Donald Trump’s trial on charges that he tried to overthrow the election will almost certainly not happen in March 2024, as many had hoped. If it doesn’t, Trump will have once again demonstrated that a commitment to due process is the Achilles’ heel of democracy. While democracy’s defenders play by the rules and the rule of law, Trump bends the law to his own purposes.

That is the only conclusion one can reasonably draw from the latest Special Counsel filing, which asks the Supreme Court to hear immediately Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from prosecution. The claim is nonsensical, and the Special Counsel’s request for Supreme Court review is understandable (indeed, even commendable), but once again, Trump has succeeded in weaponizing the judicial process to his own advantage, using the delay that comes with Supreme Court review to postpone his trial to a more politically advantageous time for him.

Trump was indicted this past summer on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States and obstruct an official proceeding in order to overturn the election through a scheme that reached its culmination in a violent assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump has claimed that his actions on that day were all official presidential actions and thus that his prosecution must be dismissed because a president acting in his official capacity cannot be charged with a crime for those actions. In lawyer’s terms, he is claiming absolute immunity from prosecution.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: How Trump gets away with it]

The substance of the claim borders on the frivolous—inciting a riot and trying to steal an election are not official presidential acts. But Trump’s goal in raising his claim of immunity is presumably not to win. It is to delay his trial, with the hope that if he wins the next presidential election, he can kill the case altogether.

Most claims by criminal defendants (for example, a claim that the prosecutor is using illegally seized evidence) are adjudicated by a trial court and then reviewed on appeal after a conviction is obtained. This has the general virtue of making some appeals unnecessary (when, say, the defendant is acquitted) and of giving the appeals court a full record of everything that happened in the court below, to better inform its review. Thus, in the normal course of a criminal case, Trump would be obliged to first make his arguments to the court and to a jury. Only if he were tried and convicted would he have a full set of post-trial appeals.

Claims of immunity are different. They are resolved before a trial because they are, in effect, claims that the defendant should not even have to bear the burden of preparing for or participating in a trial. Immunity claims of this sort are rare, but when they do arise, they give the defendant grounds for an immediate appeal.

On December 1, the trial judge in Washington, D.C., ruled on Trump’s immunity claim and rejected it—quite properly, in my view. Last week, Trump appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In the normal course, most appeals processes run slowly—the average case takes roughly 18 months from start to finish, and some go longer. That isn’t inevitable, however. The D.C. Circuit Court heard and ruled on the gag-order question in Trump’s case in less than 45 days. But even if the court followed the same rapid pace for Trump’s immunity appeal, one could not reasonably expect a circuit-court decision on the issue until sometime in late January, at the earliest. Only after that would Trump be able to ask the Supreme Court to review his claim of immunity, and the Court’s hearing might not happen until late in 2024; a decision might not be handed down until after the election, or possibly after Inauguration Day.

(Of course, the Supreme Court could choose not to take up the case for review, but that seems unlikely. After all, the prosecution of a former president is a momentous decision, and the law around that question is the sort of thing the Supreme Court would likely think that it should settle for the country, instead of leaving it to a lower court.)

To forestall that delay, the Special Counsel has taken the relatively unusual step of asking the Supreme Court to short-circuit the process and take the case directly from the trial court, without waiting for the court of appeals to rule on the matter. This work-around, known as “certiorari before judgment,” is rare, but not unheard of. It was used, for example, during the Watergate era, when Richard Nixon was fighting against the release of the White House tapes. The Court has allowed for it in other contexts as well, such as the challenge to the 2020 census and the Texas challenge to Biden’s immigration policy, when an immediate resolution is of the essence.

The courts will try to move quickly, of course. Late in the day yesterday, the Supreme Court ordered Trump to respond to the Special Counsel’s motion to expedite within 10 days. So the odds that the Court will agree to hear the merits of the matter quickly seem relatively good, and the likelihood is even higher that we will have an answer before the new year on whether the court will hear the case at all. And if it says it will not, then the court of appeals (which asked for a Trump response on the question of an accelerated schedule by Wednesday, December 13) has made clear that it will move expeditiously.

