Less than a week before Election Day, Donald Trump last night called for one of his prominent political adversaries to go before a firing squad. In an onstage interview with Tucker Carlson in Arizona, Trump called Liz Cheney, the Republican former representative from Wyoming, “a very dumb individual” and “a radical war hawk.”

“You know they’re all war hawks when they’re sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, Ooh gee, well, let’s send 10,000 troops right into the mouth of the enemy,” Trump said. “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, okay. Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”

Like Trump’s hate-filled rally at Madison Square Garden last weekend, these comments are a good summation of what he would bring to the White House if reelected. His campaign is premised around violence, disregard for the rule of law, and retribution for anyone who might disagree with him.

[David A. Graham: This is Trump’s message]

“This is how dictators destroy free nations,” Cheney responded on X. “They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”

Trump’s campaign said that Trump “was talking about how Liz Cheney wants to send America’s sons and daughters to fight in wars despite never being in a war herself.” Trump isn’t wrong that Cheney has often advocated foreign military interventions. She can and should be criticized for many of her views. But Trump isn’t calling for a debate. He vividly imagined Cheney with “guns trained on her face.” Normalizing discussion of political opponents getting shot is a step in a dangerous direction.

These remarks cannot be written off as joking around, the excuse that Trump has typically used when he’s crossed lines. (He seems less concerned about disapprobation these days.) Trump didn’t laugh when he said it. Neither did Carlson or the audience. Besides, Trump has repeatedly called for the armed forces to be used against his political critics. He’s proposed deploying the military against the “enemies from within,” a group that includes “radical left lunatics” generally, but also former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Adam Schiff, both California Democrats. He’s amplified calls on Truth Social for former President Barack Obama to face a military tribunal (for what crimes, one can only guess). He has said that retired General Mark Milley, whom he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be executed.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump wants you to accept all of this as normal]

Yet some voters may go to the polls without a firm grasp of his rhetorical record. Trump makes so many outrageous remarks that keeping track of them all is difficult, and some parts of the press persist in toning down even his most dangerous comments. The headline in The New York Times on Trump’s Cheney remarks as of this writing was “Trump Attacks Liz Cheney Using Violent War Imagery,” which is not strictly false but misses the point.

In these comments, Trump flagrantly displayed his hypocrisy. Although the former president has remade himself as a putative dove, he once backed some of the same conflicts that Cheney did, including the war in Iraq. And although he claims he wants to avoid foreign adventurism, he spent his first term in office being talked out of attacking Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, among others. He and his allies are now proposing that the U.S. military launch attacks on cartels inside Mexico.

[David A. Graham: Trump isn’t bluffing]

Trump is also proposing new uses of the military domestically, not only against his enemies but to conduct a mass deportation. He has encouraged brutal policing and vigilante attacks by citizens. Trump may hate war, but he loves violence.

Perhaps voters shouldn’t give this man command of so many people armed with rifles.

The approach of the presidential election has people in both parties in doomscrolling mode. Some Republicans are creating elaborate conspiracy theories about voter fraud in swing states. Some Democrats are creating elaborate conspiracy theories about Nate Silver’s projections. Of course, this kind of internet-based obsession isn’t healthy. Although perhaps the best way to avoid a sense of impending dread about the coming presidential election is to actually participate in some form of civic engagement in the four days before November 5, those who are loath to leave their couches and interact with their fellow human beings have a well-adjusted alternative to volunteering: reading a book. As a journalist who has thought, talked, and written about electoral politics every day for as long as I can remember, I can suggest five books that might lend readers a new perspective on politics—without all the unpleasant mental-health side effects of spending hours online.

The Earl of Louisiana, by A. J. Liebling

Liebling’s chronicle of the 1959 gubernatorial campaign of Earl Long, Huey Long’s brother, who became the dominant figure in state politics in the decades after his brother’s assassination, is one of the great classics of literary journalism. Set in the byzantine world of Louisiana politics in the mid-20th century, the book is a remarkable character study of the younger Long, who served three stints as governor of the Bayou State (and was briefly institutionalized by his wife during his last term, as chronicled by Liebling). Although it’s arguably not even the best book about one of the Longs—T. Harry Williams’s biography of Huey is a masterpiece—it captures a precise moment of transition as American politics adjusted to both the rise of television and the beginnings of the civil-rights movement. Its glimpse into those changes also serves as a last hurrah for a certain type of traditional politics that seems remote in our very online age.

