The Real Target in the MAGA War on Journalism

The president and his minions are vowing to ramp up their assault on reporters and publications who reveal information about the bungling idiocy, shameless profiteering, and truly psychopathic malevolence that has distinguished this government from all preceding ones. If they follow through with their threats, any unflattering account of Trump’s reign will be a prosecutable offense. But this raises certain questions. What fear is really behind this witch hunt? Could any journalistic exposé really reduce the ardor of Trump worshipers?

Reporting In the Era of Bespoke “Truth”

It is difficult to believe the Trump team are really concerned about ensuring the unflagging support of the Republican base (the only constituency they care about). On the face of it, any effort to criminalize fact-based journalism is redundant. Hysterical blindness among the MAGA faithful is working just fine. Almost since the inception of Fox News, Republican voters have voluntarily confined themselves to right-wing disinformation ghettoes, choosing to be cosseted in the reassuring comforts of their favorite delusions.

At the click of a remote, they can be transported to their favorite land of political make-believe – where their every bigotry is affirmed and justified by tribal “experts;” history is always as they wished it were; science is never a bar to superstition; God is always on their side; and their Earthly deities like Donald Trump never have feet of clay.

Right-wing media producers know they are dispensing something their customers crave. Tucker Carlson acknowledged in the leaked emails that emerged from discovery in the Dominion voting machine lawsuit that Fox knew Trump lost the 2020 election in a fair contest and that the corrupt voting machine story was an economically necessary fraud. Tellingly, Carlson warned his colleagues there that the network’s stock price would plummet if they reported the truth and challenged the fiction of a “stolen election,” to which their perpetually aggrieved viewers were deeply attached. He insisted that any fact-checkers who did their job be fired.

For as long as Fox did not point out the corpulent flesh of their scantily clad emperor, its audience of Trump worshipers could ignore unpleasant “fake news” emanating from legacy media and continue to admire the sartorial splendor of their leader.

Conversely, nothing enrages the base more than when their Fox information cocoon becomes permeable to disquieting facts about their revered demigod. That is what happened in 2020 when the network reported the news of Trump’s election loss to Joe Biden in Arizona. It was a major crisis for the Murdock empire as many furious viewers defected to other more reliably mendacious MAGA outlets.

Tribe-affirming fiction, not objective information, is their product. This translates into a business model dependent on carefully curated lies. Under the direction of Roger Ailes, “news” at the network shifted away from the quaint practice of objectively reporting the facts of the world to marketing a hedonic commodity akin to alcohol, heroin, and porn. Fox learned a clear lesson from their 2020 experiment with reality-based election reporting; if you don’t give customers what they want, they’ll go elsewhere. Since the MAGA audience is already happily brainwashed and does the work of selective information exposure themselves, you may wonder why the administration would bother launching its current war on the free press.

A Challenge to the Conventional Wisdom on Whom MAGA Media Repression is Targeting

Why try to block the revelation of Trump’s unethical and criminal behavior when most of those actions have taken place in plain sight? As long they are reframed or unreported by right-wing media, those in the MAGA cult remain immunized against caring about any of it. While there have been some high-profile defections (like Margorie Taylor Greene) and a few hard to spin scandals (like Trump’s bromance with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, his approval rating today (7/13/26) remains at 40%.

This level of support exists even in the face of skyrocketing prices, the Iran quagmire, support for genocide, open self-enrichment, manifest incompetence, theft of tax dollars, the sport bombing of South American sailors under the guise of drug enforcement, and the impunity granted ICE agents who murder Americans. None of these facts seem to concern the GOP base, especially if stories or outrage about them appear only in non-MAGA media.

If his followers are indifferent to damning information about their leader, why are Trump and his enforcers making threats to investigate, indict, charge, prosecute, and incarcerate those who commit the crime of reporting? It seems rather obvious that he has little to worry about. Trump knows he has can tell any brazen lie, accept any bribe, steal what he wants from the public treasury, and threaten to end the right to vote without losing supporters. As Trump’s infamous Fifth Avenue murder impunity fantasy attests, he has never been worried that journalistic accounts of his actions would estrange the base. If anything, Trump’s followers celebrate the brazenness of his criminality.

The Enemies Within

The real source of his anxiety is less the work of journalism and the malignant actions that might be revealed and more those in his immediate orbit who might be leaking to reporters. In other words, the calls he wants to silence are the ones coming from inside the house.

The reason journalists can get the facts that Trump and his consiglieres, capos, and stooges would like suppressed is because leakers and whistleblowers in the president’s inner circle are exposing them. The most compelling imperative behind the war on the free press is to purge disloyal insiders. They’ve been explicit about this aim. The consistent demand they make of the publications they threaten is that reporters give up their sources.

As with Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot before him, and all paranoid autocrats everywhere, the most fearsome enemies for Trump are the most intimate ones. It has often been aides who start their jobs deeply loyal to the boss, like General John Kelly, Stephanie Grisham, John Bolton, Omarosa Manigault Newman, and Anthony Scaramucci, who end up writing the most humiliating tell-all books.

Ironically, for someone obsessed with unflagging loyalty, adoration, and deference, his administration has been beset by more leaks than any other. The staggering amount of unauthorized disclosures was even quantified in a report by the American Federation of Scientists.

It is in fact MAGA insiders that enable journalists to do the jobs MAGA wants to criminalize. There are always tiny cracks in the fortress of absolute power. It is almost as if repression exerts a hydraulic force that seems to push truth out through those fissures, and in direct proportion to the effort a regime makes to stifle it.

The hunt for leakers has a deeper psychic source. If there is one obsession beyond building monuments to himself that has occupied Trump’s attention more than any other it is fear of “enemies from within.” Currently, the faces of such enemies are those of the disloyal among his inner circle. But at other times they are immigrants, protesters, Democratic voters, fact-based media, academics, scientists, and even non-compliant weather forecasters. His paranoid preoccupation with loyalty, as with all paranoia, is grounded in projection. He sees in others what he cannot acknowledge in himself.

Even casual observers of Trump’s behavior in and out of office have noticed that the direction of loyalty for Trump is always unilateral, from others to him. Central to his malignant narcissism is an indifference to others. Devoid of empathy or compassion, people function for him as pieces on the chess board of his ambitions, to be moved around or sacrificed as needed to achieve a win. Because the inner worlds of others are incomprehensible, his default assumption seems to be that everyone is like him – incapable of loyalty and ready to betray trust the moment it confers an advantage. In other words,heis the ultimate enemy from within – the cut-throat, back-stabbing betrayer, the Brutus within the Caesar.

The enemy within.

What enemy?