But even expedited review in the Supreme Court can happen only so fast. By conceding that the case is of crucial national importance, the Special Counsel is, in effect, agreeing that the Court needs to allot a reasonable amount of time for the case to be briefed and argued. When the Nixon case was pending, with a trial date looming, the Court still took two months to brief, hear, and resolve the matter. With that timeline as a model, it would be possible—though just barely—for the Trump case to be resolved by the end of February. But that would be extremely fast, and even then, a March trial would be nearly impossible, inasmuch as Trump would not have been obliged to prepare his case while the appeal was pending. At a minimum, a decision in February would probably mean an April trial. And a more likely decision in March or April or May (if the Court takes the case), makes a March trial impossible. Of course, the Supreme Court could deny the Special Counsel’s request to hear the case now, and then this will take even longer. If Trump is elected before the matter is resolved, he is all but certain to close the case against him, and that will be the end of that.

[Donald Ayer: The Trump prosecutions are cause to celebrate the rule of law]

Either way, Trump’s tactics show the weakness of a judicial system that can be manipulated by the maliciously inclined. Due process is the crown jewel of the rule of law; it embodies the idea that every person is entitled to a day in court and to be heard following a set standard protocol to ensure fairness. We would not want it any other way. But a day in court takes time. Delays are an inevitable part of the system’s commitment to the rule of law—they are both justified in some absolute sense and utterly predictable. But by indulging Trump’s abuse of the process, the justice system allows Trump to make his prosecution a key factor in the election, in the expectation that his status as a victim will help him to victory.

This is a dangerous moment, when the best result is that the judicial system can only partially mitigate Trump’s manipulation of it, and it may not manage even that. One can only hope that the Supreme Court recognizes the gravity of the moment and treats the Special Counsel’s request with the care it deserves.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

For all its marvelous creativity, the human imagination often fails when turned to the future. It is blunted, perhaps, by a craving for the familiar. We all appreciate that the past includes many moments of severe instability, crisis, even radical revolutionary upheaval. We know that such things happened years or decades or centuries ago. We cannot believe they might happen tomorrow.

When Donald Trump is the subject, imagination falters further. Trump operates so far outside the normal bounds of human behavior—never mind normal political behavior—that it is difficult to accept what he may actually do, even when he declares his intentions openly. What’s more, we have experienced one Trump presidency already. We can take false comfort from that previous experience: We’ve lived through it once. American democracy survived. Maybe the danger is less than feared?

In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.

By Election Day 2024, Donald Trump will be in the thick of multiple criminal trials. It’s not impossible that he may already have been convicted in at least one of them. If he wins the election, Trump will commit the first crime of his second term at noon on Inauguration Day: His oath to defend the Constitution of the United States will be a perjury.

A second Trump term would instantly plunge the country into a constitutional crisis more terrible than anything seen since the Civil War. Even in the turmoil of the 1960s, even during the Great Depression, the country had a functional government with the president as its head. But the government cannot function with an indicted or convicted criminal as its head. The president would be an outlaw, or on his way to becoming an outlaw. For his own survival, he would have to destroy the rule of law.

From Trump himself and the people around him, we have a fair idea of a second Trump administration’s immediate priorities: (1) Stop all federal and state cases against Trump, criminal and civil. (2) Pardon and protect those who tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf. (3) Send the Department of Justice into action against Trump adversaries and critics. (4) End the independence of the civil service and fire federal officials who refuse to carry out Trump’s commands. (5) If these lawless actions ignite protests in American cities, order the military to crush them.

A restored Trump would lead the United States into a landscape of unthinkable scenarios. Will the Senate confirm Trump nominees who were chosen because of their willingness to help the president lead a coup against the U.S. government? Will the staff of the Justice Department resign? Will people march in the streets? Will the military obey or refuse orders to suppress demonstrations?

The existing constitutional system has no room for the subversive legal maneuvers of a criminal in chief. If a president can pardon himself for federal crimes—as Trump would likely try to do—then he could write his pardon in advance and shoot visitors to the White House. (For that matter, the vice president could murder the president in the Oval Office and then immediately pardon herself.) If a president can order the attorney general to stop a federal case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal prerogative of the presidency. If Trump can be president, then the United States owes a huge retrospective apology to Richard Nixon. Under the rules of a second Trump presidency, Nixon would have been well within his rights to order the Department of Justice to stop investigating Watergate and then pardon himself and all the burglars for the break-in and cover-up.

