This day of Trumpist darkness and violence told us something awful about our future
I grew up in Pittsburgh. When I was a kid, my father brought home the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette every evening. He carried it under his arm as he walked into the house, and handed it to me. He knew, even at a young age, I was enthralled by the news.
I spread it out on the living room floor and read about the world. I learned how a free press reported about democracy, how the stories were always grounded in facts. I never imagined that one day I’d be lucky enough to write, on occasion, for that paper.
I also never imagined I’d live to see the day it went dark. My hometown is without a newspaper.
The news that the Post-Gazette is closing isn’t just personally heartbreaking. It’s chilling. Because media outlets don’t vanish in isolation. They disappear alongside something else, something far more dangerous. When the press goes dark, democracy surely follows.
Astonishingly, it seems that the press and American democracy are folding almost simultaneously, withering and suffocating together.
On Wednesday, the confluence of this darkness came into horrifying focus. We watched a venerable American newspaper shut its doors while the country absorbed acts of authoritarian violence, deception and hegemony, any one of which would have dominated the national conversation at any other time.
Instead, they competed with one another for dwindling space and attention. The last of the grand finale fireworks of democracy descending, leaving a blackened sky.
As the media shrinks, power grows more reckless. Across the country, ICE agents are being sent into cities, to detain people without transparency, without accountability, often without cause.
Yesterday, that recklessness turned lethal. Agents opened fire on an innocent woman as she drove through her neighborhood in Minneapolis. Witnesses said she was warning others ICE was nearby. Early reports and video made clear she posed no threat. She was trying to protect her neighbors.
As she pulled away from the aggressive agents attempting to enter her car, she was shot at, at least twice, and died. Her airbag soaked with the blood of tyranny.
And yet, almost immediately, the President of the United States declared, without evidence, that the agents acted in self-defense. The Secretary of Homeland Security, dressed up in a cowboy hat, lacking seriousness or law enforcement background, quickly echoed the claim. She said the woman "attempted to run [the agents] over and rammed them with her vehicle.”
It was a lie. They were both lies. Lies told in the face of video evidence. Lies delivered reflexively, because this administration has learned it no longer needs to wait for facts. The untrue narrative materializes instantly, corrections never follow.
This is what happens when there are fewer reporters to ask hard questions, fewer editors to slow the spin, fewer institutions left to insist on truth before being subsumed in falsity. Fewer newspapers to report the facts.
As if this weren’t enough, political talk shows were debating whether Donald Trump might invade, forcibly take over or buy Greenland, against the will of its people. It is territory governed by Denmark, one of America’s closest allies.
These conversations were treated as policy discussions, and yes, they came with warnings about the danger of such action. But imperialism pertaining to the U.S. government was being hashed-out in the U.S. media. And, our allies in Europe were intertwining imperialism and the United States in the same menacing sentence.
Over the weekend, Americans got a crash course on what all this means when the U.S. invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president. Now we’re openly entertaining the seizure of land from a NATO ally. The implications are bewildering.
In Trump’s first term the theft of Greenland was bandied about as a joke. No more. Trump will carry through on his commination because he feels emboldened. Seizing Greenland will fracture NATO, and shatter alliances that have defined global stability for eight decades.
It will recast the U.S. not as a defender of democratic norms, but as a predator willing to discard them.
Any one of these stories — the death of a major newspaper, state agents killing a civilian, a president lying about it, open talk of territorial conquest — would once have been a five-alarm fire. Yesterday they arrived all at once. And because they arrived together, none fully broke through.
Democracy doesn’t usually collapse in a single coup or one dramatic announcement. It erodes when its guardrails fail concurrently, when the press dries up, when violence becomes routine, when truth is wiped away, and when despotic ambition is discussed without shame.
It erodes when citizens are forced to absorb too much horror at once, until outrage gives way to exhaustion. We are watching that erosion in real time.
America once prided itself on a free and vibrant press that restrained power, on law enforcement meant to protect rather than terrorize, on leaders who valued democratic ideals abroad. Today, newspapers disappear. Armed agents patrol cities like occupying forces. And the language of conquest replaces the language of freedom.
When the lights of democracy go out completely, when there is no newspaper to hand to the next child in Pittsburgh, and when accountability disappears, who will be left to tell us what’s being done in our name?
- John Casey was most recently Senior Editor, The Advocate, and is a freelance opinion and feature story writer. Previously, he was a Capitol Hill press secretary, and spent 25 years in media and public relations in NYC. He is the co-author of LOVE: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality (Rizzoli, 2025), named by Oprah in her "Best 25 of 2025.”