aggressive claim that the president is the law is altogether new, and coming fast at the electorate. Perhaps in this limited time, the voters are waiting and seeing. Trump and his allies may not appreciate that they are testing, and may not prevail over, America’s anti-government tradition. After all, they are the government now.

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Somewhere, Richard Nixon is raging with envy. Nixon was twice left for politically dead, after the 1960 presidential election and then the 1962 California governor’s race, but Watergate proved too much for even him to overcome. (Not that he didn’t try, as Elizabeth Drew reported in The Atlantic in 2014.)

Andrew Cuomo, inheritor of Nixon’s resting scowl face, may have found a way to do what the 37th president couldn’t: come back from an apparently career-ending scandal. Over the weekend, the Democrat launched a campaign for mayor of New York, and polling right now shows him with a wide lead, thanks to the corruption allegations plaguing the incumbent and newly minted Donald Trump ally Eric Adams.

The idea that Cuomo is the man to clean things up, however, is ridiculous. He was forced to step down as governor of New York in 2021 after revelations that his administration covered up mishandling of COVID and multiple allegations of sexual harassment. (Cuomo has denied wrongdoing but did admit to instances that were “misinterpreted as unwanted flirtation.”) Cuomo’s candidacy is an indictment of New York City politics: A city so eager to tell the rest of us how great it is should be able to produce a better class of mayoral contender (a point made pithily by The Onion with this parody headline: “De Blasio: ‘Well, Well, Well, Not So Easy to Find a Mayor That Doesn’t Suck Shit, Huh?’”).

The nascent comeback is also a sign of the weird amnesia some Americans seem to have developed about the past few years. After his resignation, Cuomo followed his brother, Chris, into the media, launching a podcast where he assailed cancel culture. The implication was that he was a victim; his reemergence as a candidate suggests that the podcast successfully spread that idea, but Cuomo is a victim of nothing except his own bad behavior.

In the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, Cuomo’s clear, consistent briefings made him a media star, and they provided a counter to then-President Trump’s erratic statements. As it turned out, though, New York wasn’t especially effective at fighting the virus, and Cuomo’s administration went to great lengths to cover up the number of deaths in nursing homes.

Then, in August 2021, the state attorney general’s office released an investigation finding that “Governor Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of both federal and state laws.” The probe found 11 credible accusers who brought allegations against Cuomo.. He denied wrongdoing, though he admitted to making at least some of the alleged statements. “I acknowledge some of the things I have said have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation. To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” he said.

It is true, and irrelevant, that Cuomo was not ultimately charged with any crimes. The facts in either of these scandals still ought to disqualify him from holding public office, and his resurrection represents a failure of the Democratic Party.

“Parties help to make political choices legible for voters, and, even more importantly, they organize politicians in pursuit of collective policy goals,” Jacob M. Grumbach, a political scientist at UC Berkeley who studies state-level politics, wrote to me in an email. The system is working if “the goals of the group come before the ambitions of individual politicians,” Grumbach said. The Democratic Party knows there are potential candidates who would be better than Cuomo for the party as a whole, but it’s “unable to coordinate to stop Cuomo from using his political capital to enter and likely win the NYC mayoral elections,” he said.

Instead, Democrats seem to be either acquiescing or openly backing him. Representative Ritchie Torres, a young moderate who has become prominent for criticizing the party’s progressive wing, endorsed Cuomo—in an exclusive given to the conservative New York Post, no less—as someone who would battle extremists on the left and right. Torres refused to “relitigate” Cuomo’s resignation, telling the Post: “America loves a comeback, New York loves a comeback.” Okay, but doesn’t it matter who’s doing the comeback, and what they’re coming back from? Cuomo is likely benefiting from a broader societal backlash to cancel culture and “wokeness.” But if, in order to curb the far left, Democrats like Torres are willing to embrace an alleged sex pest who tried to cover up seniors’ deaths, is it worth it?

This kind of selective amnesia about the recent past is not exclusive to New York or to politics—it’s afflicting many areas of American culture. The film director Brett Ratner, who faced multiple credible accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct in 2017 (which he denied, and for which he wasn’t charged), released a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump that received a reported $40 million licensing fee from Amazon. Jon Gruden, a football coach who was forced to resign for emails that used homophobic language, among other things, has been restored to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ Ring of Honor. The late Pete Rose, who in 2022 blithely dismissed the allegation of having had a sexual relationship with a 14- or 15-year-old girl by telling a reporter, “It was 55 years ago, babe,” is in line for a presidential pardon and possible reinstatement in Major League Baseball after he was barred for gambling.