After Trump was elected in 2016, he was quickly surrounded by prominent and influential people who recognized that he was a lawless menace. They found ways to restrain a man they regarded as, to quote the reported words of Trump’s first secretary of state, “a fucking moron” and, to quote his second chief of staff, “the most flawed person I’ve ever met in my life,” whose “dishonesty is just astounding.” But there would be no Rex Tillerson in a second Trump term; no John Kelly; no Jeff Sessions, who as attorney general recused himself from the investigation into the president’s connections to Russia, leading to the appointment of an independent special counsel.

Since 2021, Trump-skeptical Republicans have been pushed out of politics. Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger forfeited their seats in the House for defending election integrity. Representative Tom Emmer withdrew his bid for House speaker over the same offense. The Republican Senate caucus is less hospitable to Trump-style authoritarianism—but notice that the younger and newer Republican senators (Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, J. D. Vance) tend to support Trump’s schemes, while his opponents in the Senate belong to the outgoing generation. Trump’s leading rivals for the 2024 nomination seldom dare criticize his abuse of power.

Most of the people who would staff a second Trump term would be servile tools who have absorbed the brutal realities of contemporary Republicanism: defend democracy; forfeit your career. Already, an array of technically competent opportunists has assembled itself—from within right-wing think tanks and elsewhere—and has begun to plan out exactly how to dismantle the institutional safeguards against Trump’s corrupt and vengeful impulses. Trump’s likely second-term advisers have made clear that they would share his agenda of legal impunity and the use of law enforcement against his perceived opponents—not only the Biden family, but Trump’s own former attorney general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If Trump wins the presidency again, the whole world will become a theater for his politics of revenge and reward. Ukraine will be abandoned to Vladimir Putin; Saudi Arabia will collect its dividends for its investments in the Trump family.

First-term Trump told aides that he wanted to withdraw from NATO. Second-term Trump would choose aides who would not talk him out of it. Other partners, too, would have to adjust to the authoritarianism and corruption of a second Trump term. Liberals in Israel and India would find themselves isolated as the U.S. turned toward reaction and authoritarianism at home; East Asian democracies would have to adjust to Trump protectionism and trade wars; Mexico’s antidemocratic Morena party would have scope to snuff out free institutions provided that it suppressed migration flows to the United States.

Anyway, the United States would be too paralyzed by troubles at home to help friends abroad.

If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes of personal impunity and political vengeance.

In this scenario, Trump opponents would have to face a harsh reality: The U.S. electoral system has privileged a strategically located minority, led by a lawbreaking president, over the democratic majority. One side outvoted the other. The outvoted nonetheless won the power to govern.

The outvoted would happily justify the twist of events in their favor. “We are a republic, not a democracy,” many said in 2016. Since that time, the outvoted have become more outspoken against democracy. As Senator Mike Lee tweeted a month before the 2020 election: “Democracy isn’t the objective.”

So long as minority rule seems an occasional or accidental result, the majority might go along. But once aware that the minority intends to engineer its power to last forever—and to use it to subvert the larger legal and constitutional system—the majority may cease to be so accepting. One outcome of a second Trump term may be an American version of the massive demonstrations that filled Tel Aviv streets in 2023, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to remake Israel’s court system.

And what might follow that? In 2020, Trump’s advisers speculated about the possibility of using the Army to crush protests against Trump’s plans to overturn that year’s election. Now those in Trump’s circle are apparently thinking further ahead. Some reportedly want to prepare in advance to use the Insurrection Act to convert the military into a tool of Trump’s authoritarian project. It’s an astonishing possibility. But Trump is thinking about it, so everybody else must—including the senior command of the U.S. military.

If a president can summon an investigation of his opponents, or summon the military to put down protests, then suddenly our society would no longer be free. There would be no more law, only legalized persecution of political opponents. It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield both the law and institutional violence as personal weapons of power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve.

That grim negative ideal is the core ballot question in 2024. If Trump is defeated, the United States can proceed in its familiar imperfect way to deal with the many big problems of our time: the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, climate change, educational standards and equal opportunity, economic growth and individual living standards, and so on. Stopping Trump would not represent progress on any of those agenda items. But stopping Trump would preserve the possibility of progress, by keeping alive the constitutional-democratic structure of the United States.

