Here’s How Truthout Is Preparing for Trump’s Day One

For months, Donald Trump issued terrifying promise after terrifying promise on the campaign trail: threatening to deploy the military in his mass deportation schemes, pledging to increase fossil fuel extraction, and vowing to issue a number of repressive policies targeting the most vulnerable people in our communities. He’s also promised to hit the ground running with a flurry of executive orders as soon as Inauguration Day comes around. Truthout has been preparing for this day, and the rest of his second term, by anticipating a broad range of possible scenarios under a second Trump administration that seeks to crack down on left and progressive civil space — including journalism outlets like ours.

In this conversation, Maya Schenwar, director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism and Truthout’s board president, and editor-in-chief Negin Owliaei talk about the threats to media and nonprofit organizations under Trump, the role and responsibility of independent journalism in increasingly repressive times, and how our editorial work can reflect the moment to come.

TRANSCRIPT

Maya Schenwar: Hi, everyone. I’m Maya Schenwar, Truthout’s board president and director of the Truthout Center for Grassroots Journalism. And I’m here with Negin Owliaei, Truthout’s editor-in-chief, to discuss Truthout’s future during the second Trump presidency.

And it’s clear to all of us at this point that the United States is on a precipice. And although we know a lot about the MAGA agenda, we also recognize that there are a lot of unknowns about how the next four years and beyond will play out. So those of us in left and progressive journalism are really needing to prepare for a constellation of possible scenarios in anticipation of the immediate future.

And I’m thinking about how in 2016, even though Truthout has long covered fascist movements and fascist strains in U.S. politics, we had to scramble to adjust and meet that moment after Trump won the 2016 election. But of course, back then, we had the Trump administration’s own lack of preparedness on our side. And this time around, the strategists and the interests driving the Trump administration have been preparing for a long time, and signs indicate that they will hit the ground running.

And Negin, I’m so grateful that you’re Truthout’s editor-in-chief right now, and you have been setting this team up to hit the ground running as well. So in what ways is Truthout preparing for the second Trump administration?

Negin Owliaei: So thank you, Maya. I feel so fortunate to be at Truthout in this moment. When we were preparing for the election, we knew that no matter what happened, the coming years were going to be difficult no matter what. So the situation’s already grim. We’ve watched a year of livestreamed genocide from Israel on Palestine. We’ve seen the fallout of the climate crisis in terms of the hurricanes this past fall. We’ve watched as billionaires continue to take over our public spheres. And Truthout’s just been covering all of this, day in and day out. And what we know is that a second Trump administration is just going to accelerate all of that with a speed that is truly terrifying.

So we have a few thoughts about how we can reflect that in our work. First of all, we’re looking to cover Trump’s attacks on the most vulnerable members of our communities with the urgency that they deserve. So I’ve been really proud of the work that Truthout has already put out there to prepare people for what’s to come when Trump takes office.

As you mentioned, we already know the kinds of flurries of executive decisions he’s going to be putting out on day one. There are a couple of pieces in particular that I’ve been really proud of, and that’s covering how active duty military can resist mass deportation orders. I think those have been so crucial, and we’re looking to do more of those kinds of work as the administration kicks off and begins.

And then more broadly, we see the Trump era as a large-scale attack on the idea of a public commons. And that includes everything from health care to social security to education, to something as basic as just the right to exist in public space and in public life. So we want to show what elements of these attacks are specific to Trump and his brand of politics, and we also want to look and see what’s coming back from this decades-old Republican consensus on austerity and how these two different kinds of branches reinforce each other, and then just wrap all of us up and bring everyone else down in this right-wing spiral. So we’ve already done some of that. We’ve looked at the roots of plans like Project 2025 from the Heritage Foundation, and what they might tell us about what’s to come.

And finally, we also want to highlight the people in places that have been resisting authoritarianism for a long time now, whether they’re in the U.S. or abroad. So the word unprecedented gets thrown about quite a lot. And, I mean, I know a lot of what we’re about to see will feel really unprecedented. But we also know the people around the world have been organizing in the most repressive of conditions for years, decades, you know, forever, really. And so I think it will be so crucial for us, in the immediate practical fact, to learn lessons from those different kinds of struggles and find points of solidarity, but then also to keep our own hope alive and see what’s possible.

MS: Absolutely. Yeah, I think looking at those histories of resistance and resisting ourselves, the tendency to kind of erase history in our work and kind of treat each moment as a new catastrophe entirely, i’s really important. And I think that’s particularly true since we are watching the signs of incoming, increased repression emerge all around us, including the repression of both journalism and nonprofit organizations. And Truthout is, of course, both of those things.

