Trump’s MAGA is not engaging in democracy, they are destroying it

Donald Trump's war on free speech is not political discourse, it's a full-frontal assault on democracy, aided by cowardly media complicity, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

AMERICAN ABC’s suspension of comedian Jimmy Kimmel for offending President Trump is a dark day in American history. Trump is trashing the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protection for free speech that was once a pillar of American freedom and democracy.

Rather than stand up to Trump’s threats, cowardly major media corporations are capitulating to dictatorial pressure. The result is a free speech crisis, threatening the very existence of American democracy.

Let’s be clear, this crisis is not caused by “both sides”. It is not a symptom of polarisation. It is not the Left failing to be civil to the Right. It is a deliberate assault on democracy by Trump’s right-wing MAGA movement, a movement that finds democracy inconvenient in its quest for total, unchecked power.

The failure of mainstream media to appreciate that U.S. democracy is being deliberately undermined by Trump and his right-wing allies, and has been for the past decade, is helping to bolster Trump’s assault on democracy.

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Mainstream media’s failure has been exemplified in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder by New York Times writer Ezra Klein, saying:

‘You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practising politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.’

Klein was absolutely pilloried on BlueSky for this sensationally bad take. Hundreds of people pointed to Kirk’s hate-filled content, his bad faith lies, his attacks on minorities and vulnerable groups, and his monetisation of extremism, collectively asking if Klein really thought Kirk was a champion of “the right way to do politics”.

The core sentiment of this outrage was eloquently summarised by Mike Masnick in a piece titled, ‘The “Debate Me Bro” Grift: How Trolls Weaponised The Marketplace Of Ideas’.

Masnick argued Kirk was not doing politics the right way; he was:

‘...showing up armed with a string of logical fallacies, nonsense talking points and gotcha questions specifically designed to enrage inexperienced college students so he could generate viral social media clips of himself “owning the libs.”’

In a podcast made to defend his original statements, Klein dug in further, saying:

“Much of what I would describe as Kirk's worst moments were now just standard fair [sic] MAGA Republicanism. And the leader of MAGA Republicanism is the President of the United States... We are going to have to live here with each other, believing what we believe. Disagreeing in the ways we disagree.”

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Klein’s argument – incredibly – appears to be that the Left just have to accept that they believe different things than the hard-right MAGA movement. Even worse than that, since the MAGA movement has all the power, the Left basically just need to give up on opposing them and accept the White House is controlled by people who have used lies, hatred towards minorities, misogyny, and now, attacks on freedom of speech, to grow and maintain their power.

What Klein seems to be very simplistically arguing in a perfect exemplar of everything wrong with the mainstream media’s treatment of people like Trump and Kirk, is that there are only two ways to do politics.

The first is the wrong way, by waging political violence against your enemies, which, by the way, I’ve never heard a left-wing person advocate for, either before or after Kirk’s murder — a murder the Left had, as far as I can tell from available evidence, nothing to do with.

Or, the other way to do politics – the “right” way – is to just accept that the Left and the Right have a difference of opinion, and be civil in living alongside each other. The Left, apparently, should play nice with the Right while the Right destroy their freedom and democracy. The Left should apparently just sit down, be nice, and let their country be destroyed, their identities be undermined and their communities be torn apart.

This false binary of right and wrong politics ignores Trump’s assault on established ways of doing politics. Trump’s MAGA movement is not just doing politics wrong. This movement has deliberately undermined the U.S.’s entire system of democratic institutions that used to set standards and rules for how politics was done, has undermined truth, and has made America hateful and divided.

Obviously, the right way to do politics is not political violence. Nor has the Left ever advocated that it is. It is just as true that the right way to do politics is not the Trump MAGA way — a way that Kirk monetised to contribute to Trump’s power.

I’ll spell it out clearly. Hate is not debate. Lying is not debate. The radicalisation of Americans using White supremacy and Christian nationalism is not debate. Trump’s MAGA movement is not debating the Left. It is engaged in a war, an assault on truth, on respect, on tolerance, of equality, on freedom and now, on the freedom to complain about this assault.

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People like Klein and the rest of the mainstream media have failed every day of Trump’s decade-long assault on American democracy to adequately scrutinise him, to hold him to account and to raise the alarm on his anti-democratic agenda.

This failure is made clear by Klein seemingly believing, even in the eye of Trump’s blatant authoritarian push, that Americans are engaged in business-as-usual politicking, a politicking supposedly disrupted by the Kirk murder. By walking past the truth of Trump’s new reality, the mainstream media has helped legitimise and empower the Trump MAGA movement’s political rise.

The new era of American politics is not one where both sides need to be more civil, but rather is one where some on the Left are rightly fighting for their democracy and their freedom, while the Right destroys it on behalf of billionaires.

People standing up against Trump, or Kirk, in defending their country or even defending their personal right to exist, are not in a debating competition. Censorship of political views you disagree with is not debate. Trump’s toxic, corrosive way of doing politics is undermining American democracy; it is a right-wing problem, a problem every non-MAGA American and even some inside the movement, too, are victims of.

This is not an issue of both-sides. It is one side waging war on the other.

Klein and the rest of his mainstream media colleagues have never been brave enough to make this point. Their both-sideism, their knee-jerk desire to blame the Left either equally, or wholly, for the crisis of American democracy, and their cowardly failure to name the problem as right-wing, has been a cloak behind which Trump has used hate, lies and extremism to grow his power.

Ironically, this right-wing hate, lies and extremism is the leading cause of political violence in America. Yet, the U.S. is quickly moving towards a reality where its citizens no longer have the freedom to oppose Trump.

Trump is not engaging fairly in democratic debate. His movement is destroying it. Trump is working with a cowed mainstream media to ensure it is no longer considered safe to criticise this.