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, by Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson’s tale of the 1972 presidential campaign has offered a rousing introduction to American campaigns for generations of teenage political junkies. His gonzo journalism is prone to treating the line between fact and fiction as advisory at best, but it also gets into the actual art of politics in a way that few others have managed. His depiction of George McGovern’s campaign’s careful management of the floor of the Democratic National Convention is genuinely instructive for professionals, while still accessible to those with only a casual interest in the field. In a year in which “vibes” have earned a new primacy in campaign coverage, reading Thompson is even more worthwhile, because he did a better job than anyone of covering the vibes of his moment.

[Read: Six political memoirs worth reading]

SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party, by Ivor Crewe and Anthony King

Americans frequently complain about their two-party system and wonder why no third party has yet emerged that could somehow appeal to a broad constituency. But sustaining such mass popularity is even harder than it sounds, as shown by this history of the Social Democratic Party in the United Kingdom. Perhaps the closest thing to a full-fledged third party that has emerged in the Anglosphere in the past century, the SDP was formed in 1981 as a breakaway from the Labour Party, which seemed irretrievably in control of fringe leftists and Trotskyites; meanwhile, all the Conservative Party had to offer was Margaret Thatcher. The SDP, in an alliance with the Liberal Party (a longtime moderate party of moderate means and membership), appeared positioned to shatter the mold of British politics. In the early 1980s, it polled first among British voters. But its momentum fizzled, as Crewe and King chronicle, due to both internal conflicts and external events such as the Falklands War. The party, which now exists as the Liberal Democrats, has had varying fortunes in British politics since, but it has never reached the heights that once felt attainable in the early ’80s. Crewe and King explain why, while also outlining just how close the SDP came.

This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future, by Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns

If you feel the need to reflect on contemporary American politics right now, Martin and Burns’s book on the tumultuous end of the Trump administration and start of the Biden presidency provides a smart field guide for understanding how exactly Donald Trump went from leaving Washington in disgrace after January 6 to potentially winning reelection in 2024. It chronicles the series of compromises and calculations within the Republican Party that first enabled and then fueled Trump’s political comeback, and also goes inside the Democratic Party, dissecting Kamala Harris’s rise as Joe Biden’s vice-presidential nominee as well as the missteps that hampered her role in the early days after Biden took office. Days from the presidential election, this offers the best look back at how our country got here.

[Read: What’s the one book that explains American politics today?]

On Politics, by H. L. Mencken

Journalism rarely lasts. After all, many stories that are huge one day are forgotten the next. Seldom do reporters’ or columnists’ legacies live on beyond their retirement, let alone their death. One of the few exceptions to this is Mencken, and deservedly so. Mencken was not just a talented memoirist and scholar of American English but also one of the eminent political writers of his time. Admittedly, many of his judgments did not hold up: Mencken had many of the racial prejudices of his time, and his loathing for Franklin D. Roosevelt has not exactly been vindicated by history. However, this collection of articles covers the vulgar and hypocritical parade of politics during the Roaring ’20s, when Prohibition was the nominal law of the land. The 1924 election of Calvin Coolidge (of whom Mencken wrote, “It would be difficult to imagine a more obscure and unimportant man”) may be justly forgotten today. But it produced absurdities, such as a Democratic National Convention that required 103 ballots to deliver a nominee who lost to Coolidge in a landslide, that were ripe for Mencken’s cynical skewering. Today, his writing serves as a model of satire worth revisiting.

If Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. really do team up to “make America healthy again” from the White House, the implications would be surprisingly trippy. On Sunday, at his rally in Madison Square Garden, Trump said he would let Kennedy “go wild” on health, food, and medicine if he wins the presidential election. The next day, Kennedy shared that Trump had promised him control of several agencies, including the CDC, the FDA, the Health and Human Services Department, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, “and a few others.”

