Jen Psaki (1:59)
Trump is laying the groundwork. We all know this. We've all watched what he has been doing, and he has really upped his game in the last few days. He's laying the groundwork to undermine the validity of the midterm elections. Make absolutely no mistake about it. I mean, it's the same language he used in the lead up to the 2020 election, the same language he used to sow doubt in the outcome if he did not. And when he says. When you just heard him say if the elections are honest, he means if his party wins, that's what he means. And there's a simple and very obvious reason he's doing this, and it's because he's increasingly unpopular. He does not think he and his party can win on their own. And there's reason he thinks that, because a new Quinnipiac poll out today finds Trump's approval rating is now just 37. And that's three points down from where he was in that same poll just three weeks ago. On every single issue from the economy to immigration to foreign policy, Trump's approval rating continues to sink to new and deeper lows. And so Trump is doing what he has done his entire life. He is trying to lie and cheat his way out of it. He's denying that there is any way voters could reject the path that he and his party have put us on. And that's not just Trump's self delusion. It's an intentional strategy. And a crucial element of that strategy, a critical part of how he tries to lie his way out of unpopularity, is to try and make it so that his narrative is the only one. People here, that's his dream. That's what he wants to happen. And I don't just mean by being louder than his critics or by saying things that are more outlandish than his critics. Since taking office, Trump has done everything he can to cut off access to reliable information about his administration. He banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool. He killed all federal funding for public broadcasting. He shuttered the overseas offices of Voice of America News. He took control of the military news outlet Stars and Stripes. His minion over at the FCC has made mob like threats against broadcast networks that do any sort of critical coverage of his administration. He's threatened news organizations with lawsuits over their reporting, sometimes getting them to fork over millions of dollars that they could have spent on quality journalism. He's put new restrictions on Pentagon reporters, forcing the most legitimate press out of the building altogether and replaced them with right wing propagandists. And that's not to mention what he's done to the White House briefing room, which is make it Kremlin esque. His FBI has even taken the extreme step of raiding the home of a Washington Post reporter who happened to be very well sourced within the federal government that he's currently running. At every turn. He's tried to cut off the public's access to truth, to real fact based reporting about how he's running the country. What he desperately wants is for his warped version of the story to be the only thing out there unchallenged, unchecked, no one questioning it. And the thing is that all of the powerful people trying to get into his good graces know that, and many of them have been more than happy to help him do it. People like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who allow disinformation to spread like wildfire on the social media platforms they control. Or the executives at abc, Disney who gave Trump millions to settle a BS lawsuit with ABC News and pulled late night comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air before bowing to to public pressure to reverse the decision. Or billionaire father and son duo Larry and David Ellison, who took over CBS News, paid Trump millions to settle another BS lawsuit and then handed editorial control to a right wing apologist who had no experience running a major news organization and is somehow trying to run one of the most famous and most beloved news magazine shows in the country into the ground. They also canceled a beloved late night comedy show to silence comedian and Trump critic Stephen Colbert. And then there's this guy, the founder of Amazon and the fourth richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos. Now, in just the past week we've watched this man line the Trump family's pockets by spending $75 million on the Melania Trump documentary, which just asked Rotten Tomatoes is not doing so hot. Cozied up to Trump's secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for a photo op at his spare. There you can see that weird thing on your screen. And that was all before today when Jeff Bezos decided to gut one of America's most storied newspapers, a paper that made its name holding powerful presidents accountable. The Post laid off more than 300 journalists and about 30% of its total workforce. And the cuts reportedly affected all departments of the paper. We're still learning all the people impacted. Among the sections hit hardest were the paper's sports desk, its international desk, and even its Metro desk. Its Metro desk is, of course, the desk where Washington Post legends Woodward and Bernstein broke the Watergate story wide open. Now, among the journalists who lost their jobs today were the Post Cairo bureau chief, along with the paper's entire roster of Middle east reporters and editors. The Post also laid off its Ukraine correspondent, Lizzie Johnson, while she was still overseas reporting from a war zone in sub zero temperatures. That's where she learned that she was going to be laid off. And in a particularly galling mood, even though those are all galling moves, the Post also laid off the tech reporter who covers Jeff Bezos Co. Amazon for the paper. And here's the thing. Anyone who tells you that this was all just about the bottom line is wrong. That's not true. I mean, back in 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, the purchase price was less than 1% of his total net worth. Since then, his net worth has skyrocketed by about 10 times, from $25 billion to an estimated $260 billion. That's what makes him the fourth richest man on the planet. And just to give you a sense of how his spending priorities have changed, just consider that the price he paid to acquire the Washington Post back then was about half of what he spent to construct his big luxury superyacht. Half. As the New York Times Peter Baker points out, Bezos would have only had to spend what he makes in a single week, one week, to keep the Washington Post paper operating as usual for five more years. That's it. That's how rich the guy is. And while today's cuts at the Post have been portrayed as a decision to address declining readership, it was decisions made by Bezos and his leadership team that helped put the paper on that path. I mean, after Jeff Bezos decided to cancel the Washington Post editorial board's tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, a quarter of a million readers canceled their subscriptions. That is a lot. Despite that reaction from readers, Bezos and his leadership team continued their apparent effort to appease Trump. They thought that was a good idea and worked out well. 250,000 subscribers. Let's continue on this path. I mean, a year ago, in what many see as an attempt to placate the Trump administration, Bezos overhauled the Post's editorial board, narrowing editorial coverage to just two topics, free markets and. And personal liberties. Which I will say in retrospect is kind of ironic. I mean, since our tariff loving, authoritarian president has done his level best to destroy both of those things. And then when the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post journalist, Bezos stayed conspicuously silent. But of course, none of that would ever be enough to stop the good journalists at the Washington Post from doing their jobs and angering Trump in the process if needed. Because that's what good journalists are supposed to do. I mean, I spent more than 20 years answering reporter questions on campaigns in the State Department and over years at the White House under two presidents. And sometimes they made me mad. And I knew that when Washington Post reporters like Karen DeYoung or David Ignatius called about a national security scoop, or when I learned that Jeff Stein had gotten his hands on yet another internal policy memo somehow during the Biden administration, or. Or when Michael Scheer had gotten wind of a campaign strategy detail or campaign ad My life was about to become harder because it was news we weren't ready to have out there yet. But the point is, they were and remain excellent, hard hitting, well sourced reporters. That is what they do. Their jobs were never to make my life easier or to make a president of either party feel good about himself. And it certainly was never to make billionaires more money either. It was to report information to all of you. It was to bring to light what was happening inside of government and to hold to account the people leading them. Adults who work in presidential administrations, even when they are being criticized, even when they're annoyed or don't want to pick up the phone, are supposed to understand that, and most of them do. Adults who take it upon themselves to buy legacy media institutions are supposed to understand that. Jeff Bezos used to understand that, or at least he pretended to. Here he was talking about the role of journalism at a code conference just back in 2016.
