The vibe shift of Trump’s second term, summed up in one telling tagline

Democracy no longer dies in darkness, apparently. As far as the Washington Post seems concerned, it might very well lurch slowly toward the great beyond right in broad daylight.

According to the New York Times, the Post has adopted a new internal mission statement for the direction of its journalism: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.” It’s a far cry from the official slogan the newspaper adopted early in Donald Trump’s first term: the goth-tinged, pugilistic “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Although that slogan, drawing on the Post’s history of power-checking stories such as its Watergate exposé, will reportedly remain in print (for now), the new mission statement augurs a whole new trajectory. And not just for one newspaper either.

The Washington Post has been previewing just such a turn for months. Since owner Jeff Bezos quashed an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris in late October, the paper has shed at least a quarter-million subscribers and lost several marquee writers, including Josh Dawsey and Jennifer Rubin, along with Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who resigned after one of her political sketches was rejected. (The proposed sketch, which depicted Bezos kneeling before Trump, offering large sacks of money, later went viral on Telnaes’s Substack.) The change in the mission statement, a paean to false-togetherness with a dash of All Lives Matter-style equality, represents a broader shift than the Post’s editorial direction.

It’s evident in city streets, for instance, where the massive resistance following Trump’s election in 2016 is now largely absent. Protests erupted in New York and Washington, D.C., during the weekend after last fall’s election, but that energy has not been sustained. Nothing on the scale of the historic Women’s March in early 2017 appears in the works this time either. A People’s March is scheduled “in D.C. and elsewhere” for January 18, but even if it managed to draw anywhere near the nearly half a million people who flocked to D.C. in 2017, it’s doubtful it would grab much attention now.

Trump’s election in 2016 sent shock waves throughout the nation. He lost the popular vote by nearly three million, and so thoroughly bucked the traditional qualifications for a U.S. president, his coronation felt, to many, like an aberration. Many social media users, live performers, and even the leaders of some organizations seemed to operate from an adversarial position—the #Resistance—in part because Trump acted so antagonistic toward those who opposed him. At the time, animosity toward the president was loud, proud, and just about everywhere.

Not so much anymore.

This time, Trump not only enjoyed an electoral college victory but won the popular vote as well (by little more than two million). Most people who voted against him a third time now understand that their neighbors across the country, who also experienced the years 2017-2020 and everything that followed, decided they wanted Trump back. His presence in the White House is no longer an aberration. Judging from the deflated protest presence and the general vibe on social media, Trump’s critics either feel beaten down or they just know the drill by now. It may have felt bizarre in 2017 when the President of the United States made an enormous fuss about crowd size at his inauguration. This time, it’s just expected.

Several elected officials have reacted differently to Trump’s second election win than they did his first. As Politico reported in January 2017: “In legislative proposals, campaign promises, donor pitches, and even in some Senate hearings, Democrats have opted for a hard-line, give-no-quarter posture, a reflection of a seething party base that will have it no other way.” This time around, the opposition party seems chastened, adopting a less confrontational tone and professing a willingness to work together on “shared priorities.”

Beyond the general public and their representatives, the difference in the corporate response is even more pronounced this time. The CEO of Coca-Cola recently presented Trump with a commemorative Diet Coke bottle to welcome him back to power, a nod to Trump’s storied love of the beverage. Just four years ago, the company issued a statement describing January 6 as “an offense to the ideals of American democracy.” Its CEO has apparently since changed his mind. And he’s joined by a cavalcade of corporate overlords, many in Big Tech, who are donating big money to Trump’s inauguration fund. On the list, heads of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many others.

Among those who have loudly expressed their openness to Trump is Bezos, whose Amazon recently acquired a documentary about Melania Trump for $40 million. There’s also Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who recently made an Elon Musk-like pivot away from fact-checking on Facebook and has reportedly taken several meetings with Trump advisor Stephen Miller. Bezos and Zuckerberg were both vocal critics of Trump during his first term; now, they’re both joining him on the dais at his inauguration. (“Everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump has said of his new Big Tech supporters, though in his just-released inauguration photo, he does not look very friendly.)

And then there’s the press. Some corners of the media, which Trump has previously dubbed “the enemy of the people,” seem fearful of displeasing him now, where they once seemed determined to hold his feet to the fire. ABC News, for instance, agreed to donate $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit around anchor George Stephanopoulos’s use of the term “rape” in describing the case where Trump was found liable for sexual abuse. (Legal experts claim ABC could have won; instead, they opted to not even try.)

ABC’s acquiescence in December may have emboldened Trump to push further against the press. Days later, he then sued the Des Moines Register and its pollster Ann Selzer for “election interference.” Their misdeed? Releasing a poll that showed Trump losing Iowa. (He won the state handily.) Considering the deep pockets of Trump ally Elon Musk, whose distaste for the media is well-known, the president now has a war chest to potentially keep any media outlet of his choosing tied up in litigation throughout his second term and beyond.

Things just feel different now, and the Post’s new mission statement encapsulates it. “Riveting storytelling” is certainly something to strive for, but putting a fine point on “for all of America” seems defensive in its implicit promise of no bias. In fact, objective truth isn’t for one group or another, it just is what it is.

Plenty of other boutique news sources exist for All of America to find their particular worldview reflected back at them. It feels surreal for a news organization long known for deeply reported stories with real-world impact—about the U.S. government, specifically—to appear to cater to a fantasy of unity, no matter who the president is.

Perhaps the 2017 tagline, like a lot of media, entertainment, and conversation during that time, put a bit too much melodramatic elbow grease on a legitimate purpose. Still, it was a fairly accurate temperature reading of that moment.

The Washington Post’s new mission statement feels like it all too well captures this one. Roughly translated: “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.”