Vulture Capitalism Comes for Democracy

The playbook Trump and Musk are following to dismantle government resembles the one used to pick apart America’s newspapers.

(Composite / Photos: Shutterstock)

WE’RE GOING TO GET LEANER, hungrier, better, more efficient—everyone who has worked in a newsroom large or small has heard some version of this speech. I remember hearing a variation of it at my first newspaper job in 2010. I was just an intern there. A rookie who had no idea what all this meant. But I soon found out.

Over the next year at that paper—the Journal Star in my hometown of Peoria, Illinois—I watched a few veterans leave. The reporters and the editors around me constantly complained about the state of the paper, saying it was a shell of its former self. I struggled to understand what they were talking about—the newsroom still had a couple dozen people in it on any given day. I felt a jolt of energy each time I walked in. There was a dedicated reporter for each of the beats of city hall, courts, education, and law enforcement. Plus a few jacks-of-all-trades, some feature writers, a full stable of photo editors and photographers, two editors on the night desk, five or so men and women poring over copy, and a handful of page designers. And that was just the news side; on Friday nights, the newsroom swelled with sports reporters hunting for an empty desk to beat a midnight print deadline and get their stories on that night’s football games into the paper.

Today almost all of those people—those jobs—are gone. There are fourteen people left at the Journal Star, a newsroom that used to number well over a hundred back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Two-plus decades of budget cuts, buyouts, and layoffs seem to be nearing their inevitable endpoint.

And so it has gone across the country. As newspapers like the Journal Star have drastically shrunk, it’s not just the jobs going away. In many cities and towns, the downsizing or disappearance of newspapers has also meant the crumbling of a culture of community responsibility. Vital newspapers could strike fear into the hearts of elected officials and others who abused their power or harmed their fellow citizens. In some places, online alternative sources for local news and discussion have begun to pop up, but they have not come close to filling the political and civic vacuum left by the absence of newspapers.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the plight of America’s newspapers since Donald Trump returned to the presidency—and not because of the way some major newspapers have been yanked toward Trump-friendliness. No, I’ve been struck by something else. To anyone who has worked in a newsroom, the Trump administration’s dismantling of government—supposedly in the pursuit of cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse”—has a very familiar smell to it. It’s the stench of the kind of vulture capitalism that has demolished newsrooms across the country in a quest for greater revenue for shareholders.

The pattern looks like this: A private company acquires a family-owned newspaper and immediately starts looking for ways to maximize profits. Buyouts are offered, roles are consolidated, resources are cut. No one at the company asks the reporters and editors how all of this will affect the product—you know, the news—and the product predictably suffers. Fewer people buy the paper and subscribe online. Advertisers see the diminishing readership of the paper and its role in the community, and pull their ads accordingly. Fewer ads equals fewer employees on the business side, so some more money is saved there. By this point, the newspaper’s website has become a horrific eyesore overstuffed with the lowest kinds of junk ads intended to convert whatever clicks remain into a few dollars. Right around this point is also usually when the newsroom cuts come—and they are brutal. Whatever ability the already-struggling newsroom had to put out a good product is dealt a vicious blow. The cycle continues: The product continues to suffer, the citizens decide they don’t need the paper anymore, the newspaper fades further into obscurity and uselessness.

If the first part of this playbook sounds familiar, it might be because it’s what’s happening inside the federal government right now. Trump and Elon Musk—aided by a motley crew of unknowns and very online racist twentysomethings—are taking their chainsaws to the federal government. Waiting in the wings are Trump’s billionaire buddies—including thirteen in his administration—who are salivating at the prospect of government agencies being privatized and services being cut.

It’s America’s wealthiest—including presumably these Trump officials—who will reap the rewards of this privatization of government, partly in the form of the tax cuts that will disproportionately benefit them, partly because the dismantling of the regulatory state will allow their profits to soar. As labor laws are abused, pollution proliferates, and workers are impoverished, the rich will grow richer.

And what about the second part of the analogy—the part where my beloved hometown newspaper, where I wanted to spend my career taking down elected officials and everyday bad guys, dies? The federal government hasn’t died off, of course. But parts of it are being killed off. And if Trump and Musk and Russell Vought continue on their present course, more parts of the government will be rendered so ineffective as to be useless.

Again, recall that the alleged purpose of all this chainsaw work is to find “fraud, waste and abuse.” So far, they haven’t found a single dollar of fraud. And the waste and abuse they’ve been clamoring about has turned out just to be government agencies, programs, and spending that Trump, Musk, and Republicans simply don’t like.

This entire quest for “efficiency,” with inexperienced DOGEbros deputed into every department of government, resembles nothing so much as the scenes in which private equity men stand in newsrooms telling reporters and editors not just how to do their jobs but that by having fewer of them everything will be better and more “efficient.”

But it was in that newsroom back in Peoria, with its stained carpet, institutional knowledge, and gritty heart now fading into history, that I learned how simple this world can be: There is provable fact and there is everything else. All that other noise is spin—or bullshit, as a grizzled columnist might say.

The provable fact to keep in mind right now is that when you take something apart, even claiming you can improve it, there’s a good chance you’ll break it. Trump and Musk want to break the government as it now exists; they want to replace it with something else. That’s the final part of this analogy: What replaces a good newspaper? Corrupt politicians for one; a less informed community for another. What replaces good government? We’re about to find out, but I’m guessing it’s something like lots of cash for Trump, Musk, and their rich friends, and a worse outcome for everyday Americans.