Kennedy, an anti-vaccine advocate, has not explained how such a position—which does not currently exist within the U.S. government—might be created. But a recent post on X offers some clues about what his leadership might entail. He outlined a number of products and interventions he wants released from federal “suppression,” including raw milk, ivermectin, and sunshine. The very first item on his list was psychedelics.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, when mushrooms and LSD were considered inseparable from the anti-war movement and hippie culture, psychedelic drugs have been culturally associated with the American left. But in this election cycle, many prominent people who’ve expressed support for or have personally used psychedelics, such as Kennedy and Elon Musk, have rallied behind Trump, the hard-right candidate. Over the past few years, libertarians, wellness influencers, research scientists, MAGA die-hards, and titans of corporate tech alike have endorsed hallucinogenic drugs. It’s clear that modern psychedelic users and advocates, as a group, have no consistent political slant. Instead, they may reveal the polarization that already plagues us.

Although the use of psychedelics long predates American politics, about half a century ago, the substances began to take on a distinctly political valence in the United States. Psychedelic advocates championed the idea that these drugs would end wars and promote left-wing ideals. In 1966, the poet Allen Ginsberg told a roomful of ministers that if everyone tried LSD, “we will all have seen some ray of glory or vastness beyond our conditioned social selves, beyond our government, beyond America even, that will unite us into a peaceful community.” The Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary wrote in 1968 that “turning on people to LSD is the precise and only way to keep war from blowing up the whole system.”

Echoes of that philosophy still resound today, in speculations that wider psychedelic use would encourage personal and political action on climate change, or that MDMA will help eradicate all trauma by 2070. But now you’re just as likely to encounter psychedelic use in clinical trials as a mental-health treatment, as a tool for spiritual exploration, or in more individualistic applications such as optimizing and enhancing productivity. In contemporary U.S. society, there is no longer one psychedelic culture. “If the only thing you knew about someone is that they’re pro-psychedelics, that wouldn’t necessarily be an obvious indication of their political affiliation,” Aidan Seale-Feldman, a medical anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame who studies the current psychedelic renaissance, told me. “It is surreal that in this era of so much division and difference in the U.S. that psychedelics are something that people would actually have in common.”

[Read: When does a high become a trip?]

An affinity for psychedelics may be bipartisan these days, but when it comes to current advocacy, “it seems like those on the right promote psychedelics more than the left,” Jules Evans, a philosopher who directs the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, told me. Before the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy as a treatment for PTSD this summer, members of Psymposia, a nonprofit that describes itself as offering “leftist perspectives on drugs,” raised concerns about the approval. Rick Perry, the conservative governor of Texas, said of psychedelic legalization last year that “at the federal level, this is more supported by the Republicans.”

Last week, the German psychedelic investor Christian Angermayer wrote on X that many attendees at a recent psychedelics event in San Francisco were pro-Trump, “some of them very openly.” In recent years, Silicon Valley has moved both to the right and toward psychedelics. Musk, Trump’s largest donor, has said that he has a ketamine prescription for depression, and has been reported to take other psychedelics. Rebekah Mercer, a benefactor of Breitbart News and of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, gave $1 million to MDMA research. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, has invested millions in companies researching psilocybin and other psychedelics; Thiel is also the vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance’s mentor, and was Vance’s largest donor during his 2022 senate race.

Kennedy hasn’t said whether he’s used hallucinogenic drugs, but he has talked about how ayahuasca helped his son process his grief over his mother’s death. Before he dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Trump, Kennedy had “more psychonauts around him than any presidential candidate in American history,” Evans said. Kennedy’s vice-presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, was once married to the psychedelic enthusiast and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, from whom she separated after taking ketamine and having sex with Musk. (Shanahan denies the affair.) Kennedy’s former senior adviser Charles Eisenstein has said that psychedelics are necessary to “get us out of the Matrix.”

Groups with varying political or cultural motives have long dabbled with psychedelics. The CIA wanted to use LSD as a truth serum during enemy interrogations, or as a brainwashing tool, or as a weapon on the battlefield to incapacitate soldiers. President Richard Nixon, who signed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which prohibited many psychedelics, was close friends with Claire Booth Luce, a Republican Congress member and staunch advocate for psychedelic therapy. (Once, while she was tripping on LSD, Nixon called her for advice about his upcoming debate with John F. Kennedy. She had to call him back later.) But on the right, such views were mostly fringe. “If Richard Nixon could be alive today and see the Republican governor of Texas advocating for psychedelics, it would completely blow his mind,” Benjamin Breen, a historian at UC Santa Cruz and the author of Tripping on Utopia, told me.

