The Nine Worst Trump Scandals of 2025

As longtime readers may recall, I’ve always wondered if Donald Trump truly intended to win the 2016 election. Howard Stern asked him why he wanted to take the world’s hardest job when he “only had about 10 good years left before he ‘starts to drool’ on himself”—which now seems pretty prophetic. Weeks into his first term, Trump was already giving melancholy interviews about how he missed his old life. It really seemed that his first presidential run was a goof that went sideways, to the detriment of all of us.

But as for his effort to reclaim the Oval Office? I’ve never wondered why he wanted back in. The second time out, he ran on a combination of desperation to avoid jail, a desire for revenge, and unmitigated avarice. He pretty much ran on a platform of looting the country and punishing his perceived enemies. With the gift of immunity from the Supreme Court, he spent the first year of his second term taking bigger swings at double-dealing, committing more brazen acts of corruption. There are far too many examples to do an exhaustive, let alone authoritative, list of crimes. But these are the ones that stuck with me particularly in a year of misrule.

The UAE crypto bribe: It’s not every day one of TNR’s staff writers gets to compare a scandal to Teapot Dome, but that’s how Tim Noah described the shady dealings that went down between Trump and his shadowy backers from the United Arab Emirates, who—in what’s been characterized as the largest cryptocurrency transaction in history—made a $2 billion stablecoin purchase in World Liberty Financial, which is essentially the president’s personal crypto slush fund. With quid like that, you knew that a sizable pro quo was to come. Sure enough, Trump permitted the UAE to import a larger quantity of U.S.-produced AI computer chips than it was allowed under the Biden administration. Simple enough scandal to understand, right? Well, as Noah later noted, the business press seems to not get it.

Plane and simple corruption: So, it’s kind of hard to do the whole “nothing to see here!” routine when the nothing is a luxury 747 that your Qatari friends want to off-load on the president. Trump tried to sell this gift as the new Air Force One, a generous gesture in return for all the money the United States has spent providing security for our nominal Gulf allies. The plane became the subject of a long-simmering dispute, as Democrats have attempted to block it from being used as Air Force One. Regardless, as Alex Shephard noted, the debasement in this arrangement exceeded the mere quid pro quo: “Trump wants to be treated as a king, and Qatar is playing ball.”

Death of USAID: Russell Vought, Elon Musk, and their wrecking crew of DOGE bros spent the first half of the year visiting destruction upon the civil service; the damage done is something we’ll all be feeling for a long time. But the most damnable part of their legacy may be the dismantling of foreign aid agencies like the United States Agency for International Development. A Boston University study found that the agency’s demise had “already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children.” “We are now witnessing what the historian Richard Rhodes termed ‘public man-made death,’” wrote the Harvard School of Public Health’s Atul Gawande.

Bombs over Latin America: It’s giving Wag the Dog, if you ask me. The administration, seemingly hot to bring back neoconservative military conquest, soft-launched its latest regime change war in Venezuela by making indiscriminate attacks on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific waters off of Central America. These attacks, all undertaken without a jot of congressional oversight and on the dubious premise that the boats were packed with fentanyl bound for the United States, were murderous on their own. But the news that the military was ordered to strike an already stricken boat in a “double tap” attack to kill any survivors has raised the specter of war crimes—and in a way that even many Republicans don’t seem ready to countenance.

Trump’s Binance buddy gets a pardon: Changpeng Zhao began this year the disgraced former CEO of Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, having done prison time for, as the Biden DOJ put it, “failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering (AML) program,” violating the Bank Security Act, and allowing money to flow freely to a host of bad actors, including “terrorists, cybercriminals, and child abusers.” But Zhao, having forfeited the right to run Binance, wanted back in. So he used his connections to Trump’s family and inner circle to secure a pardon that would let him run the show again. In return, Zhao showered his attention on World Liberty Financial—using Binance’s leverage to enrich Trump’s private crypto fund. TNR’s Tim Noah was positively apoplectic about the shady arrangement.

