Small-Time Authoritarian Models Donald's Journalist-Attacking Modus Operandi

Uses Courts to Pervert Justice, Seek Revenge For Stories He Doesn't Like

Donald has cowed white glove law firms, extorted universities, brought tech bros to their knobby nerdy knees and neutered an entire class of feckless Republicans.

But the toughest gang to wrangle to the ground and manipulate are journalists, even of late those who work for Fox News, CBS (now FoxNews lite) and other second-rate right-wing outlets that exist as a klaxon for Donald’s whatever-he-said-last agenda.

The scourge of Minneapolis has become a problem for the inhabitants of MAGA-land whose comments this week shifted from murdered ICU nurse Alex Pretti was a gun-wielding domestic terrorist to maybe we shouldn’t be executing people in cold blood in American cities because it’s a bad look, Donald, and you know, it’s going to shellack us in the November midterms.

But it’s also put journalists to the test because we all have eyeballs and so do they. The gruesome, looping videos of Donald’s Gestapo pushing a woman to the ground, pepper spraying Alex Pretti, tackling him and pummeling him with the spray can, holding his hands behind him while he’s prone on the icy sidewalk, then shooting 10 bullets into his back, are not debatable. Some of what this last week has shown is that Donald has not and probably never will be able to round us all up, force us into lockstep, and have us behave obediently while he and his parasitic, billionaire cronies rape and pillage the country financially, morally, and spiritually. Certainly, the foot soldiers on Minneapolis’s freezing frontline have shown how far ordinary American-loving patriots are willing to go and how much they are willing to risk, to protect our constitutional rights.

Real journalists who have chosen this tough and often dangerous profession for the right reasons have a preternatural alignment with truth telling. Those who’ve made a long, and not especially profitable career at doing this kind of work, have traded in the perks of cushier and better paying jobs and pensions because somewhere along the way we have felt called upon to give voice to the voiceless, to tell stories, to inform people, to hold the powerful accountable, and to propagate the truth.

Today’s upside to the submission and partial collapse of corporate media is that freewheeling, free-thinking journalists have the tools they need, like Substack and podcasts and local hyper media sites like mine, to do the hard work newspapers and mainstream news channels once valued. There is no Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite anymore, and there never will be. While the danger of fragmented media can be that we live in silos that reinforce our views, there is enough cross-pollination between right, left and everything-in-between media to occasionally reach consensus on some things, like the shooting of Alex Pretti. Right-wing media found themselves with little choice but to call it as the whole world was able to see it, and I’m secretly hoping they felt the thrill of truth-telling, once again, or maybe for the first time. There is something inexplicably rewarding about reporting the plain truth, and secondarily, putting it into context for a greater audience. At its essence, that’s what good journalists do.

But tinpot authoritarians don’t like good journalists, and they flex their muscles when they have a subservient kakistocracy around them to do their dirty work. Donald has tried so hard – suing the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, breaking into the home of a Washington Post reporter to seize her computers, phone, and Apple Watch. He’s tried name calling – hello Piggy – and belittling (especially women journalists), chair shuffling among the White House Press corps, and yet he cannot suppress the daily deluge of news that pours out and exposes the delinquency of his kleptocracy. This is one flood Donald cannot dam.

Which brings me back to a suburb north of New York City where a small-time autocrat is looking to the White House for instruction on how to intimidate and undermine a journalist. Yes, I’m that journalist and I’m going to share this story because it’s emblematic of the age we are living in and how the toxicity trickles down to small communities. Bent politicians have always found ways to exploit power and misuse their offices but this story smacks of Donald-dom.

In a previous column, I wrote about a company called BusPatrol, which partners with municipalities to equip school buses with cameras that snag motorists who drive by after the bus’s arm is extended and the lights are flashing. Problem is, as I learned personally, the program is plagued with technical problems, tons of tickets are dismissed, many tickets are issued in “hot spots” where motorists simply can’t stop because they are driving at speeds that would make doing so dangerous but where the tickets rack up.

Late last year, I went to court to contest a ticket for an alleged violation six months earlier. A county attorney told me the ticket would be dismissed before I even had a hearing. My journalist’s nose twitched when five other tickets were dismissed similarly. I dug in and began writing about the program – showing its fault lines – and reporting on other jurisdictions like Long Island, Florida and Pennsylvania, where others have been scrutinizing the program. The program, which hides behind the veneer of keeping children safe, raises money through steep $250 to $300 tickets, most of which BusPatrol keeps. Further research showed that in my district, 90 percent of contested tickets were dismissed in 2024.

Reporting on this topic has unhinged our frail, fragile, crawling to the finish line with a bottle in hand, I’m told, County Executive – though it’s not entirely clear why he’s gone to great length, including a massive social media trolling campaign and defensive word salad press releases nobody cares about, to fight back. Pulling pages from Donald’s playbook, he’s tried to smear our credibility and has repeatedly goaded me to “RELEASE THE TAPE.” He’s talking about the video BusPatrol collects before it’s sent to the County’s Sheriff for a determination of a violation. In my instance, I’d already passed the bus three seconds before the arm went down. In the County Executive’s telling on social media, I had passed the bus three seconds after the arm went down—though for the sake of drama that later morphed to five to six seconds.

All this was farcical enough – but was doing nothing to deter our continued coverage.

Then I got a FedEx-delivered letter saying the county was setting a date to re-hear the same violation that had been dismissed. Calling Pam Bondi. Drunk on Republican power drinks, the mini-me Donald figured dragging me back to court would set me right.

He’s so wrong. First, I will win my case in court. If the municipal court is bent, I will appeal the decision. I plan to write to Letitia James about this because she knows a little bit about malicious prosecution. I will continue reporting on BusPatrol.

But the best thing that happened this week was that a reader contacted me to say how grateful she was for our reporting, and that she’d received a BusPatrol ticket. Rather than pay the ticket, she planned to send the $250 to us as a donation.

And that’s why journalists stick at it. We know we’re going to bump up against corrupt officials but the public rewards us for delivering the truth.