Even five years ago, psychedelics might have been accurately described as a horseshoe issue, picking up people on both extremes of the political spectrum. But today, the drugs are more like a magnet, attracting Americans indiscriminately. Thanks to years of positive coverage in both traditional media and extreme outlets such as Breitbart, “psychedelics did go mainstream in the U.S.,” says Nicolas Langlitz, an anthropologist at the New School and the author of Neuropsychedelia. The number of young adults using mushrooms has nearly doubled over the past three years, and use of other psychedelics is increasing too. “The mainstreaming of psychedelics perhaps ironically signals the end of the psychedelic community,” Ido Hartogsohn, an assistant professor of science and technology studies at Bar-Ilan University and the author of American Trip, told me.

One of the paradoxes of psychedelics is how they can sometimes amplify ideas people already hold or the values of the communities they’re immersed in, but at other times (such as during therapy) they can provide an opportunity for radical change. Leary thought this was the influence of “set and setting”—that a person’s mindset and environment can affect whether a psychedelic experience ends up hardening or cracking open a person’s worldview. Hartogsohn has argued that the social and cultural context in which the psychedelic experience happens matters too. And right now, the American cultural context is hyperpolarized. That might help explain why, as Evans wrote in March, “psychedelics don’t seem to dissolve the arguments of the culture wars of the last few years. They amplify them.”

This year, social-media users have circulated AI-generated videos of Trump and Musk renouncing their wealth and power after an ayahuasca ceremony, and choosing to instead devote their lives to those less fortunate. But as much as Americans yearn to reduce the country’s political polarization, the idea that psychedelics will automatically do so is a fantasy. “People may be taking the same drugs, but they are imagining very different futures,” Evans said. Psychedelic enthusiasts have long hoped that widespread acceptance of the drugs would usher in utopia. Instead, it may actually reveal how starkly American visions of utopia diverge.

Everything about the staging of Kamala Harris’s “closing argument” rally Wednesday night on the White House Ellipse seemed designed to frame the upcoming election as a referendum on democracy. Flanked by American flags and surrounded by banners that screamed FREEDOM, the Democratic nominee delivered her speech against the same backdrop that Donald Trump used on January 6 when he addressed the crowd that went on to storm the Capitol.

“So look,” Harris said about halfway through her speech. “In less than 90 days, either Donald Trump or I will be in the Oval Office …”

Scattered shouts of You will! You will! echoed from the audience near the stage. In my conversations with Harris supporters afterward, their confidence seemed authentic. To a person, everyone I talked with believed they were on the verge of victory—that Harris would defeat the “wannabe dictator” once and for all, pull America back from the brink, and save the world’s oldest democracy from descending into facism.

Then I would ask a question they found dispiriting: What if she doesn’t?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind for months. We are in a strange and precarious political moment as a country: With four days left in one of the closest presidential races in history, supporters of both campaigns seem convinced that they are going to win—and that if they don’t, the consequences for America will be existential.

Trump and his allies have already clearly signaled what they will do if he loses: Claim victory anyway, declare the election rigged, and engage in another conspiracy to overturn the result, whether by litigation, extra-Constitutional arm-twisting, or even violence. The pressure campaign is unlikely to work; as Paul Rosenzweig noted in The Atlantic, none of the officials overseeing vote tabulation in battleground states is a partisan election denier. Still, this full-frontal assault on the validity of the election represents an ongoing threat.

If Harris loses, the response from her coalition would almost certainly be less dramatic and damaging; unlike Trump, she has committed to accepting the result. But as the election nears and panic over Trump’s authoritarian impulses reaches a fever pitch in certain quarters, I’ve begun to worry that prophecies of democratic breakdown following a Trump reelection could become self-fulfilling. What happens to America if Harris voters have fully internalized the idea that democracy is on the ballot, and then “democracy” loses?

In 2016, Trump’s surprise victory was met with a groundswell of small-d democratic energy. There were marches in the streets, and record-breaking donations to the ACLU, and waves of grassroots organizing. Subscriptions surged at newspapers committed to holding the new administration to account; books about combating tyranny became best sellers. The energy wasn’t contained to the liberal “resistance” movement. Conservative expats launched their own political groups and publications. As my colleague Franklin Foer recently wrote, the warnings of impending autocracy in America at the time “helped propel a spirit of loud, uncompromising opposition to Trump.”

