By Steven V. Roberts

When the megarich owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times spiked editorials endorsing Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, cold shivers and hot anger swept through the ranks of their editors and reporters. Staffers protested that their bosses were hedging their bets, anticipating a Trump victory and protecting their wider business interests against a man who punishes his enemies with vicious vindictiveness. 

“It’s a sort of preemptive bending of the knee to who they may think is the probable winner,” said Robert Kagan, explaining why he resigned as a Post columnist. Kagan directly criticized the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who started Amazon and also owns Blue Origin, an aerospace company with a $3.4 billion government contract.

“This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory,” Kagan told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “Trump has threatened to go after Bezos’ business. Bezos runs one of the largest companies in America. … They depend on the federal government.”

Bending knees is the very last thing a free press should be doing on the eve of a momentous presidential election. Whoever wins — Trump or Harris — should be covered with vigilance, persistence and courage.

This is especially true if Trump triumphs, because he has proven countless times that he lies with impunity, never corrects himself and never apologizes. The Post, in fact, has documented that Trump told “30,573 untruths during his presidency — averaging about 21 erroneous claims a day.”

The ominous precedent set up by the two papers and their queasy owners goes far beyond the media’s traditional role as watchdog and truth-teller. If Trump wins a second term, he has openly vowed to undermine democracy, to be a dictator on Day 1, to purge what he calls “the enemy within,” to eliminate any person or institution that thwarts his pursuit of power.

This is not Democratic propaganda. It comes from Trump himself, and from people who served in his administration and observed him closely, like retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” the general told author Bob Woodward. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”

Another former general, John F. Kelly, Trump’s second White House chief of staff, recently told The New York Times: “Certainly the former president is in the far-right area, he’s certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators — he has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.” 

After Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, his refusal to accept defeat fueled increasingly desperate attempts to overturn the results and subvert the system. He failed because so many officials and institutions stood up to him, including Republican governors in Georgia and Arizona, state legislators and election monitors, federal judges (including many he’d appointed), and his own vice president, Mike Pence, who now refuses to endorse him.

Writing in the Post, Bezos insists there was no “quid pro quo” from Trump in exchange for killing the endorsement of Harris, but there doesn’t have to be. In his 2017 book “On Tyranny,” historian Timothy Snyder describes the concept of “anticipatory obedience” and writes that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”

“In times like these,” Snyder observed, “individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.” 

What’s particularly alarming about Bezos’ cave-in is that the Post has a noble history of standing up to power, defying the Nixon administration when it tried to bar publication of the Pentagon Papers and cover up the Watergate scandal. 

The reporters who broke the Watergate story, Woodward and Carl Bernstein, recently issued a statement stressing that the decision not to endorse Harris “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners),” asserted former Post executive editor Martin Baron. “History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

This is not a time for knee-bending or spinelessness. Every individual and institution that stands for democracy and the rule of law — journalists and judges, attorneys and legislators, vote casters and vote counters — must be ready for the battle that almost certainly looms ahead.

Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at stevecokie@gmail.com.