A second Trump presidency, however, is the kind of shock that would overwhelm all other issues. It would mark the turn onto a dark path, one of these rips between “before” and “after” that a society can never reverse. Even if the harm is contained, it can never be fully undone, as the harm of January 6, 2021, can never be undone. The long tradition of peaceful transitions of power was broken that day, and even though the attempt to stop the transition by violence was defeated, the violence itself was not expunged. The schemes and plots of a second Trump term may be defeated too. Yet every future would-be dictator will know: A president can attempt a coup and, if stopped, still return to office to try again.

As we now understand from memoirs and on-the-record comments, many of Trump’s own Cabinet appointees and senior staff were horrified by the president they served. The leaders of his own party in Congress feared and hated him. The GOP’s deepest-pocketed donors have worked for three years to nominate somebody, anybody, else. Yet even so, Trump’s co-partisans are converging upon him. They are convincing themselves that something can justify forgiving Trump’s first attempted coup and enabling a second: taxes, border control, stupid comments by “woke” college students.

For democracy to continue, however, the democratic system itself must be the supreme commitment of all major participants. Rules must matter more than outcomes. If not, the system careens toward breakdown—as it is careening now.

When Benjamin Franklin famously said of the then-new Constitution, “A republic, if you can keep it,” he was not suggesting that the republic might be misplaced absentmindedly. He foresaw that ambitious, ruthless characters would arise to try to break the republic, and that weak, venal characters might assist them. Americans have faced Franklin’s challenge since 2016, in a story that has so far had some villains, many heroes—and just enough good luck to tip the balance. It would be dangerous to continue to count on luck to do the job.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Revenge Presidency.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

The relationship between Donald Trump and the news media has always been a little disingenuous, like a pair of fighters trading insults and throwing air punches at a weigh-in. The hostility is real, but the performance benefits both sides.

Trump claims to despise the journalists who cover him, calling them “the enemy of the American people,” suing them, and threatening unspecified reprisals for their transgressions against him. But his narcissism craves their constant attention, and as president he gave reporters far more access than his successor has, taking their late-night phone calls, then framing their cover stories in gold. Media organizations, including this one, have warned for years that Trump is a danger to the democracy that makes journalism possible, and that a vigorous press is essential to a free society. At the same time, the media became dependent on his vile words and scandalous deeds for their financial health, squeezing droplets of news from his every tweet even if the public had nothing to learn. Leslie Moonves, the disgraced former TV-network chair, said of Trump’s first candidacy: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

As soon as Trump left office, readers and viewers disappeared—within a month, The Washington Post lost a quarter of its unique visitors, and CNN lost 45 percent of its prime-time audience. From exile, Trump summoned one reporter after another to Mar-a-Lago and gave interviews for books that both sides knew would attack his presidency and become best sellers. When he returned as a presidential candidate and criminal defendant, cable-news-network ratings climbed again.

It’s impossible not to feel that Trump has gotten the better of this codependent clench. His endless stream of grievance and invective eroded his supporters’ trust in the news media to the point where 58 percent of Republicans now say they have none. If half the country believes most of what the mainstream media report and the other half thinks it’s mostly lies, this isn’t a partial win for journalists, whose purpose isn’t to strengthen the opposition but to give the public information it needs to exercise democratic power. Trump’s purpose is to destroy the very notion of objective truth. The match was rigged in his favor, and being compelled to fight it has not been good for journalism.

Though reporters did excellent work covering Trump’s presidency, his effect was to make the American media a little more like him: solipsistic (foreign reporting nearly disappeared), divisive, and self-righteous. Trump corrupts everyone who gets near him—spouses, children, followers, accomplices, flunkies. He corrupts the press by obsessing it; by flooding it with so much shit that news becomes almost indistinguishable from fluff and lies; by baiting it into abandoning independence for activism; by demoralizing it with the recognition that much of the public doesn’t care.

Trump wants power again for two reasons, and a policy agenda isn’t one of them: to remove the humiliating stain of defeat, including the prospect of prison, and to exact revenge on his enemies. In a speech in Michigan last June, he named them one by one and promised to destroy them all: “the deep state”; “the warmongers”; “the globalists”; “the communists, Marxists, and fascists”; “the sick political class that hates our country”; and finally—he pointed at reporters in the room—“the fake-news media.”

