Independent media flourishes when reporters work outside the gravitational pull of official Washington.
Trump’s obsession with “droopy” portrayals exposes how brittle his self-mythology has become.
The GOP’s cracks widen as fear of the base collides with the political cost of backing a collapsing presidency.
Edwin Eisendrath and veteran reporter Asawin Suebsaeng of
open the door to a conversation that immediately strips away the pretense surrounding legacy media’s decline, making clear how journalism regains honesty when it isn’t trapped inside an access economy. From that wider vantage point, the fragility of Trump’s strongman performance becomes impossible to ignore; the moment the mythology falters, the machinery around him starts to misfire, especially in a party where loyalty is always contingent on usefulness. Inside that vacuum, the donor class begins recalibrating faster than the base, sensing that proximity to a failing project can be just as dangerous as opposing it. Beneath all of it sits a governing ideology willing to collapse moral boundaries entirely, one that treats state violence as spectacle and public suffering as a renewable resource for political theater.Tune in to the full conversation with and !
Trump Goes to Hell
They say there’s a bright tunnel, a welcoming chorus, a beaming reunion with the lost and beloved. He got the tunnel, sure, but the light was gaudy, with a little neon edge to it, as if someone had gold-leafed the sun and marked it up fifty percent. The chorus was a loop of his own applause lines, tinny and off-tempo. He had the odd sensation of dying i…