That energy contributed to record-high turnout in the 2020 election, when Trump was defeated. To many people outside the MAGA coalition, Joe Biden’s victory represented a triumphant climax in the narrative of the Trump era. And had the one-term, twice-impeached president simply receded into a Mar-a-Lago exile, the story might have ended with a tidy civic moral: An aspiring authoritarian was vanquished in the most American way possible—at the ballot box. Democracy wins again.

But of course the story didn’t end there. And the fact that, four years later, Trump is within a coin flip of returning to the Oval Office has created some dissonance in liberal America. Trump has, in his third campaign, been more explicit than ever about his illiberal designs. He has talked about weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies, replacing thousands of civil servants with loyalists, and revoking broadcast licenses for TV networks whose news coverage he doesn’t like.

Democrats have sought to warn voters about the threat that these actions would pose to democracy—sometimes dialing up the rhetoric in an effort to wake Americans to the peril. But the messaging seems to have had an unfortunate dual effect, deeply stressing out voters already inclined to believe it while largely failing to resonate with the undecided and politically disengaged. Last week, The New York Times reported on a memo circulated by the leading pro-Harris super PAC warning Democrats that persuadable voters weren’t being moved by messages that focused on the former president’s authoritarianism. “Attacking Trump’s fascism is not that persuasive,” the email read. Compared with 2020, fewer Americans are telling pollsters that they are highly motivated to vote, or that this is the most important election of their lifetime.

Within a certain segment of Harris’s base, though, the struggle against autocracy remains very much top of mind. And if you spend too much time online monitoring the discourse, as I do, you might come away with the impression that, for many, Election Day will be the decisive moment in the battle for American democracy. Some liberals are even making plans to leave the country if Trump wins. Biden’s son Hunter recently told Politico he was worried that Trump’s reelection would mean “losing our democracy to a fascist minority” and warned that a second Trump term “is potentially the end of America as we’ve known it.”

I’ve heard similar sentiments from my most anxious Harris-voting friends and family members. And I’ve wondered whether another Trump victory would spur in them the same spirit of post-2016 activism or send them spiraling into fatalism and disengagement.

On Wednesday night, Harris was careful in her speech not to wallow too much in the doom and gloom of an imperiled democracy. But she did take aim at her opponent’s illiberalism. She said that Trump was “out for unchecked power” and warned that if elected, he would enter the Oval Office with an “enemies list.” She alluded to the country’s birth in revolt against a “petty tyrant,” and described Americans who have fought over centuries to defend and promote democracy around the world. “They did not struggle, sacrifice, and lay down their lives only to see us cede our fundamental freedoms, only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant,” Harris declared to cheers.

In my conversations after the speech, many supporters, teary-eyed and high on adrenaline as Beyoncé’s “Freedom” still blared from the speakers, were understandably loath to talk about what they’ll do next week if their candidate loses. But they politely indulged me.

Alyssa VanLeeuwen, a mom from Maryland who brought her eighth-grade daughter to the rally, emitted a guttural agghh when I posed the question to her. “Democracy is absolutely on the line,” she told me. A Trump victory, she said, would mean a bleak and uncertain future for her daughter. “I’m scared. I’m terrified if that happens.”

When I asked her if she thought that fear would translate to disillusionment or activism, she paused to give it thought. “I think,” she said, “everybody’s going to go to battle again to try to fight for their neighbors.”

I spoke with another Harris supporter who asked me not to use her name (“My family could be targeted”). She, too, called the prospect of Trump’s reelection “terrifying.” She said that Trump would herald “the return of McCarthyism” as he used federal power to root out and punish his political enemies, and went on to lay out in vivid detail the various worst-case scenarios of a second Trump term. But when I asked her whether she thought American democracy itself might be destroyed, she said no. “We have 300 million people in this country,” she told me, “and I don’t think we would allow that.”

This attitude was shared by almost everyone I spoke with that night on the Ellipse. Some of them told me about friends, glued to cable news and doomscrolling on their phones, who might tend toward fatalism if Trump wins again. But the people I met—the kind who travel long distances and wait outside in the cold for hours to attend political rallies—were not thinking of Election Day as a singular make-or-break moment. They seemed to know that, no matter who wins, America will still be a democracy next week, and the week after that. Its preservation depends, in part, on not pegging its fate to the outcome of any one election.