But politics is where voters and institutions seem most ready to ignore the past. As my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote last week, the whimpering end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia has led many on the center and left to pretend that no scandal existed. “But even the facts Mueller was able to produce, despite noncooperation from Trump’s top lieutenants, were astonishing,” Jonathan wrote.

In some Trump-related cases, his administration is trying to force the country to forget what happened. The most maddening of the Trump scandals was his alleged hoarding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. The president escaped a trial on the case by winning the election, but the basic facts were not really in dispute: He possessed boxes and boxes of documents, he had no credible claim to them, and he didn’t give them back when asked to by the government. Now the FBI has handed the materials back over to Trump. And as my colleague Quinta Jurecic recently wrote, Trump and his administration are trying (in vain) to pretend that the January 6 insurrection never happened, yanking down government webpages and issuing pardons.

At the peak of social-justice activism in America, critics complained that pulling down statues of Confederates or removing the names of tarnished figures from institutions was tantamount to erasing history. Now, as the movement wanes, a different message is emerging: Some parts of history are apparently fine to erase.

Related:

Portrait of a leader humblebragging (From 2021) January 6 still happened.

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Martin Baron: Where Jeff Bezos went wrong with The Washington Post Trump’s cultural revolution The man who would remake Europe Conan O’Brien understood the assignment.

Today’s News

Donald Trump said that 25 percent tariffs will be imposed on Canada and Mexico tomorrow, and that there is “no room left” for last-minute deals. In the first full month of Trump’s presidency, the number of migrants illegally crossing America’s southern border hit a new low not seen in at least 25 years, according to preliminary government data obtained by CBS News. Israel will stop all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza until Hamas accepts the new terms for an extension of the cease-fire agreement, Israeli officials said yesterday.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: With the best intentions, the United Kingdom engineered a housing and energy shortage that broke its economy, Derek Thompson writes. The Wonder Reader: Shan Wang compiled Atlantic articles about why the egg is a miracle.

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Evening Read

lllustration by Katherine Lam

Migrants Prepare to Lose Their American Lives

By Stephanie McCrummen

At a Mexican restaurant, the owner stashed newly laminated private signs under the host stand, ready to slap on the walls of the kitchen and a back dining room where workers could hide if agents arrived without a proper warrant.

Inside a house nearby, a woman named Consuelo went to the living-room window and checked the street for unusual cars, then checked the time as her undocumented husband left for work, calculating when he was supposed to arrive at the suburban country club where he’d worked for 27 years, where he’d earned an “all-star” employee award, and which now felt like enemy territory. She lit the first prayer candle of the day.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

No one wins a trade war. J. D. Vance stopped talking about eggs. Firing the “conscience” of the military What it takes to make Shane Gillis funny

Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: NEON; Patrick T. Fallon / Getty; Trae Patton.

Watch. Anora (available to rent online) swept the Oscars, proving that Hollywood’s biggest night can still recognize indie movies, David Sims writes.

Examine. The trend known as “anti-fan art” hinges on irony: The creators’ best works are inspired by the pop culture they disdain, Shirley Li writes.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

If I invoke the musical style called Americana, who comes to mind? Jeff Tweedy? Tyler Childers? Jason Isbell? As Giovanni Russonello wrote in 2013, the genre is heavily white and male, in contrast to its influences. I’ve been listening a lot over the past week to “Cry Baby,” a song by Sunny War that features Valerie June. It’s a summit of two young Black women from Tennessee who are making music—and a reminder that there’s no American music, or Americana, without Black music. Sunny War’s Anarchist Gospel was one of my favorite records of 2023, and Armageddon in a Summer Dress, which features “Cry Baby,” is one of my favorites of 2025 so far.

— David

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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The day the world learned that Jeff Bezos would buy The Washington Post, the Amazon founder offered assurances that he would not cower when faced with threats from a vengeful president and his appointees.

