The Brooklyn Rail

Trump is building an authoritarian regime in the US even more rapidly than Viktor Orban did in Hungary, although Trump and Stephen Miller and Robert Vought are working from the same playbook as Orban. Many government agencies and some of the most powerful institutions of education, law, business, and media in the US capitulated very swiftly, acquiescing to Trump’s demands and paying extortionate “fees.” Trump came in controlling the Republican party, the Congress, and the Supreme Court, and has acted quickly to replace judges and people in charge of government agencies with slavish loyalists. The speed of the take-over has overwhelmed what’s left of the justice system’s ability to respond to all Trump’s illegal actions.

The most alarming and consequent changes right now are those being attempted in the military and in the media. Commandeering the US military into being used as a police force against US civilians has so far foundered on the constitutional strictures against it, and the military brass’s refusal to betray their oath of office. Pete Hegseth’s demands that generals and admirals in the Pentagon sign non-disclosure agreements and submit to lie-detector tests for him have not helped to ingratiate him to the military. Hegseth and Trump have also fired more than half a dozen top generals and ordered the military to cut 20% of its generals and admirals, and they fired the only two women serving as four-star officers, and the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, who was only the second Black man to hold that position.

Corporate media has been more compliant, as corporations merge and buy up assets to form larger corporations. The crossover from Big Tech oligarchy to legacy news was signaled by Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the Washington Post in 2013.

The latest case of the partisan take-over of a legacy news organization is the one by Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison (son of Trump ally Larry Ellison) moving on CBS News. This is after the $8.4 billion merger between Ellison’s Skydance Media and Paramount Global, and Paramount paying Trump $16 million to settle a ridiculous suit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris in advance of the merger. Also to get the FCC under Trump’s Project 2025 henchman Brendan Carr to approve the Skydance/Paramount merger, Ellison promised Carr that the resulting company would eliminate all diversity hiring and install an ombudsman (Kenneth Weinstein, a former Trump appointee) to review all complaints of bias lodged against CBS News. Paramount also agreed to install new editing rules for Face the Nation, after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem complained that her answers to Margaret Brennan’s questions were “shamefully edited” after her taping. And on the eve of the Paramount/Skydance merger, CBS suddenly cancelled Stephen Colbert’s top-rated late-night talk show for airing too many Trump jokes.

Paramount is also reportedly looking to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, which owns CNN. And the settling of the succession feud within Rupert Murdoch’s family insures that Fox News will remain rightwing into the future. Shares in Fox Corporation are up 40% since Trump was elected the second time, and Fox News has 63% of the cable viewership, while both CNN and MSNBC have lost half of their audience.

Most people get most of their news from social media now. TikTok is about to be sold to a group of Trump allies, including tech baron Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. Algorithms that determine content on TikTok, X, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook are used to manipulate users. As others have said, we’re not divided; we’re being divided.

Through it all, the Epstein Affair continues to haunt the Trump regime. Speaker Mike Johnson has told his Republican representatives to go home after the government shutdown and stay there indefinitely, in order to delay the vote on the release of the Epstein files. If the House doesn’t meet, it cannot swear in new Representative Adelita Grijalva, who was elected in a special election in Arizona after the sitting representative, Grijalva’s father, died. Grijalva has pledged to be the 218^th and last signature needed on the bipartisan petition to release the Epstein files. Speaker Johnson has gone to extremes to keep the Epstein files from being released so far, and appears willing to do that forever.

Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, just told the New York Post’s Miranda Devine about meeting his neighbor Jeffrey Epstein years ago and being invited to Epstein’s house next door. “Why do you have a massage table in the middle of your house? How often do you have a massage?” asked Lutnick. “Every day,” replied Epstein. Then Epstein got “weirdly close” to Lutnick’s face and said, “And the right kind of massage.” Lutnick said Epstein was “the greatest blackmailer ever. That’s how he had money.” He surmised that Epstein must have traded some of his tapes of other invited famous and powerful people on his massage table to the authorities, like Alex Acosta, in exchange for that sweetheart deal in Florida in 2008.¹

On September 26, Jason Leopold reported on the 18,000 emails from Jeffrey Epstein that Bloomberg News has acquired through FOIA requests, including a lot of emails to and from Alan Dershowitz. One letter from Dershowitz in September 2006 is addressed to “Jeffrey’s close friends, as one of his close friends, not a lawyer.” In a memo paraphrasing Dershowitz, he says “These girls are self-described prostitutes, they don’t feel harmed, and they’re out for money.”²

“They don’t feel harmed.” This is Dershowitz speaking about the underage girls that Epstein groomed and raped and abused for decades, and who are now speaking out. Dershowitz was reportedly paid at least $4 million by Epstein for representing him as his defense attorney, in addition to being “one of his close friends.”

The statue of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein gleefully holding hands that was installed on the National Mall in Washington, DC last month and rudely removed and damaged by the National Park Service, is now back in place and with a better title. Previously called “Best Friends Forever,” it is now named “Why Can’t We Be Friends?”