Chips to China: Speaking of Tim Noah and apoplexy: It’s probably not great that one firm, Nvidia, has come to possess such godlike, market-moving power. Its outsize importance to the global economy had Noah fingering it as one of the major pillars to crumble, when he gamed out a potential Trump stock market crash back in October. Trump’s been doing what he can to boost Nvidia’s fortunes, however: This year, the president broke with long-standing national security tradition and announced that he was permitting the firm to sell its H200 chips to China. As The New York Times’ David Sanger noted, the deal—the fruits of “intense lobbying” from Nvidia CEO and White House gadfly Jensen Huang—raised a basic question: “If the chips that power the most advanced technology can be sold to the United States’ chief technological, military and financial competitor, where is the new line drawn?” That’s probably the least of Trump’s concerns, however: The deal also guaranteed that “25 percent of all the revenues from the sales would go to the United States,” in yet another case of this administration’s affection for fascist corporatism.

The continuing January 6 crime wave: Every once in a while, I like to check in with the people who were given presidential pardons by Trump for their crimes of sacking the U.S. Capitol and attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election by force. Here’s one who killed a person in a drunk-driving incident. Here’s another. Here’s the guy who plotted to kill the FBI agents who investigated him for the Capitol riot. Here’s the alleged child molester who tried to buy his victim’s silence with fictitious “January 6 reparations” money. Here’s another alleged child sex predator who at least made no claims about pending reparations. Here’s a man arrested for allegedly threatening to kill Hakeem Jeffries. Here’s the guy who’s inexplicably not yet been arrested for stalking and threatening Jamie Raskin. What’s this? Another alleged child sex predator? This guy who was arrested for absconding with “industrial copper wire valued at tens of thousands of dollars” seems quaint by comparison. Anyway, there are scores of these repeat offenders, so I think we can all agree that these pardons were a spectacular idea.

ICE’s war on U.S. citizens: The administration has coupled its turning loose of January 6 criminals on our streets with the incessant plucking of law-abiding citizens off those same streets. An October report from ProPublica brought the gory details: “More than 170 cases this year where citizens were detained at raids and protests,” including 20 instances in which citizens “reported being held for over a day without being able to call their loved ones or a lawyer.” As I wrote around the same time, Trump shares (dis)credit with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. In his concurring opinion in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, Kavanaugh etched his name into infamy by contending, “If the person is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, that individual will be free to go after the brief encounter.” As ProPublica’s Nicole Foy wrote, this “is far from the reality many citizens have experienced”:

Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration agents. They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.

The ultimate symbol of Trumpian corruption: The fact of the matter is that the White House actually could use a ballroom. But what it’s getting, in the form of Trump’s teardown of the East Wing to make way for his planned monument to his bottomless ego, is something that ably sums up the despicable nature of this presidency and its cronies. As TNR’s Matt Ford wrote in a lengthy jeremiad on the topic, “The raw spectacle of Trump tearing a hole in the White House to hang out with his rich friends is already a potent symbol of his presidency.… At every level, the entire project may be the perfect summation of what his administration has been like for the country.” Perhaps the one good thing about the ballroom is that Democratic presidential contenders can compete with one another over who will tear it down best.

I could go on like this: And I probably should. But I would go on forever. There’s Signalgate, the firing of numerous inspectors general, and the extortion campaigns against businesses, universities, and Big Law firms. Robert F. Kennedy’s deadly anti-vaccine policies are a mass-casualty crime in the making. We’re building concentration camps and shipping people to gulags. We’re threatening Canada and Greenland. Trump’s tariffs are ruining Christmas. He stole $230 million for himself. And the only reason I haven’t mentioned l’affaire Jeffrey Epstein until now is that it’s been so ever-present in our lives that I don’t actually need to remind you about it.