He summoned memories of Richard Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, who warned that the legendary publisher Katharine Graham was “gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer” if the Post published one of its Watergate stories. “While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer,” Bezos wrote to the paper’s anxious journalists in August 2013, “if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham’s example, I’ll be ready.”

I led the newsroom at the time Bezos bought the Post. For a long while, he fulfilled his promise to the paper and its readers, exceeding my expectations. Then he faltered badly.

Now we know that Bezos is no Katharine Graham. It has been sad and unnerving to watch Bezos fall so terribly short of her standard as he confronts the return of Donald Trump to the White House. It’s been infuriating to observe the damage he has inflicted in recent months on the reputation of a newspaper whose investigative reporting has served as a bulwark against Trump’s most transgressive impulses.

All the signs lately point to a determined effort by Bezos to either placate Trump or please him outright: quashing an editorial that backed Kamala Harris for president only 11 days before the election and ending a decades-long tradition of presidential endorsements. A gushing postelection message of congratulations to Trump on his “extraordinary political comeback,” with no mention of his sordid resistance to the peaceful transition of power, which marked a historic low in presidential politics. Having Amazon join other tech companies in donating $1 million to the inauguration fund. Making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago for a late-night dinner with Trump, where Bezos and Melania Trump discussed a documentary about her—a chat that led to a $40 million licensing deal with Amazon, reportedly nearly three times the offer of the next-highest bidder. Sitting on the dais, as Trump’s showpiece, during the inauguration ceremony. And, last week, a Bezos memo prohibiting any opinion articles in the Post that weren’t aligned with his own ideology of “personal liberties and free markets,” an imperious intervention that caused the editorial-page editor to resign. Trump himself disclosed that he’d dined with Bezos the very evening the Post owner issued his latest dictate.  

[Read: There are no more red lines]

Hundreds of thousands of readers have canceled subscriptions, no longer confident that this great newspaper will keep faith with the mission implicit in its motto of “Democracy dies in darkness.” Many of the Post’s talented journalists have decamped to other media outlets, unsure of their paper’s strategy and its soul.

Thankfully, the news department continues to operate with admirable independence and vigor, delivering revelatory work about a second Trump administration. That makes it all the more dismaying to witness the Post’s public image repeatedly tarnished as its owner cozies up to Trump with the evident goal of avoiding the president’s wrath and winning his favor.

For more than a decade, it looked as if Bezos would defy the worst expectations of him as a media owner. He did the right thing, surprisingly and encouragingly. I highlighted his many instances of steadfastness and courage in the 2023 book I wrote about my eight-year tenure as the Post’s executive editor, which overlapped with his ownership and the first iteration of Trump in the White House. “In all my interactions with him,” I recounted, “Bezos showed himself to have integrity and spine.”

He oversaw an editorial page that unflinchingly, and with just cause, called Trump “bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s enemies.” That was in a 2016 presidential endorsement of Hillary Clinton. In 2020, the Post’s editorial page opposed his reelection, labeling him “the worst president of modern times.” After Trump’s triumph in 2016, many of us at the Post worried that Bezos would capitulate to Trump’s bullying as he acquired the fearsome powers of a president. And yet Bezos allayed our concerns. He fully supported our news coverage, giving us complete journalistic independence. Never once did he interfere, even when stories provoked Trump to retaliate against Amazon and him personally. I admired that, and remain immensely grateful.

“Don’t worry about me,” he told the political staff. “I can take care of myself.” I recall him musing later, in a dinner we had with leaders of The New York Times, how someday we might have to march together in protest if Trump’s attacks on journalists endangered the constitutional right to a free and independent press.

With the passage of time, it’s easy to forget how often Bezos was viciously denounced by Trump over the course of his first presidential campaign and first term as president. With Bezos pegged as a political enemy solely because of the Post’s coverage, Trump pressed to raise postal rates for package deliveries—vowing, depending on the day, to double, triple, or quadruple rates paid by Amazon. He interfered in a $10 billion cloud-computing contract for the Department of Defense with the goal of ensuring it didn’t go to Amazon, which had been perceived to be the leading bidder. He endlessly, and falsely, taunted Bezos with accusations that he was using the “Amazon Washington Post” to lobby for government favors and avoid taxes. He mocked Bezos’s divorce and his extramarital affair, ridiculing him as “Jeff Bozo.”

