As goes the Washington Post: US democracy takes another hit under Trump

The email landed in Lizzie Johnson’s in-tray in Ukraine just before 4pm local time. It came at a tough time for the reporter: Russia had been repeatedly striking the country’s power grid, and just days before she had been forced to work out of her car without heat, power or running water, writing in pencil because pen ink freezes too readily.

“Difficult news,” was the subject line. The body text said: “Your position is eliminated as part of today’s organizational changes,” explaining that it was necessary to get rid of her to meet the “evolving needs of our business”.

Johnson’s response may go down in the annals of American media history. “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone,” she wrote on X. “I have no words.”

The Washington Post’s Ukraine correspondent may have been rendered speechless over Wednesday’s move by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire and Post owner, to cut more than 300 jobs – almost a third of the paper’s workforce. The bloodletting, which has raised renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Donald Trump’s attacks, swept away the paper’s entire sports department, much of its culture and local staff and all of its journalists in such arid news zones as Ukraine and the Middle East.

Others, though, managed to find their tongues. “It’s a bad day,” said Don Graham, son of the Post’s legendary Watergate-era owner Katharine Graham, breaking the silence he has maintained since selling the paper to Bezos for $250m in 2013.

“I am crushed,” was the lament of Bob Woodward, one-half of the paper’s double act with Carl Bernstein that exposed Watergate.

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” said Marty Baron, the Post’s lionised former editor in chief. Not one to mince his words, Baron castigated Bezos for his “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump”, saying it left an especially “ugly stain” on the paper’s standing.

Several hundred people rallied in front of the Post’s offices on Thursday, voicing support for their laid-off colleagues. “It’s disappointing on an immense scale. They don’t seem to give a damn about this institution and the people that make it run,” said Patrick Nielsen, an engineer at the paper.

Howls of dismay were also uttered by prominent Post alumni in interviews with the Guardian. Robert McCartney, a 39-year veteran of the Post until he retired five years ago, said it was a “tragedy and an outrage”.

Like many Post insiders, McCartney has been astonished by the stark contrast between Bezos’s handling of the newspaper during Donald Trump’s first term in office and his conduct now in Trump 2.0.

McCartney was a senior journalist on the paper during Bezos’s initial eight years of ownership, through Trump’s first presidency. Back then, he, like many others, was grateful for Bezos’s tutelage.

“We saw him as a savior. He pumped money into the Post, didn’t meddle in the newsroom and stood up to Trump,” he said.

Fast-forward to 2026, and a very different Bezos has emerged. In 2017, soon after Trump’s first inauguration, the Post introduced its new strapline: “Democracy dies in darkness.”

That wording still runs proudly beneath the masthead. At the end of a week like this one, though, America looks a notable shade darker.

Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor until 2012 who now runs investment firm North Base Media, said that this was a terrible moment to be hammering one of the country’s great custodians of public accountability: “These are historic times, given the cyclone bearing down on the world order and American system of government. This is when journalism matters most. I mean, laying off reporters in Ukraine, now.”

It is not as though Bezos needs the money. He is the fourth-richest person on the planet, according to Forbes, with a $245bn fortune.

As Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, pointed out, Bezos could cover five years of the Post’s $100m annual losses by dipping into his earnings from a single week.

The optics of Wednesday’s train wreck of an announcement were also diabolical: the job of facing the distraught staff on Zoom was delegated to the Post’s hapless current executive editor, Matt Murray.

Bezos was nowhere to be seen. Yet there he was, earlier in the week, beaming broadly as he welcomed Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, to the Florida headquarters of his space company, Blue Origin.

Nor did Will Lewis, Bezos’s consigliere as publisher of the Post, have the courage to present himself as the guillotine came down. A day after he had presided over the evisceration of the paper’s sports department, he was spotted attending the red carpet at an NFL Super Bowl event in San Francisco.

On Saturday night, however, Lewis abruptly resigned, acknowledging “difficult decisions” as he praised Bezos’s leadership of the paper.

The lay-offs came just five days after the launch of the first lady documentary, Melania, bankrolled by Amazon Prime Video. Bezos sank $75m into that pile of “gilded trash” yet, unlike the Post, seems unfazed by the film’s paltry return on investment.

“What Bezos did for Melania while gutting his own newspaper,” wrote the historian Simon Schama, will come to be seen “as the most glaring symptom of cultural collapse in a democracy hanging on to truth by the barest of threads”.

This fateful juncture has been looming for a while. The first warning signs came in October 2024, when Bezos yanked the Post’s planned endorsement of Trump’s Democratic rival Kamala Harris just 11 days before the presidential election.

A wave of public revulsion ensued, leading to the cancellation of at least 250,000 Post subscriptions.

