The War on Reality: NPR, PBS, and the Machinery of Control
Trump’s attack on public media isn’t a distraction, it’s a warning. And it’s only the beginning.
Trump’s attack on public media isn’t a distraction, it’s a warning. And it’s only the beginning.
In the dead of night, with the flourish of an executive order and a flurry of Truth Social posts denouncing “radical left monsters,” Donald Trump declared war on public media. He ordered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cease federal funding for NPR and PBS, accusing them of ideological bias and failing to serve the American people. It was, as PBS President Paula Kerger flatly put it, a “blatantly unlawful” move.
In Trump’s America, lawful is just another word for inconvenient.
This has nothing to do with money. Congress already appropriated CPB’s funding through 2027 in bipartisan legislation. And it certainly wasn’t about saving taxpayers, the cost of federal support for public media is barely half a billion dollars a year, or roughly the price of a single Pentagon accounting error. No, this was something else entirely: a loyalty purge. A calculated effort to silence independent journalism and reroute the American narrative through partisan fire hoses. It is, unmistakably, the latest and loudest echo of a much bigger plan: Project 2025.
Many Americans have heard of it, but still may not realize how much of it is already unfolding beneath their feet.
Project 2025, a 920-page manifesto engineered by the Heritage Foundation and over seventy other far-right organizations, is not just a policy roadmap; it’s a war plan. A deliberate, detailed attempt to take apart the federal government as we’ve known it since the end of World War II, and reassemble it in the image of a single man. The swamp, in this vision, isn’t drained, it’s restocked, with political loyalists who owe everything to Trump and nothing to the Constitution.
The document lays out an aggressive timetable. Day One begins not with measured reform, but with conquest. Trump loyalists, pre-screened and pre-vetted, are to be installed across every federal agency. Civil service protections? Dismantled. Independent oversight? Gutted. Departments that resist, like Education, Justice, Energy, and EPA, are to be restructured, defunded, or deleted entirely.
It’s already happening. Within his first weeks back in office, Trump reimposed Schedule F, a buried bureaucratic mechanism revived to fire federal employees deemed insufficiently loyal. Thousands are now vulnerable to removal, judges, analysts, climate scientists, financial regulators, and people whose only crime is believing that facts should not serve a political master.
Public broadcasting is just the latest canary in the authoritarian coal mine. Alongside the executive order to cut funding came investigations, FCC reviews, probes into NPR’s underwriting language, and accusations of ideological bias stretching back to social media posts from former employees. It’s the same playbook seen at universities, in the arts, and within scientific institutions: accuse, isolate, defund, replace.
The administration is moving quickly to erase the quorum at CPB by firing board members mid-term. Without a quorum, CPB can’t authorize funds, sign grants, or defend its independence. This tactic, death by dysfunction, is also being trialed at the FTC, the Department of Labor, and elsewhere. Paralysis, not policy, becomes the endgame.
If that sounds familiar, it should. This is a blueprint that turns democracy into performance art, rule of law into rubber-stamped theatre. In the world of Project 2025, “freedom” is the word on the front door, even as journalists, immigrants, scientists, and dissenters are shoved out the back.
The goals are dressed in euphemisms, efficiency, accountability, constitutional order, but the underlying vision is clear. In this vision, the president does not govern by consensus or law. He governs by decree. Regulatory protections are not debated; they are scrapped. Public education becomes ideological training. The military enforces immigration law. Courts are circumvented. The press is “fake.” The facts are fungible.
And the people? They are not citizens. They are spectators. Or worse, targets.
This is why the order to defund NPR and PBS matters, not because of the dollars at stake, but because of what’s being hollowed out: public memory. These are the institutions that carried news through wars, delivered science to rural classrooms, brought classical music to tribal lands, and emergency warnings to forgotten valleys. To Trump and the architects of Project 2025, that kind of independent reach is intolerable. It’s not propaganda. It’s dangerous because it means Americans might still hear a story that wasn’t approved by the palace.
And the rot is spreading far beyond the media. Even inside the federal judiciary, a system traditionally deferential to the executive branch, the alarm bells are now deafening. Federal judges are openly stating, on the record, that they no longer trust the Department of Justice under Trump. Why? Because Trump’s DOJ, helmed by loyalists like Pam Bondi, Emil Bove, and Todd Blanche, isn’t just twisting the law. It’s weaponizing it.
Take the recent incident at Columbia University. In a grotesque perversion of the Civil Rights Division’s mission, DOJ officials targeted a student group protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza. Federal prosecutors, acting on orders from Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal attorney turned DOJ hatchet man, attempted to secure a search warrant for the group’s Instagram account. The goal? Surveillance. Possibly deportation, and certainly intimidation.
When the request reached Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn, she said no. There was no probable cause. But the DOJ didn’t stop. They appealed the denial because in Trump’s world, judicial rulings are obstacles to be overturned, not respected.
So Netburn did something extraordinary: she ordered that any future request must come with a full courtroom transcript, word-for-word, to prevent DOJ attorneys from twisting or misrepresenting what transpired. Her message was unambiguous: I don’t trust you. Not your words, not your intentions, and most definitely, not your ethics.
This is not isolated. From Maryland to Manhattan, federal judges have been warning, sometimes in open court, that Trump’s DOJ is no longer a credible actor. In the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, Judge Paula Xinis is on the brink of holding the administration in contempt. Other judges have demanded court reporters be present for every hearing, because the government’s own attorneys can’t be counted on to accurately recount what’s said.
Just think about it, the judicial branch of the United States now requires extra documentation to protect itself from the Department of Justice.
This is what erosion looks like. Not a bomb, but a rot. Not an overthrow, but an undermining. What Project 2025 proposes is not the destruction of institutions by force; it’s their co-option, their slow repurposing, until what’s left is only the façade of governance. A press that praises. A DOJ that prosecutes the president’s enemies. A civil service purged of dissenters. And a court system neutered, unless it serves the cause.
And so when Trump defunds PBS or declares that NPR is “radical,” it isn’t a budget issue, it’s a precedent. He’s showing us what comes next. Not just the suppression of independent journalism, but the collapse of institutional legitimacy. The goal isn’t just to silence critics. It’s to make no one believe anything, not the news, not the courts, not the facts.
What Trump and his enablers seek isn’t just a second or third term. It’s a second constitution, unwritten, unbound, and unaccountable.
And if we’re not careful, we’ll be left with only the state-approved version of events, broadcast on whatever’s left of the airwaves, while the real story, our story, disappears into the archives.