[Joshua Benton: Jeff Bezos’s hypocritical assertion of power]

Against those attacks and others, Bezos pushed back. In May 2016, I interviewed him at a conference held in the Post’s Washington, D.C., headquarters. I gave his staff a heads-up that I would ask about Trump’s broadsides against him, and for the first time Bezos addressed them. “Most of the world’s population,” Bezos said, “live in countries where, if you criticize the leader, you can go to jail. We live in the oldest and greatest democracy in the world, with the strongest free-speech protections in the world, and it’s something that we are, I think, rightly proud of … We want a society where any of us, any individual in this country, any institution in this country, if they choose to, can scrutinize, examine, and criticize an elected official, especially a candidate for the highest office in the most powerful country on Earth.”

In a 2018 interview with the financier and philanthropist David Rubenstein, Bezos spoke out forcefully and eloquently against Trump’s assault on the press. “If you’re the president of the United States or a governor of a state or whatever, you don’t take that job thinking you’re not going to get scrutinized. You’re going to get scrutinized, and it’s healthy … It’s dangerous to call the media lowlifes. It’s dangerous to say that they’re the enemy of the people.” He commended the work I was doing as the Post’s editor in charge of news coverage and that of Fred Hiatt, who oversaw editorials and opinions. In slang expressing unreserved approval, and to robust applause in a cavernous ballroom, he said we were “killing it.”

Bezos also made the gutsy legal request to have Trump deposed over the loss of the Defense Department contract. “The question is whether the President of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of DoD to pursue his own personal and political ends,” Amazon’s lawyers wrote in late 2019. “President Trump’s animosity toward Mr. Bezos, Amazon, and the Washington Post is well known, and it originates at least in part from his dissatisfaction with the Washington Post’s coverage of him from before he assumed office.”

You no longer hear tough words like that from Bezos and his camp. At least as striking as his recent, highly publicized overtures to Trump is his drastic shift to highly accommodating language.

When Bezos spoke in December at the Times’ DealBook conference, it was as if he were a different person. He looked different, more buff. He sounded different, more meek. There was no expression of appreciation for the Post’s coverage, nor anything about the importance of the Post or the media generally, only his intent to try to talk Trump “out of that idea” that the press is the enemy of the people. “I don’t think he’s going to see it the same way,” he added, elaborating a bit on that minimalist goal. “But maybe I’ll be wrong.” (Predictably he was wrong, spectacularly so.) And then Bezos assessed that Trump was “calmer than he was the first time” and “more settled.” Bezos could not have believed the words he uttered.

Jeff Bezos sits next to U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) and Kimberly Thune (second left) during the luncheon following President Donald Trump’s inauguration at the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty)

[George Packer: The Washington Post is dying a death of despair]

The big question is why Bezos’s language and behavior have changed so dramatically. I can’t get into Bezos’s head, of course, but one answer must lie in an indisputable fact: Trump is less calm, less settled, and far more vindictive. He campaigned for office pledging retribution against “the enemy from within”—in other words, anyone who opposed him. In August 2023, Trump wrote on Truth Social, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU.” By October of last year, NPR had counted 100 instances of Trump threatening to prosecute or punish political enemies.

Bezos has ample reason to worry about the consequences of any retribution. Federal contracts are key to the success of Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing division that has been delivering more than half of the company’s profits. An arch-competitor is Oracle, whose founder and chairman is Larry Ellison, the GOP megadonor whom Trump hosted recently at the White House and extolled as “one of the most serious players anywhere in the world.” Bezos’s commercial space venture, Blue Origin, has received billions of dollars from his personal bank account. January’s successful launch into orbit of its New Glenn rocket positions Blue Origin to finally compete with Space X, the pacesetter owned by Trump’s seemingly omnipotent best buddy, Elon Musk. The government will be Blue Origin’s essential customer.

You don’t have to look far to see what might happen to businesses in Trump’s crosshairs. Solely because the top-tier law firm of Covington & Burling represents the former special counsel Jack Smith, Trump stripped its attorneys of national-security clearances and ordered federal agencies to cancel the firm’s federal contracts. Smith had received pro bono assistance in anticipation of retributive investigations and prosecution by Trump’s Justice Department. The president, who had sworn only a month earlier to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution, aimed to damage a law firm for work that is guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment’s promise of access to counsel.