Before leaving the Ellipse, I met Salome Agbaroji, a 19-year-old Harvard student who had traveled from Cambridge to see Harris speak. As a poet, she spends a lot of time thinking about the language that shapes our politics, and she told me she resents what she considers hyperbolic rhetoric in the media about the end of democracy. A professor had recently taught her the root of the Greek word for democracy—demos, meaning “people,” and kratia, meaning “rule.” The power of the people doesn’t disappear overnight just because the White House is occupied by an illiberal leader.

“I don’t think democracy lives in an institution,” Agbaroji told me. “Democracy lives in the people.” As long as people hold on to “that spirit, it will be hard to kill.”

Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan, two of the nation’s prominent scholars and commentators on matters of democracy, freedom, and the American idea, are joining The Atlantic as contributing writers, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg announced today. Both writers join The Atlantic from The Washington Post, where they served as opinion columnists.

“The Atlantic is deeply committed to covering the crisis of democracy in all its manifestations, and having Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan join our already excellent team represents a real boon for our readers,” Goldberg said.

Allen, who serves as the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, is a political philosopher and scholar of public policy. She is also director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and director of the Democratic Knowledge Project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has published numerous books on justice and citizenship, including 2023’s Justice by Means of Democracy, as well as Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality and the acclaimed memoir Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. Allen has contributed several articles to The Atlantic, the most recent about the history of a forgotten Black Founding Father.

Kagan is a senior fellow in the foreign-policy program at the Strobe Talbott Center for Security, Strategy, and Technology at the Brookings Institution. He has written for The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The Wall Street Journal, and is the author of a number of critically acclaimed and best-selling books, most recently Rebellion: How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again. He is also the author of The Ghost at the Feast: America and Collapse of World Order, 1900–1941; The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World; and Of Paradise and Power. Kagan served in the State Department from 1984 to 1988 as a member of the policy-planning staff, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and as deputy for policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs.

Press Contact: Anna Bross, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

What happens when the owner of one of the most important news organizations in the country decides that the journalists are the problem? That’s the question I keep asking myself in response to Jeff Bezos’s op-ed explaining his decision to have his newspaper, The Washington Post, stop making presidential endorsements just days before it was reportedly set to formally back Vice President Kamala Harris.

Bezos argued that the press needs to accept reality about its unpopularity, and implied that journalists are to blame for our sinking reputation. He didn’t even acknowledge the concerted, multiyear campaign—led most recently by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel—to convince Americans that the free press is, to borrow a phrase, the “enemy of the people.” Bezos writes, “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased … It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”

Not once did Bezos even try to explain why it is that “most people believe the media is biased.”

The decision to get out of the presidential-endorsement game itself is not problematic to me. In fact, I’ve always felt sorry for any working journalist who has to cover a candidate’s campaign the day after its opinion page comes out against that candidate. As NBC’s political director, I had to deal with analogous situations over the years, when campaigns refused to grant interviews to or even interact with NBC journalists because they didn’t like an opinion that was aired on MSNBC’s more ideological or partisan programs. For reporters who are simply trying to do their job—covering a campaign, reporting what’s happening, and writing the most factually accurate account of the day that they can confirm by deadline—it’s not a comfortable position to be in.

[Ellen Cushing: Don’t cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.]

For years, I pushed NBC to invest in a conservative talk-show lineup on CNBC. I wanted to be able to say: We have a red cable channel at night and a blue cable channel at night, but here at NBC, we are stuck covering politics as it is, not as we wish it was. Covering politics as it is continues to be my mantra. Those who want to push their own politics should leave reporting and become activists; there are plenty of places where they can do that.

The real problem with what Bezos did was not the decision he made, but its timing and execution—rolled out on the eve of an election with little explanation. And then, when he did publish an explanation, he somehow made things worse. There are many legitimate criticisms of contemporary journalism, but Bezos didn’t level any of them. Instead, he wrote that media outlets suffer from a “lack of credibility” because they “talk only to a certain elite.” He betrayed no awareness that he was parroting a right-wing talking point, revealing his ignorance of the 50-year campaign to delegitimize the mainstream press—which arguably began when conservative supporters of President Richard Nixon vowed revenge for the media’s exposure of the Watergate crimes.

