Perry Bacon, New Republic - Eight years ago, Don Lemon was hosting a 10 p.m. show on CNN
that each night forthrightly described the antidemocratic tendencies of
President Trump. Guests such as onetime Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein and former Nixon aide John Dean
explained in detail how unprecedented (or Nixon-like) Trump’s actions
were. Lemon himself at times delivered long diatribes castigating Trump
for his racist rhetoric and demonization of journalists.
Eight years later, another talented journalist (Abby Phillip) helms the 10 p.m. hour on CNN. But the program now nearly always includes some pro-Trump guests mouthing the president’s talking points and downplaying his radicalism. In many ways, the star of News Night With Abby Phillip is conservative pundit Scott Jennings, a regular on the show whose back-and-forths with liberal guests often go viral.
CNN’s 10 p.m programming is a microcosm of a broader, monumental shift in America over the last eight years: Key institutions are accommodating and adapting to Trump, rather than challenging him. Trump is more aggressive than eight years ago, but his authoritarian tendencies were fully on display then too. The Democratic Party today, as in 2017, vacillates between aggressively confronting Trump and trying to appeal to pro-Trump swing voters. There is a strong grassroots anti-Trump movement led by groups such as Indivisible.
But what’s so different is how universities, businesses, news organizations, and other core parts of civil society are behaving now. Corporate executives who once forcefully criticized the president say little these days. Universities are reshaping their campuses to comply with Trump’s vision of higher education. Mainstream news organizations often go out of their way to legitimize policies that are authoritarian, ill-conceived, or both.
It was always going to be hard to restrain a second-term authoritarian president with an army of aides who had learned from the mistakes they made in Trump’s first term. And it’s even harder with the courts and Congress controlled by Trump-aligned Republicans. But what I have been shocked by over the last six and half months is how willing powerful American institutions are to agree with Trump—and how unwilling they are to collaborate with one another to stop him. More
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