Newspaper owners have every right to set their paper’s overall direction, and opinions expressed in editorials—or whether to publish any at all—have always been their prerogative. In a note to readers this past October, Bezos argued that calling for a halt to presidential endorsements would help avoid a “perception of bias” and a “perception of nonindependence.” He framed it as an effort to restore reader trust, which has sharply declined for the media. “We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility,” he wrote.

Setting aside whether a presidential endorsement every four years truly weighs more heavily in readers’ perceptions of bias than the daily editorials on sharply polarizing subjects, Bezos’s own behavior since that decision has undercut his stated goals. Appearing on the dais during Trump’s inauguration did not look like working harder to increase the Post’s credibility. Nor did it signal independence. Instead, it suggested dependence on Donald Trump. Bezos denies that fear of retaliation against his other commercial interests had anything to do with the endorsement decision. “That was certainly not on my mind,” he told the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook conference. That strains belief.

“We saved The Washington Post once. This will be the second time,” Bezos said during the DealBook interview. “It took a couple of years. It made money for six or seven years after that. In the last few years, it’s lost money again. It needs to be put back on a good footing again … We have a few other ideas.”

The opinion section’s Bezos-mandated pivot to “personal liberties and free markets” appears to be one of them. Bezos is right that his previous strategy for turning the Post into a national news organization was a grand success, and I was glad to execute it as my fellow journalists and I contributed good ideas of our own and scotched some really bad ones. This latest turn seems less promising, not to mention less inspiring. Will readers drawn to the Post outnumber those who lose confidence in it?

[Read: The tech oligarchy arrives]

What’s especially worrisome about Bezos’s instructions is the mandate that alternative views are unwelcome—“left to be published by others.” And neither Bezos nor the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, has defined what precisely is meant by “personal liberties and free markets,” identified what sorts of opinions would be considered nonconforming, or addressed how this might affect the reputations of columnists who remain on staff. Who exactly in the opinion section has been against personal liberties? Will opinions in favor of regulation (of major tech platforms, for example) not be tolerated? Will it be allowable to speak of instances where markets have failed or gone awry? If columnists take a free-market view, won’t readers conclude that they’re doing so only because they’re required to as a condition of employment?

Lewis, in a note to staff, celebrated the “recalibrated content strategy” for offering “new clarity and transparency.” But Post columnists tell me they have no clue what it foretells and whether they’ll fit in. They’ve asked for explanations from the owner and the publisher, and been met with silence. Opacity, not transparency, appears to be the order of the day.

The White House and its allies, in contrast, didn’t seem confused at all about what was in the offing. Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, responded to the edict by posting a GIF of a typically grumpy Grinch cracking a smile. Elon Musk promptly blasted out, “Bravo, @JeffBezos!” The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk cheered, “Good! The culture is changing rapidly for the better.” None of them worried that Bezos’s directive constituted what they claim to abhor (and what it is): cancel culture.

The most fundamental American liberty is free expression. Newspapers such as the Post have long honored that constitutional right by welcoming a wide range of views in the opinion section, whether their leadership agreed with them or not, so as to encourage civil public debate. Bezos was now decreeing that views out of alignment with his own ideology would not see the light of day in territory that he controls. The paper that proclaims itself to be on the side of democracy had taken a step that was distinctly undemocratic.

As of today, the Post’s editorials continue to take Trump to task. After Friday’s quarrelsome White House meeting between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the Post judged that Trump “sounded more like Don Corleone than an American president.” In the months ahead, we’ll see if a reconfigured opinion section censures the president for his own abject failures to practice what Bezos preaches.

Trump and the modern Republican Party are anything but models of free-market principle. An affection for punitive tariffs is but one example. The incessant bullying of private enterprise to serve Trump’s political interests is yet another, as Bezos knows from personal experience. “In today’s Republican Party,” the Post columnist Catherine Rampell has written, “the primary economic role of the state is not to get out of the way. It is, instead, to reward friends and crush political enemies.”

[From the March 2025 issue: Capitulation is contagious]

As for personal liberties, it’s difficult to imagine a greater hazard than Trump, a man who speaks admiringly of the world’s dictators. He asserts unprecedented presidential powers and has demonstrated disdain for the rule of law. He is using the federal government as a weapon against his political adversaries, withdrawing security protection from former officials who have crossed him and threatening prosecution of those he deems to have persecuted him. High on the list of targets is the press, a regular object of harassment, intimidation, investigation, litigation, and condemnation, with the goal of further undermining public trust and sabotaging economic sustainability.