What Bezos failed to acknowledge is that a legion of right-wing critics—most notably the longtime Fox News CEO, Roger Ailes—spent decades attacking media outlets, repeating the charge that they are irredeemably biased. For Ailes and others, it proved a lucrative approach—when you hear something over and over, you tend to believe it. Trump and his team have used the same strategy, building their appeal by attacking the press. Social-media algorithms have only made this repetitive, robotic attack on the press worse.

But instead of defending his reporters against such attacks, Bezos decided to blame the victim in his extremely defensive op-ed. He is right to note that “complaining is not a strategy.” But neither is surrender. Six years ago, I argued in The Atlantic that media outlets had made a mistake by failing to respond to their critics. Many journalists feared that fighting back against bad-faith attacks on our work would make us look partisan. So instead, we chose not to engage when partisan actors at Fox News or campaign operatives used the charge of media bias against working journalists. And I wrote that this needed to change.

I thought that if journalists defended their work, at a minimum, the owners of media institutions would have our back. Boy, was that naive. It turns out that Bezos himself has fallen victim to the campaign to convince the world that all media should be assumed to be biased politically unless proved otherwise. His op-ed must have felt like a gut punch to reporters at the Post. Only in its final lines did he say that the journalists he employs deserve to be believed.

To Bezos’s credit, he has at least put his name on an op-ed and attempted a defense of his actions. The leaders of the publicly traded companies that happen to own major news organizations have not had the guts to explain publicly—either to the employees they’ve laid off or the ones they’ve kept—why they’ve decided to either “Trump-proof” their companies or to shrink their commitment to the news-and-information business.

And if you haven’t been paying attention to the accelerating contraction of major news organizations, just wait until the first quarter of the coming year, when many publicly traded companies may decide that news divisions aren’t worth the headaches they cause their CEOs. These companies have plenty of cash to help sustain their news divisions while they find their footing in the new media landscape. The fact they are choosing not to do so says a lot.

Part of me understands the logic of much of corporate America. The idea that Trump could use the power of the government to punish companies for journalism he dislikes is not hypothetical. Amazon alleges that he did this once already—interfering with the award of a $10 billion defense contract—because the Post’s tough reporting made the president see Bezos as his “political enemy.” Executives have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their shareholders’ investment. If that means accepting the terms of coercion by Trump, apparently, so be it.

Bezos could have made the case that The Washington Post is not a partisan institution, but instead, he argued that journalists have to accept the perception of media bias as our reality. If that’s what we have to do, then perhaps Bezos should either sell the Post or put it in some sort of blind trust. Because he has created the perception—among both the public and his own employees—that his other business interests influenced his decision not to raise Trump’s ire with a Harris endorsement.

Bezos, who owns the space company Blue Origin, is in a rich-guy race with Elon Musk, who owns SpaceX, to become the leader in commercial space exploration. That Musk has become Trump’s chief surrogate, and a leading financier of his campaign, must surely have made folks at Blue Origin nervous. Perhaps that’s why Blue Origin executives secured a meeting with Trump before the election. The timing of their meeting—the same day the Post made its no-more-endorsements announcement—only adds to the perception problem facing Bezos. But in the same op-ed in which he told his journalists that they needed to accept perceptions as reality, he insisted that the perception of a quid pro quo was wrong, and that he hadn’t known about the meeting beforehand.

[Robert Greene: Why major newspapers won’t endorse Kamala Harris]

By Bezos’s own logic, how are the journalists at the Post supposed to be able to get out from under the perception that Bezos is hopelessly biased? What about readers? Do they now have to assume that the Post’s politics are Bezos’s politics?

I’m sorry that Bezos has not brought the same energy, focus, and innovation to the Post that he brought to Amazon. The man who built the “everything store” could have developed the Post into an “everything portal,” a model for information sharing. If he wanted to foster ideological diversity, he could have purchased multiple publications, each with its own editorial board. Instead, he apparently decided he wanted a trophy. And now that trophy has gotten in the way of another ambition—becoming a commercial space pioneer.

What chance do journalists have to regain public confidence if the person who owns one of the most important media institutions in the world doesn’t have the first clue about the long-standing campaign to delegitimize the very publication he owns?

Whatever the public perception, the reality is that most journalists, across the country, show up at work each day determined to be fair, honest, and direct. That’s what their readers expect of one another, and they should expect the same of the people who report the news they consume.

If only Jeff Bezos understood that.