The first time around, Trump’s attempts to use presidential power against the media were desultory. He was accused of trying to deny a large Pentagon contract to Amazon in order to damage Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post. To hurt CNN, he pushed his Justice Department to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner, which owned the network. He talked about weakening journalists’ legal protections and even having them arrested. He created a threatening atmosphere by singling out individuals and organizations. All of it put the media under constant pressure and made their work more difficult. None of it was very effective.

[From the November 2023 issue: Martin Baron on how we got ‘Democracy dies in darkness’]

Last April, Trump’s campaign website posted a video on deregulation in which the candidate vowed to bring the Federal Communications Commission “back under presidential authority as the Constitution demands”—giving himself direct control over broadcast licenses and other regulatory matters. It’s hard to imagine that at the start of his presidency, he knew what the initials FCC stood for. “One general nightmare is he will be more competent at undermining a free press in a second term, either through advisers or lessons learned,” John Langford, a counsel at Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to combatting authoritarianism, told me.

“People who actually believe are going to do a better job,” a conservative who served in the Trump administration and is now involved in efforts by the Heritage Foundation to build a loyal cadre of political appointees for a second term told me. In its approach to the media, he said, the biggest mistake of Trump’s presidency was appointing officials who wanted to be liked by journalists. Second-term hires would welcome being the subject of a hit piece in Politico.

A second Trump White House would give important policy scoops to friendly publications such as The Federalist and The Washington Free Beacon rather than to supposedly unfair outlets like The New York Times, which would report them unfavorably. “The White House press corps could be shaken up,” the former Trump official said, explaining that the administration’s director of communications could say to the White House press corps, “I know you have your rules, but we’re not going to play by those rules. Give these people”—administration allies—“press credentials, or we’ll have briefings with only people we invite, in a different room.”

It’s not hard to imagine Trump breaking laws to go after journalists, seeking embarrassing personal information on his most effective pursuers. At the start of his term, he floated to James Comey, the FBI director, the possibility of jailing journalists who published classified information. Comey laughed off the idea; with fanatic loyalists in the bureau, a second-term Trump could carry it out. In a 900-page manual on how to bring the administrative state under the president’s complete control, Heritage advises that “the Department of Justice should use all of the tools at its disposal to investigate leaks,” including seizing reporters’ email and phone records, a practice that Attorney General Merrick Garland ruled out in 2021. The conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court might be less likely to defend press freedom during a second Trump term than the Court has been in the past. Joel Simon, the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, has urged colleagues to prepare, practically and psychologically, for legal assaults, economic pressure, “a toxic online environment,” and dangerous streets with violence from both police and demonstrators.

President Richard Nixon put his critics in the press on an enemies list, illegally wiretapped and surveilled them, discussed siccing his IRS on them. Nixon’s henchmen even proposed various ways to kill the columnist Jack Anderson (they postponed the plot, instead bugging the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate, and never got back to it). Trump doesn’t need to have journalists poisoned. He doesn’t even need to have them investigated. His most powerful weapon is his ability to convince large numbers of Americans that the press has no particular value for democracy and deserves no special protection; that it’s just another racket of corrupt, self-serving elites; that its hard-won exposés and running fact-checks are all fake news; that the evidence of the senses can be vaporized by a Truth Social post. His epistemological nihilism drives journalists half-mad, unable to counter him or escape his hall of mirrors.

The worst fate for the press in a second Trump term would be neither legal jeopardy nor financial ruin. It would be irrelevance.

Other democracies have reached this point. “Political leaders discredit the press and plant in the minds of the public that they’re just another political actor,” Simon told me. “The public doesn’t see attacks on the press as threats to their own interests, and that opens the door to consolidation of power.” Szabolcs Panyi, an investigative journalist in Budapest, worries that Americans haven’t paid enough attention to the decline of freedom in other countries to prevent it from happening here. “The American public doesn’t recognize that the same could happen to them,” he told me. “They’re not even aware that democracies can be turned in just a matter of years—two election cycles—into hybrid regimes.”