But the biggest scandal of all is something Trump didn’t create. It’s this country’s piss-poor legacy of holding the powerful to account—a major factor in both Trump’s rise to power and the foundation of the era of elite impunity in which we are all mired. So whether your favorite Trump scandal made the cut here or not, keep its memory close, nurture your fury, and seek out the future leaders who will not shrink from the task of holding Trump and his enablers accountable for their howling criminality—who will push the envelope to bring retributive justice when their time in power comes.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here. Power Mad will return in 2026.

In case you missed it, President Donald Trump fell asleep on television this week. There he was, in the middle of a meeting with the members of his Cabinet, completely set adrift on memory bliss as the pool cameras rolled, locked on his dozy face. Before you worry too much, rest assured that this wasn’t a meeting in which matters of national importance were discussed, but rather one of those now-regular occasions in which the president’s underlings gather to see who can offer him the most flamboyant praise. Still, it is rather worrying that not even these regular sessions of compliment bukkake can sustain the president’s waking interest.

Or, at least it should be worrying? I really hate to play the “age card,” folks, but back in my day (2023 and 2024), I distinctly recall that a president with apparent mental infirmities was nigh unto scandalous. Biden’s famous struggles were a national catastrophe that led many journalists to come a-ridin’ atop their high horses to bother their readers about how they got caught flat-footed by the fact that President Joe Biden, nominated at the age of 77, somehow continued to age. Why had no one warned them? (Probably because the same media, back when this all didn’t seem to matter, ritually executed the one guy at the Democratic debates who did.)

For a press so dedicated to sanewashing the Trump administration’s open sewer of corruption, the kid gloves treatment still seems the order of the day. This week, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire published a lengthy exegesis of the “President Trump is increasingly isolated” variety, titled “The Bubble-Wrapped President.” In the piece, Lemire reports that Trump has “dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term.” He is described therein as “distracted,” “out of touch,” focused on matters not “high on voters’ minds,” and showing “little willingness to acknowledge” problems gripping the country.   

The piece treats this mostly as some kind of inscrutable mystery, a tale told by the thinking-face emoji. The real story is moving between the lines: The president is fully checked out because he’s old, enfeebled, and his brain is slowly turning into pasta e fagioli. The president moldering in a narcoleptic haze as Marco Rubio yammers away at his side is the same guy who doesn’t seem to remember why he pardoned former Honduran president and celebrated drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, or what part of his body was recently subjected to an MRI. 

There is plenty of room for the discourse to shift, however—and some evidence that it might. The New York Times treats the matter with somewhat less puzzlement than The Atlantic, noting Trump’s advanced age and planting a few red flags about his health; its piece garnered an outraged Truth Social post from Trump after publication. In one of the few articles to actually take on the matter of Trump’s obvious infirmity frontally, The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt seems exasperated that a president who has obvious trouble “completing a thought” has “largely been saved the same examination” so regularly foisted on Biden.

If The Atlantic limits that examination to a single aside, in which Trump’s lack of acuity is likened to “the same low energy move for which [he] used to mock Joe Biden,” the latter half of the piece does at least present a compelling reason why more attention to a fully noped-out chief executive might be a matter of some alarm: The vacuum Trump is leaving in the White House needs to be filled, and it’s being filled by “enablers” rather than people who might “[moderate] some of his more extreme impulses.” Or, as someone less committed to euphemism euthanasia might put it, it’s being filled by utter ghouls: a Pentagon head who’s in over his head and spiraling out as he commits war crimes, a Health and Human Services secretary who’s bringing Lysenkoism back, an FBI director crashing out because no one brought him a cool jacket to wear—and all the rest hopped up on völkisch nationalism, pulling Black people out of their cars in Minneapolis and warring with Sabrina Carpenter.

In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, The New Republic’s Matt Ford tuned in to watch Trump’s campaign event at Madison Square Garden—a gritty reboot of the 1939 German-American Bund rally for fascism—and sounded an alarm about what the next Trump White House was going to look like. “The Madison Square Garden rally,” Ford wrote, “showed how much of Trumpism is about satisfying the basest, crudest, and most hateful impulses in American life—and how much his acolytes can’t wait to wield the federal government to do it.” The issue at hand is no longer one in which we worry there aren’t enough moderating figures in Trump’s life—it’s that all of the monsters Trump brought into his administration now have a free hand to run the country.