If the Post does its job correctly in both its opinion section and its news coverage, it will hold Trump fully accountable when he engages in deceit and as he continues to subvert this country’s democratic institutions. It will report what Trump is seeking to conceal but what the public deserves to know. That, at some point, will make the Post a fresh target for malevolent and punishing attacks. Amazon and Blue Origin might well be in the line of fire too, and Bezos’s postelection outreach to Trump is unlikely to count for much amid his fury.

As Bezos decides how to respond, I urge him to make one of his rare visits to the Post’s newsroom and stare at the wall where its nearly century-old principles are affixed, paying attention to two in particular. No. 1: “The first mission of a newspaper is to tell the truth as nearly as the truth may be ascertained.” And then No. 5: “The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners.”

Hours after his election victory last Sunday, Friedrich Merz, the leader of Germany’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), said on national television that he would try to “achieve independence from the U.S.A. I never thought I would have to say something like this on a television program,” Merz continued, but “it is clear that the Americans … are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.”

American security guarantees have protected the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945. Never since then has a chancellor of that country suggested that it emancipate itself from Washington. Not even France’s Emmanuel Macron, who has called for building a “sovereign Europe” capable of defending itself since he was first elected in 2017, could have put the imperative in starker terms. So who is the incoming German chancellor making this transformative demand?

Merz is a conservative by any measure—social, fiscal, political—and far from being the avatar of a freethinking new generation in Germany, he may wind up being the last chancellor to hail from the old one. But history has plans for him. He will likely step into the highest office of Europe’s biggest economy and most powerful state just as the United States, under Donald Trump, abandons its post–World War II role on the continent. Merz, with his right-wing instincts and establishment roots, will be guiding his country, maybe even the continent, through a period of epochal change.

Already, Merz has pledged to increase defense spending and put Paris, Warsaw, and London at the lead of a new policy to shore up Ukraine’s sovereignty and defend Europe from Russia with or without the United States. He has even sought to explore whether France and Britain might extend their nuclear umbrella to the rest of Europe, in place of American protection. At any other time, this agenda of European self-reliance might be a radical one. Now it’s a logical response to events.

When he takes office, most likely at the end of April and at the helm of a coalition government with the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), Merz will not be riding a wave of enthusiasm. The CDU won just 28.6 percent of the vote in this election—almost eight points more than the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the second-worst showing of the party’s history. And Merz has a personal reputation for being cocky, ambitious, and overly cerebral. He’s a politician with hard edges, and many Germans, especially women, find him hard to like.

[Read: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

At 6 foot 5, the incoming chancellor literally looks down on most people he talks with. He is also a self-made multimillionaire who describes himself as “upper middle class” yet flies his own private propeller plane. He is a former artilleryman in the Bundeswehr who likes authority and orderliness, and he has a taste for cashmere V-neck sweaters and checkered shirts. Once, when a TV crew was following him for a day, he admonished an employee to brush their hair.

The postwar generation to which Merz belongs has governed Germany for decades. Its men and women were raised amid the country’s immediate moral reckoning with the horrors of the Nazi Reich, and they have made this imperative central to their vision. Merz’s grandfather was a Nazi brownshirt and the mayor of Brilon, a picturesque town in the country’s west where Merz also grew up. Two generations later, Merz has watched the rise of the far-right AfD with profound concern, calling it a “disgrace for Germany.”  

Merz’s life in Brilon was economically comfortable but not always easy or orderly. As a child, he spent six months in a tuberculosis clinic run by nuns—an experience he has dryly described as “not nice at all.” His sister was killed in a car crash at age 21. And he was an impatient and irascible teenager who had to leave his local high school for disciplinary reasons, and whose grades were so bad that he had to repeat a year.

Merz’s political career has been similarly jagged; he has probably survived more defeats than any other living German politician. A former judge, he rose to prominence as a member of Parliament in the 1990s as the standard-bearer for the conservative camp within the CDU. Yet in 2000, Merz lost a bid for party leadership to an unassuming East German named Angela Merkel. Once she became chancellor, Merkel made a point of marginalizing her most threatening rival.