Starting in 2014, Hungary’s leading media companies were acquired by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s cronies and turned into regime mouthpieces or shut down. (For seven months in 2019, Panyi’s phone was surveilled.) Journalists haven’t disappeared into Hungarian prisons. Orbán has crushed independent media with a combination of economic pressure, Kremlin-inspired disinformation, and the “fake news” label. “They killed the news outlets—they don’t have to kill the journalists,” Panyi said. But the key to Orbán’s success has been public opinion. As he neutralized the press, Hungarian voters gave him four election victories in a row. Power creates more power; once the process starts, it can be unstoppable. “Probably the job that we journalists were doing was not good enough,” Panyi said, “or we didn’t make enough efforts to describe to our readers why it’s important what we’re doing.”

Sheila Coronel, an acclaimed Philippine journalist and a professor at Columbia Journalism School, began her career on the eve of the “People Power” revolt that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. “We took our freedom for granted,” she told me. “Looking back, maybe we weren’t such good caretakers of that freedom to really serve the public good, as opposed to building profitable media businesses.” As the country’s elected leaders became more corrupt, Coronel said, media companies made fortunes from “entertainment and sensationalism, feeding off political scandals without looking at the underlying causes.”

When the demagogic President Rodrigo Duterte came to power in 2016, he was able to “emasculate” the media, Coronel said. His successor, Bongbong Marcos, the dictator’s son, feeds the public an information diet of “sheer inanity,” undiluted by a critical press. “It’s death by cotton candy.” Like Panyi, Coronel watched her profession lose popular trust, partly through state pressure, partly through its own isolation and carelessness. “We contributed to the erosion of the allure and attraction of democracy,” she said.

[Read: Maria Ressa on how to fight fascism before it’s too late]

How can the American media prevent their own irrelevance in a second Trump term? First, by getting rid of a few illusions. The press can do little, if anything, to drain the sea of disinformation in which Americans are drowning. The Washington Post’s running tally of Trump’s false statements in office—there were 30,573, or about 21 a day—was a worthy project, but did the recording of all those lies change a single mind? Political beliefs are rarely based on demonstrable facts. Information of any kind only reinforces voters’ views and deepens polarization. The Post and other outlets should continue to hold public figures accountable for their lies, but none of us should expect it to make much difference.

Nor will there be any Watergate for Trump. Nixon was brought down by the work of aggressive journalists, along with a federal judge, a unanimous Supreme Court, and a bipartisan Congress—by strong democratic institutions. But they worked only because Americans still believed in them—because two-thirds of the public, which had just given Nixon a landslide victory, could not abide a criminal in office. That was a different public. Today, almost half the country is prepared to reelect Trump in spite of his two impeachments and 91 criminal charges. What scandal could investigative reporters possibly uncover that would reduce Trump’s support to Nixon’s 24 percent?

In a second Trump presidency, the press would be torn between what’s good for its narrow interests and what’s good for its broader mission of “public interest or public service,” in Joel Simon’s words—that is, democracy. For 25 years, journalists have been scrambling to survive the damage done to their business model by the internet. Venerable outlets perish or self-mutilate; newer ones come and go in a flash; mountains of bait are thrown into the water to see what rises to the surface, producing trillions of bits of data to be collected and examined for financial clues. This exhausting effort consumes so much time and talent that it’s difficult to face the obvious truth: The for-profit model of journalism shows signs of being broken.

And here lies the dilemma: that model works better with Trump. Covering him brought CNN, the Times, the Post, The Atlantic, and other outlets larger audiences. But much of that profitable coverage takes place in a glass booth that seals out a hostile or indifferent public. Claiming a higher purpose, the media flood the zone with their own shit—talking heads, hot takes, angry jeremiads—to stay afloat, and in doing so, they trade long-term credibility for short-term gain. Social-media platforms, far richer and more powerful than the mainstream press, don’t even have to feign a higher purpose. “This is the existential question that we have to ask ourselves,” Simon told me: Carry out a public service at the risk of economic ruin, or give in to incentives to cover Trump in ways that serve him better than the public?

Panyi, the Hungarian journalist, who has lived through what might await us here, spoke of “the tragedy of real journalism,” by which he meant the imperative to “stick to the good old rules of free, fair journalism even if we’re taking the punches and it’s a battle we’re about to lose.” That would be my hope for the press in a second Trump term: to investigate his presidency relentlessly, burrowing deep into every obscure corner where power might be abused, for the record and the future if not for now, and leave the cotton candy aside. Journalists can give the public what it needs to govern itself, but they can’t save democracy. That will be up to the American people.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Is Journalism Ready?”