Those who served in Biden’s inner circle aren’t going to be remembered fondly, but no matter how enfeebled the president was, the country did not have the same problem we do now. The Biden White House wasn’t packed stem to stern with people dedicated to looting the country, terrorizing children, turning masked goons out onto the streets of American cities, or using the Department of Homeland Security’s social media presence to—as administration sources told Zeteo—“intentionally use popular music from vocally anti-Trump performing artists in order to trigger a negative response from a famous liberal and provide further amplification of neo-Confederate memes.”

Y’all, it really seems like the president sliding sideways into the mud puddle of his few remaining faculties as his frantic acolytes rain down pain and duplicity on everyone is something of a big story. Or at least it used to be. Perhaps one day soon, it will be a matter worthy of attention again. Because the way things are going, I’m expecting him to either fall asleep or wander off during his next State of the Union address.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

This week, we all moved a couple steps closer to finally getting a peek at what’s been the year’s biggest political MacGuffin: the Epstein files. The long-delayed swearing in of Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva allowed the pro-disclosure caucus in the House to finally hit the magic number of “yea” votes on their discharge petition ordering their release; opposition in the House essentially collapsed after that, and the Senate used its “deem and pass” power to ratify the lower house’s decision in advance. The bill now goes to President Trump’s desk. He is expected to sign it into law and then attempt to use the contents to wage merciless war on Democrats.

All of this may come to nothing. There’s no reason to believe Trump’s Justice Department—which essentially operates as Trump’s own private legal counsel—will treat these materials with judiciousness. Frankly, you shouldn’t be surprised if they contain little in the way of smoking guns. Of Epstein’s culpability there can be no doubt; the rest is just suspicion. Conservatives have darkly warned their liberal counterparts: “Be careful what you wish for; what if this implicates a bunch of crusty old Democrats?”

To which I say, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” As I’ve watched the Epstein story unravel across the media—through the shouting of lawmakers and the flood of tawdry emails dumped in the press—I’ve not been able to ignore how it’s all one big pile of rot at the center of polite society. My TNR colleague, Matt Ford, expressed similar sentiments in a recent piece, confessing that the truly despairing thing about the Epstein affair was that the whole idea of civic virtue seems to have been murdered, and in its place, a culture of elite impunity has risen.

For my part, I’m less worried about whether some Democratic Party luminary catches an Epstein stray and more concerned about whether Democrats bungle the opportunity to attack these corrupt arrangements and the presidential administration that has made them its North Star. This iron is, at the moment, particularly hot. A fresh Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that Trump’s approval ratings had hit startling new lows, with respondents particularly “unhappy about his handling of the high cost of living and the investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”

Epstein and the economy—these are the twin albatrosses around Trump’s neck. The question, however, is whether Democrats will have the stomach and the sense to exploit both avenues to Trump’s ruin. It may not seem like a problem, but Democrats seem pathologically averse to multitasking, which explains why they’re making the salience of grocery prices their priority to the exclusion of all other matters. So monomaniacal is this approach that at various times over the past year, Democratic lawmakers have called other concerns “distractions”—up to and including Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces.

Let’s give Democrats their due: Their affordability arguments passed electoral tests earlier this month. And the administration is spooked: Trump and his allies are attempting wan affordability arguments of their own. It’s been a while, but Democrats are suddenly calling the tune in Washington.

That the Epstein matter has wounded Trump at the same time is a fortunate coincidence for Democrats seeking a skeleton key to unlock a larger argument about the harm Trump’s done to our republic: The ICE goons on our street, Trump’s White House teardown, the high cost of living, the administration’s various decisions to hurt people during the shutdown, all the weird ghouls occupying executive branch positions that once went to qualified civil servants, and the forever stench of oligarchic swampwater suffusing public life—all of these issues roiling the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people lie at the nexus of elite impunity.