Merz left politics in 2009 to make money—lots of it. He joined a law firm in Düsseldorf and sat on the boards of many big corporations, including prestigious investment firms such as BlackRock Germany, of which he was chair, as well as run-of-the-mill companies such as the toilet-paper producer WEPA. Nine years would pass before he returned to politics. By then, in 2018, Merkel was engulfed in criticism for having let nearly a million refugees into Germany from the Syrian civil war. Within minutes of her announcement that she would step down from the CDU leadership, Merz had a statement ready announcing his candidacy. But the CDU didn’t choose him—at least, not at first. Twice, it picked centrists in the mold of Merkel. But the party kept losing electoral ground. Finally, in 2022, its members saw fit to give Merz a chance to revive the CDU by shifting it to the right.

[Read: MAGA has found a new model]

Merz favored a politics of law and order and a relatively hard line on immigration. He has at one point even advocated declaring a state of emergency in order to push migrants back from Germany’s borders, something European Union law would otherwise prohibit. Only weeks ago, he passed a parliamentary motion calling for placing undocumented migrants awaiting deportation in closed facilities. This proposal got through only because it won the votes of the AfD. Merz had earlier promised never to work with the far-right party. Now he told critics that if the AfD wanted to vote for his proposal, he could hardly prevent it.

Some of Merz’s rhetoric around immigration sounds a lot like that of the populist right. He once called Ukrainian war refugees “social-welfare tourists”—though he later apologized for it. He has also designated the sons of migrants who fail to respect female schoolteachers “little pashas.” If all this was meant to reduce the AfD’s appeal by moving the CDU to the right, however, it was a failure. His tough talk did not prevent the AfD from capturing almost 21 percent of the vote this year—double what it got in 2021.

Merz’s economic views may be the ones most starkly challenged by the geopolitical moment he finds himself in. To wrest European security from the North American framework will require new investments, new programs, and, almost inevitably, big spending. Merz brings to this task the instincts of a free-marketeer impatient with government outlay and bureaucracy. In the 2000s, he promised that if he became finance minister, he’d make the income-tax form, which in Germany runs to dozens of pages, fit on a beer tap. In 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, Merz published a book arguing that Germany should cut back its welfare state, deregulate its economy, and encourage people to buy more stocks instead of letting their savings languish in bank accounts. Germany’s economy has stagnated for the past five years, and most of Merz’s solutions to that seem to come at the expense of workers or the environment: reducing unemployment benefits, creating incentives for Germans to work longer hours, and rolling back climate regulation. With the auto industry in crisis, he advocates removing the EU ban on internal-combustion-engine cars that is supposed to begin in 2035.

But conservative economic orthodoxies may soon run up against other priorities, some of them every bit as close to Merz’s core. Like most German politicians of the immediate postwar generation, Merz is a Europeanist. He sees the EU not as a constraint but as a conviction. He is an ardent supporter of Ukraine, having criticized his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, for backing Kyiv too timidly and walking in lockstep with President Joe Biden instead of choosing a more assertive course with Paris and London. Scholz once marketed himself as a “peace chancellor,” to which Merz quipped: “Peace you can find in any cemetery. It is our freedom that we must defend.”

[Read: Is it time to bury Merkel’s legacy?]

Merz wants Europe to become sovereign and free of foreign interference because he believes that the new administration in Washington, like Moscow, seeks to divide and undermine democracy in Europe. The White House, like the Kremlin, seems intent on intervening in elections on behalf of the far right, and on forcing Brussels to walk back regulations on Big Tech that might curtail disinformation and hate speech. Countering this agenda, when it was only a Russian one, was well in line with conservative German values. On Sunday, the chancellor-in-waiting said: “I have absolutely no illusions about what is happening from America. Just look at the recent interventions in the German election campaign by Mr. Elon Musk … the interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”

Merz’s conservatism may be what allows him to shepherd Europe through a historic transformation. Just as the anti-communist hard-liner Richard Nixon was uniquely situated to establish American relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972, and just as the left-wing Chancellor Gerhard Schröder was best placed to cut back Germany’s welfare state in the 2000s, Merz, with his stodgy, center-right credentials and postwar pedigree, may be just the leader to get Germans and Europeans to spend big for their emancipation from the United States.