• I was in Boston for Trump’s first inauguration. At the time, I was paying $450 a month to live in a drafty attic while working an unpaid magazine internship that I hoped would somehow lead to a career in media. My duties as an intern were far from strenuous, so I spent a lot of that January obsessively reading the news and listening to podcasts hosted by journalists I respected, trying my best to parse Trump’s chaotic use of power and paying attention what I hoped would be meaningful (though often cringe) resistance to his incipient fascist project. Eight years later, Trump is once again the President, the opposition is bleeding out behind a dumpster, and I don’t have a career in media. But I do have substantially more writing experience and a deep sense of despair.

• In 2015, the shambling corpse of Bob Woodward wheezed something about how Democracy Dies in Darkness into Jeff Bezos’s ear, and two years later, the Washington Post rolled out its ponderous new motto via Snapchat, an app used to send nudes. We didn’t know how good we had it then. The Post’s new motto, unveiled just in time for Trump’s second inauguration is “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” It sounds like algorithmically generated nonsense that means less than nothing and will appeal to no one.

• To be fair, the national news media’s oppositional stance towards Trump has always been as much kayfabe as principle. Here’s a member of the White House Press Corps, who wouldn’t give his name, explaining to the Columbia Journalism Review that Trump actually has good working relationship with the enemies of the people and vice versa:

“Despite his sometimes strident and sometimes even violent rhetoric about the press, he loves talking to us,” the print reporter said. “And his team—they like talking to us, and they know that they’re going to have a huge audience.”

• At the end of the day, reporters need to file stories, and Trump’s media team will always be willing to give them something, even if it’s total bullshit. There will of course be in-depth, hard-hitting, award-winning reporting on the depravity of the Trump White House over the next four years. Some of it will even be really good. But that will be the exception, not the rule. The professional standards of political journalism are perfectly able to accommodate the voices of demented fascists, as long as they email back before deadline:

“We’re a no-bullshit operation and we’re focused on the mission,” [communications director Steven Cheung] Cheung told CJR last week. “The press who have worked with us in the last two years understand that, and so they are better prepared to work with us. Those who don’t understand that are just undercutting themselves.”

• The first Trump White House was obviously a pit of vipers. Some of the more interesting palace intrigue stories from his first term involved high level officials selling each other out just so they could claw a little closer to the gold-painted throne. This time around, Trump intends to make backstabbing and snitch culture an official workplace policy. The administration is instructing employees to report their colleagues for any perceived attempt to continue diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on the job, threatening them with “adverse consequences” if they don’t comply.

• Whether or not this kind of policy will actually be effective at soliciting tips — and I suspect it probably won’t — seems almost inconsequential. I certainly don’t mean to downplay the misery of margnialized people working in government against whom this order will be weaponized. But I suspect the actual intended effect is to make workplaces as hostile as possible, incentivizing a mass exodus of workers and making it easier for the Project 2025 ghouls to restaff federal agencies with their own vetted candidates.