There are no distractions here, no options to weigh; this is all one single story—much like Epstein, powerful plutocratic interests have found their man in Trump, and together, they are driving the country to ruin for their own amusement and self-enrichment. Here’s how Ford captures it:

At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority. It defies checks and balances, rejecting the notion that power can be abused or corrupted because it justifies itself. Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.

As I’ve noted before, Trumpism isn’t working, and people are growing angrier and angrier. According to the most recent NPR/PBS News Marist poll, Democrats have attained a 14-point lead over the GOP on the generic congressional ballot. The time to pummel these crooks is nigh, and they needn’t be precious about it. Think of it like this: Trumpism is the culmination of a crooked scheme that began nearly a half-century ago, in which the rich and powerful looted our wealth and tore up the civic fabric of this nation. Yes, like the Epstein affair suggests, it really is one big thieving cabal of plutocratic reprobates that has done us dirty. There is an opportunity now for Democrats with guts to crush these scumbags, and take back what they stole.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

The United States Senate: Can’t live with it, can’t burn it down (or so my lawyers caution me). Recently, I’ve had cause to ruminate on the upper house’s continued existence and the way its workings threaten our own. And then, this week, liberals were given new reason to rue the “cooling saucer of democracy,” as the Democratic Senate Surrender Subcommittee—apparently with the assent of Chuck Schumer—threw the wettest of blankets on a historically great week for the party by caving on the government shutdown, letting a bloodied Trump up off the canvas, and giving Republicans reason to exult.

Those exultations, according to a report from Zeteo, were just as Trumpian as you could imagine, with anonymous White House officials said to be “cackling” and “gratuitously using terms such as ‘losers’ and ‘pussies’ as they reveled in the relief from a shutdown that even President Trump acknowledged was getting Republicans ‘killed’ politically.” It’s a fitting reminder that there are actually two U.S. Senates in America—one that is committed to dismantling democracy, while the other is committed to a functioning government (sometimes to a fault). It’s also worth remembering that the divergent ways that Republican and Democratic senators discharge their duties is hardly a recent development, but rather baked into the two parties’ DNA.

Recent history paints a stark contrast between how GOP senators behave and how they use the Senate to advance long-term right-wing agenda items, and how Democrats approach the same projects. On February 13, 2016, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia slipped this mortal coil, and Democrats salivated at the prospect of President Barack Obama replacing him. These hopes ended up being short-lived, as the Senate was in the hands of Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky senator, who by then had mastered the art of thwarting the president’s ambitions, simply put the kibosh on advancing Obama’s pick, Merrick Garland, in a norm-breaking display of “preferring not to” that would make Bartleby the Scrivener blush.

Republican senators held the line, to the delight of their base, raising the salience of the Supreme Court vacancy in the presidential election. And once Donald Trump signaled that he was willing to simply follow the Federalist Society’s lead on judicial appointments, it became easy for many Republican elites to look past the fact that he was obviously a dumb asshole who didn’t belong anywhere near the Oval Office. Holding out in the face of public pressure helped McConnell secure lasting power for his party, a reward for keen strategic thinking.

As I was reminded this week, the key to unlocking the Democratic approach to the Senate can be found in 2006, when Connecticut voters nominated Ned Lamont to be the Democratic nominee for Senate, seemingly putting an end to incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman’s career. It didn’t go according to plan: With GOP support, Lieberman ran as an independent and won. But when Lieberman returned to the Senate, rather than knock him down a peg for his dalliances with the GOP, Democratic leaders allowed him to remain a senior member in good standing, with all the attendant chairmanships and rewards.

Lieberman repaid this generosity by repeatedly shivving his fellow Democrats—and we’re all still living with the consequences. As The New Republic’s Monica Potts recently detailed, the public option, which died at Lieberman’s hands, might have gone a long way to keeping today’s insurance premiums more affordable. (When you consider Lieberman’s weakening of Obamacare alongside his 2003 effort to create the Department of Homeland Security, there is so much current Trumpian misrule covered in his fingerprints.)