So we’re seeing H.R. 9495, the “nonprofit killer” bill. We’re seeing Trump’s choice of Kash Patel for FBI director. This is a person who said he’d “come after” the media. And of course, that’s alongside Trump’s own very vocal desire for retaliation against journalists. And we’re also seeing right-wing think tanks making publicly viewable plans to shut down a wide range of progressive and left organizations, as you and I wrote about together. So how are you viewing and approaching the threat to media organizations, including Truthout, and what that means for us and for the country more broadly?

NO: So I won’t sugarcoat it. It’s definitely scary. And as you said, history has an important role to play here. So I think we need to remember that the right’s rhetoric towards both the media and the progressive space has been heightening for years, and that’s really concerning, I think, for, as you mentioned, those of us who are at the nexus of those two things.

We know what the purpose of this is, and it’s to try to get us to be quiet. So one of the ideas behind these threats, and let me be real, they are very real threats. But one of the ideas is also to push us to self-censor out of fear. So they hope that we’ll just stop, you know, they’ll hope we’ll stop standing up for Palestinian liberation. They hope that we’ll stop covering trans rights, that we’ll start tiptoeing around the different demands of the new Trump administration, that we won’t hold the wealthy and powerful to account, and we won’t investigate them.

And I want to be clear that Truthout is not going to do that. We’re going to keep publishing the important and accurate news that’s in the public interest, as we’ve always continued to do.

But what it does mean is that we need to be much more prepared than ever before, because we know that the right is more prepared than ever before, and they’re going to have all these different tools in their arsenal, and they’re going to throw the entire book at us in an attempt to censor us.

And just when you when you talk about that more broadly about what that means for the country, it’s certainly grim for anyone who depends on journalism, which is all of us. Because we can’t change what we don’t know. So as we’re preparing, I’ve been thinking so much back to the so-called “war on terror,” where we just saw how media acquiescence could be so devastating for everyone, in terms of U.S. militarism and in terms of just the degradation of civil liberties that we saw in the United States and around the world. So the stakes couldn’t be higher. And it’s not just for those of us in the media, it’s really for everyone.

MS: That’s so spot on. And it makes me think about some of the strains that you brought up earlier about active duty military resisting, people within all different parts of civil society resisting, and also us in the media having this responsibility to not acquiesce, that that’s an action in itself. And I’m thinking about when we say media, last time Trump was president and voiced his ire against the media, so many people leapt to the defense of The New York Times, Washington Post, other large corporate media institutions. I’m remembering this hashtag, I think it was #PressOn, where people were like, standing with The New York Times was an action in itself.

However, as we’ve witnessed on Palestine, on trans rights and economic and racial justice and much more, those corporate publications are not the vanguard of the kind of truthful reporting that can actually counter fascism. So what do you see as the purpose of independent media or movement media in these increasingly fascist times?

NO: Well, to bring it back to the slogans we heard during the first Trump administration, I always think of “democracy dies in darkness.” And it’s just like, what is darkness? What is democracy? Like some of these basic questions that I think movement media is on the front lines of providing answers for. And you mentioned acquiescence. We’re already seeing some of these bigger corporate outlets, how they might cozy up to Trump, with things like, for one example, the bias meters that the billionaire-owned LA Times has announced, that they’re going to be powered by artificial intelligence, and running alongside their stories.

So what do we lose when we let billionaires buy up news outlets, decide what counts as bias, how stories should be covered? And, you know, to the question of democracy, like, how do we think questions of economic democracy are going to change when it’s the wealthy that are setting the agenda?

So, as you mentioned, no one who’s reading the news from some of these larger outlets, they’re not going to get necessarily the full picture about, you know, Palestine or trans rights or any of these other questions. And so to me, that’s where independent media and movement media really comes in. Because I think what we do is we look at what we do as a question of service, like how can we be of service given this corporate media landscape.

So for us at Truthout, I think that comes to shining a light on some stories that the other media outlets might overlook or warp, it’s finding the different footholds and tactics that we can make use of under increasingly repressive times in order to fight back against that repression. And to me, it also just all comes back down to solidarity, because movement media can highlight the different struggles against authoritarianism in every level, everywhere. And part of that is because we see ourselves as part of the communities that we’re reporting on. We’re members of those communities. You know, we’re not giving some like faux objective view from above we’re part of an ecosystem that’s trying to build a better world.

And so there are definitely challenges that come to being independent, especially in this time of repression. But we’re also fortunate that we don’t feel the need to bow down to any kind of corporate sponsorship. And our readers remind us every day that we’re not alone in what we do, because Truthout’s work relies on just thousands of people that can keep our work sustainable.

MS: That’s the key. Thank you for naming that. Our Truthout community, including everyone watching this conversation, makes our work possible. And during this time when we have to resource up in order to face down the coming threats, we are grateful for anything that our readers can contribute. And we’re also grateful for your readership, your engagement, your participation, and your belief in a better future. We need each other. So thank you for existing and for being part of this growing movement.