Missing the story

Trump is trying to jail opposition party members; the media are talking about Biden

Rep. LaMonica McIver outside ICE detention facility

Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it was charging Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) with “assaulting, impeding or interfering with law enforcement” following her appearance outside an ICE detention center in Newark. Needless to say, an administration seeking to arrest an elected member of the opposition party — not for fraud or campaign finance violations but for protest — is a major five-alarm fire for democracy. The major national newspapers gave this story the proper attention:

Front pages, 5/20/25

Ha, no, that’s not what happened at all. In fact, in the five papers shown above, only the Wall Street Journal mentioned the charges against McIver on the front page, in a short blurb at lower left. Three of the papers mentioned the “controversy” and “raised questions” about the health of the man who left the White House four months ago today.

In fairness, all five papers discussed the current Republican spending bill in Congress, which is both important (affecting social safety net programs for many years to come) and dynamic (it may or may not survive a House vote this week). Other stories mentioned — the resignation of CBS News’ chief, the Supreme Court allowing Trump to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants, violent storms in Kentucky, etc. — are legitimately important and affect many people’s lives.

The coverage of Joe Biden’s health, however, remains a massive misprioritization, as it has for several years now. To be sure, it’s notable when a former president reveals a cancer diagnosis. But pretty much no one covered it that way. The cancer diagnosis was folded into the existing framework of Biden not being forthcoming about his declining health while he was president, of the White House “covering up” Biden’s condition, and this somehow being related to the Democrats’ loss to Donald Trump last November.

The prostate cancer diagnosis “generated more questions than answers,” said the Los Angeles Times. The Washington Post’s story was about how the diagnosis was encouraging evidence-free conspiracy theories from the right. The Wall Street Journal’s article (not on the front page) refers to “continued questions about the former president’s cognitive abilities in office.” Yet it quotes just one Democrat arguing that the party should nominate people for president who are under retirement age (which it did last year) and one who is angry at the Biden White House. It also quotes Vice President J.D. Vance. The New York Times’ story (also not front page) quoted just one former Democratic elected official (Dean Phillips, who challenged Biden for the nomination last year), and also quoted oncologist Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm’s brother), who claims that Biden “did not develop [prostate cancer] in the last 100 to 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency in 2021.” And hey, he’s the oncologist, but I’m guessing he’s examined Biden as many times as I have.

Here’s another pretty rough look at the day’s news. According to Google News, in the 24 hours between Sunday and Monday morning, there were this many results from United States sources for the following news searches:

• “Qatar jet”: 4,660

• “LaMonica McIver”: 9,910

• “Republican spending bill”: 30,900

• “Medicaid”: 130,000

• “Biden health”: 12,800,000

Now, it is certainly true that we haven’t even seen the paperwork on a McIver charge (although nor is there a great deal of detail on the GOP spending bill), but I’d argue that the McIver story is one of the most, if not the most, important story of the day. It’s about whether we still live in a democracy. As Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt argued last week,

How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy.

Under authoritarianism, by contrast, opposition comes with a price. Citizens and organizations that run afoul of the government become targets of a range of punitive measures: Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.

When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.

What the Trump administration is doing to Rep. McIver is arguably the clearest evidence yet that American democracy is waning, that the current system is at best a form of competitive authoritarianism, and that what Bruce Springsteen said over the weekend was correct.

Obviously the media perceive some market demand for conspiratorial stories about Biden’s health, and far less of one for the threatened arrest of a member of Congress. But this level of mismatch between ink and importance is beyond absurd.