The differences between Republican and Democratic senators are largely reflective of the two parties’ approaches to politics. On the GOP side, you see an utter ruthlessness when it comes to wielding power, no fear of breaking norms or of the stern reproaches from official D.C.’s media nannies, and a complete dedication to long-term right-wing interests. The slings and arrows of denying Obama his Supreme Court nomination are easy to bear when everyone’s eyes are fully on the prize of taking over the high court for a generation.

Taken as a whole, it must be great to be a Republican voter. Their senators are advancing key ideological projects in concert with the conservative movement, pushing the envelope on what’s deemed to be polite, and training their base to expect Beltway norms to be dismantled in pursuit of their agenda. On the Democratic side, well, they’re not beating the charges that they are an insular party fully in thrall to the Iron Law of Institutions, which holds that “the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.”

Democrats seem to treasure their tidy little debating society and its traditions and trappings far beyond any other political concern. They constantly undercut the idea that democracy is in peril by working hand in glove with the party that we are told is seeking to destroy the constitutional order. They rise in defense of the filibuster instead of their constituents and their democracy. And they piss away advantages, like a shutdown that was rattling the Trump presidency, instead of thinking strategically about the next step. (If caving was inevitable, why not force Trump to eat the pain of a ruined Thanksgiving, then step in to “save Christmas”?)

The Democratic senators’ faults shone brightly in the wake of the shutdown cave. It’s painfully obvious that the caucus maneuvered to protect its most vulnerable members from the votes to end the shutdown, instead sacrificing eight members who are not up for reelection in 2026. Schumer voted against reopening the government but is fooling nobody, multiple members are feigning anger at the result they actually sought, and no one is capable of telling the straight story of why they did what they did—probably because they are falling back on their one political idea: Let the GOP hurt people, then step in to collect the electoral winnings once the country is traumatized enough.

It’s all kabuki and prevarication, and no one is above suspicion. The Democrats opted to fund Trump’s government under unanimous consent; not one of them stepped forward to debate the merits further or use their beloved privileges to at least throw some sand in the gears. And as The American Prospect’s Whitney Curry Wimbish noted on Tuesday, it only takes one senator to put Schumer’s continued leadership up for a debate. As Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, told Wimbish, “Most Senate experts would say it’s highly unlikely. But if the members are really pissed off, this is a mechanism they have.” That’s the big takeaway: While some may huff and puff for the cameras and their angry constituents, this caucus is not, in fact, pissed off enough—or at all.

Looking into the future, Republican voters are going to increasingly cherish the Senate, even as the Democratic base’s ire at the institution grows. As I’ve previously noted, the upper chamber’s malapportionment crisis—in which fewer and fewer voters are needed to construct durable Republican majorities—is only going to get worse. One study suggests that changing demographics could one day allow 30 percent of Americans to elect 70 of its senators—a cohort that will skew rural, white, and conservative.

Imagine a GOP-led Senate capable of convicting a Democratic president in an impeachment trial minutes after their being sworn in—this could be reality in some of your lifetimes. Not so much for the geriatric windbags of the Democratic caucus, but they can look into that bleak future and see a perfect arrangement: an inert superminority caucus, with cushy jobs and top-flight health care, Statler-and-Waldorfing their way into decades-long careers as stern letter writers and handwringing concern-havers. Why put up a fight when you’re getting exactly what you want?

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

There’s a rubric I’ve been using to maintain perspective on President Donald Trump’s second term: Imagine if the dumbest person in the world and humanity’s biggest asshole were the same person, and that guy was president. It’s a pretty simple lens through which to both view Trump’s lawless, Constitution-shredding rampage of revenge and self-enrichment while never succumbing to the idea that what’s happening to the country is somehow within bounds. It is only from this standpoint that one can write the straight story about this administration.

Meanwhile, how are the View From Nowhere folks faring these days? Somehow, in 2025, the media is still struggling with what is plainly in front of its face, demonstrating the same coherence bias that I and others had reason to complain about in the run-up to the 2024 election and its immediate aftermath.