Soon after, the billionaire unilaterally imposed new strictures on the paper’s opinion content. He introduced what he called his “two pillars”: “personal liberties and free markets.”

That drove many of the paper’s top commentators rushing for the exit, among them the economics columnist Eduardo Porter, who now writes for the Guardian. “This layering of dogma undermined critical thinking,” Porter recalled. “It turned the Post into something more akin to a church, with tight constraints on thought.”

This week’s day of the long knives has left many people desperately seeking explanations. There were clearly business motives at play: you don’t get to be a gazillionaire like Bezos without caring about profit lines, and the Post has been battered in recent years by harsh industry headwinds.

But there are other, more sinister, interpretations. McCartney thinks back to 2019 when Amazon lost a $10bn Pentagon cloud-computing contract during Trump’s first term.

Amazon complained in a lawsuit that this was a blatant act of retaliation by Trump, punishing Bezos for the Washington Post’s piercing coverage of his administration. Could it be that the bruising experience led Bezos to change tack, concluding that shining a light in defense of American democracy came at too high a price for the jewels in his business empire, Amazon and Blue Origin?

“It’s very likely that the desire to appease Trump, to placate him, is playing a role in these decisions,” McCartney said.

That’s a chilling thought for such a beacon of accountability journalism as the Washington Post. And it is set against the already parlous state of US media.

Since 2000, some 3,500 newspapers have closed shop, abandoning one in four Americans who now live in news deserts with no local newspaper. The most recent casualty was the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which will publish its final edition in May. It was founded in 1786, three years before George Washington donned the mantle of first president.

While many papers have been folding, others have fallen into the hands of a new breed of super-wealthy tech and venture capitalist owners who, like Bezos, see journalism as an asset to monetize: the Los Angeles Times was acquired in 2018 by a biotech billionaire, Patrick Soon-Shiong.

Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong has displayed symptoms of Trump Appeasement Syndrome. He too refused to allow his paper to endorse Harris days before the 2024 election.

Historic newspapers brought low, news deserts proliferating: this is fertile ground on which misinformation and the Maga pestilence can grow. Trump has cultivated it relentlessly to his advantage.

Long hostile towards what he calls the “fake news media”, Trump has taken his vendetta against truth-seekers to a new level. He has stripped public media channels NPR and PBS of more than $1bn in federal funding, launched full-frontal attacks on individual journalists and outlets exposing his corruption and lies and sustained a bullying campaign against corporate owners designed to browbeat them into subservience.

CBS News is the consummate example. Trump leaned on Paramount, which owned the news network, with a $10bn lawsuit over a 60 Minutes pre-election interview with Harris. Paramount settled for $16m, even though the suit was widely ridiculed as spurious.

Front of Paramount’s mind, no doubt, was its upcoming merger with Skydance Media that required federal – ie Trump’s – approval.

Following the merger, David Ellison became CEO of Paramount Skydance. He is son of the billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who is a close friend and adviser of Trump’s.

The younger Ellison went ahead and appointed the anti-woke commentator Bari Weiss as editor in chief of CBS News, sending shockwaves through the storied network’s dazed and demoralised staff. Weiss, who came to the job with no TV industry experience, has swiftly confirmed their fears.

She pulled a 60 Minutes segment on the notorious Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador to which the Trump administration had been deporting immigrants. Among her early hires as CBS News contributors are a Trump loyalist and former US marine, a prominent vaccine skeptic buddy of the health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, and fellow anti-woke firebrand Niall Ferguson.

The cumulative malaise that is descending over US media leaves the country’s democratic institutions vulnerable to attack. It can’t be exclusively blamed for Trump’s excesses.

There are plenty of other willing accomplices and capitulators, including universities like Columbia, corporate law firms and the gung-ho conservative activists who now control the supreme court.

But from Trump’s perspective, a media on its knees surely helps. The results are present everywhere you look.

Trump is unleashed, unchained. He feels so comfortable in his regal skin that he can berate a respected female CNN reporter questioning him on the Epstein files for never smiling.

He can peddle unashamedly in racism, posting a video depicting the first Black president and his first lady as monkeys.

He can send a masked paramilitary into the streets of Minneapolis, resulting in Americans getting killed for exercising their first amendment rights. And when the polls for November’s midterm elections look challenging for him, he can prepare for another blitzkreig on the very foundations of American democracy: the ballot box.

There’s a paradox in all this. Many of the democratic norms that Trump is obliterating – take for example his destruction of the norm of Department of Justice independence in his persecution of his political opponents – were laid down in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

That’s the same Watergate scandal that was brought into the light by that pair of courageous reporters at a newspaper called the Washington Post.