Behold, the “departure.” Back on September 10, The New York Times used the term in their report of the Trump administration’s extrajudicial killings on the high seas. Their sources, per the report, provided “new details about a military operation that was a startling departure from using law enforcement means to interdict suspected drug boats.” More recently, a CNN report on Trump having collected a $130 million private donation to pay military service salaries—a highly impeachable offense for what is a comically paltry sum of money—explained that the move “marks a striking departure from government procedure for funding the military, which traditionally relies on public funds appropriated by Congress.”

Well, let’s give credit where due. The media is at least startled; they are struck. But these actions are not mere “departures”—a term that suggests a slight change of frame; unorthodox maneuvers that are nevertheless within the parameters of acceptable. Behind the sugarcoating are offenses that can be related in plain English, if anyone wants to take a stab at it. Here at TNR, for example, Matt Ford’s piece about how Trump’s military payroll gambit was a baldly illegal seizure of power got this headline: “Trump’s Military Payroll Gambit Is a Baldly Illegal Seizure of Power.” See, folks, it can be done.

Suffice it to say, avid readers of political news should be on their guard for other things Trump does that get labeled as “departures” or otherwise presented in a more anodyne frame. Just as TNR’s Tim Noah instructed that any time the media refers to someone as “fiery” what they really mean to say is “bugfuck nuts,” any time you see the word “departure” invoked, they are referring to a crime. And Trump’s crimes, in particular! I’m not sure you’ll see a bank robber assessed as having made “a startling departure from traditional cash withdrawals.”

It’s been something of a bleak period, watching the press make startling departures from telling the straight story about the Trump administration. TNR contributor Parker Molloy noted that, after Trump responded to the No Kings protest with an AI-generated video depicting him dumping gallons of shit on the protests from a fighter plane, the media was at great pains to sand off the edges of the story. There was a time when even the perception of this kind of antipathy toward ordinary citizens—say, when you label them as “deplorable”?—would invite the fury of the media. (Heck, there was a time when the political media launched a fatwa against Howard Dean for shouting at his own rally.) But this never became much of a scandal—though I will concede that Democrats could have done a better job pushing the issue.

And as we learned this week, pushing the issue can work wonders. Steve Bannon, as is his wont, seeded the media pasture with his announcement that there is a “plan” in place to run Trump for a third term. From there, an entire news cycle blossomed, one in which reporters peppered Trump with questions about his plan to run again, all of which he sidestepped—and so those same reporters told their readers that he is not ruling it out. Perhaps my favorite piece from this “Will Trump do a new crime?” boomlet was a Time magazine piece titled “Why Trump Keeps Talking About a Third Term” that suggested, “Whether Trump actually plans to run again for President, in defiance of the Constitution, merely bringing up the possibility so much, some observers say, may be strategic in its own right.”

The one problem with that contention is that Trump wasn’t bringing it up—a bunch of reporters were, and in so doing turned what should have been a confrontation (“Why do your allies keep saying you plan to abrogate the Constitution?”) into a jocular spitball session where they help Trump go over his options. (We are reliably informed that the president finds the maneuver where he runs as vice president “too cute.”) Trump, for once, seemed to understand what game was afoot. “Am I not ruling it out?” he responded to one inquiry, “I mean, you’ll have to tell me.” And so they did, in the pages of their publications.

If you’re wondering what is causing the media to fall down on the job in this manner, and infect coverage of a constitutional crime wave with limp euphemisms, I think it’s very much akin to the reason Democratic senators keep voting for Trump’s judicial appointments: It’s an act of desperation; a frantic need to suggest that our democratic institutions are still in proper working order and the duly elected president isn’t guiding the ship of state into tyranny. For if the members of the fourth estate were ever forced to report the truth of what’s happening, they would also have to confront how their own neglect helped pave this path. Based on the number of “startling departures” that are piling up, I reckon that day will come soon enough.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.