When it comes to democracy, the press is not under attack. It's on the attack.

By Gary Abernathy

If the military ever rebelled against Trump, it’s clear which side our far-left media — aka the TDS Party — would take

If the unthinkable happened and the U.S. military ever rebelled against our civilian leadership (i.e. the president), which side would the mainstream media take?

Frighteningly, it’s becoming clear that as long as Donald Trump is in the White House and Republicans control Congress, the media would line up behind the uniforms, tanks and weaponry of the military over the current civilian U.S. leadership.

To be clear, there’s no real reason to think such a rebellion or coup is on the horizon, and as a conservative I hold to the belief that, at least privately, most military members approve of President Trump and the direction he and Pete Hegseth want to take the military and the nation.

But the possibility of top military leaders making conscious decisions to oppose their commander-in-chief was already demonstrated back in January of 2021, when Gen. Mark Milley, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, colluded with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to ignore potential orders from Trump, who was still president. More on that in a minute.

Ever since Trump won reelection and Hegseth became defense secretary — now secretary of war — the far-left (formerly mainstream) media has worked to undermine Hegseth and highlight supposed complaints from career military officers who allegedly have a problem with Hegseth’s leadership and vision.

The far-left media’s agenda was made crystal clear when Hegseth called an all-hands-on-deck meeting of the country’s top military leaders, including most generals and admirals. Story after story highlighted military officials griping about the meeting and about the Trump administration. We’ll check out some examples in a minute.

From News Media to TDS Party

The media endlessly complains about Trump’s accusations against them and their bias, even calling them attacks on democracy and the First Amendment. But a greater actual threat to democracy is the far-left ideological takeover by activists of what was formerly the mainstream media.

Yes, for years the mainstream media was dominated by left-leaning journalists. That’s nothing new. But in the years since Trump’s first candidacy and subsequent presidency, the various entities that make up the mainstream media have morphed completely from left-leaning journalists to full-blown far-left ideologues and activists.

As I’ve noted before, the main opposition to Trump and the GOP is not the Democratic Party, which is diminished beyond recovery. The main opposition to the Republican Party is the far-left (formerly mainstream) media, which should simply be labeled what it has become — a new political movement which can be called the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) Party.

To be sure, there are still good journalists at work across the nation, a handful even hanging on at formerly mainstream media outlets. But they mostly work in small and midsize markets, toiling away to report news using traditional standards of being unbiased, fair, balanced and detached. But by and large, the major “mainstream” publications can no longer make such claims.

This development would be merely annoying if it just meant that stories were negative and insulting toward Trump, his voters, conservatives and Republicans in general. We could all live with that (as we long have).

But the development is more than annoying. It is dangerous for democracy. That fact has been made clear in the coverage of the gathering this week of high-ranking military officials to hear from Trump and Hegseth.

First, let’s clearly identify who we mean by the former mainstream media, aka the TDS Party. While many other outlets may qualify, these are the ones that have outsized influences on the country in general (and sometimes the world). They are:

• The New York Times

• The Washington Post

• The Associated Press

• Gannett (USA Today and many other regional newspapers)

• NBC

• ABC

• CBS

• MSNBC (Soon MSNOW)

• CNN

I do not include PBS on this list for a couple of reasons, one being my personal affection for public television and the modest role I played on the “PBS NewsHour” in recent years. But the main reason is that while PBS is certainly left-leaning in its news coverage, its format is more respectful and subdued and typically allows for more in-depth conversations and meaningful opportunities for conservatives to at least make their case than are permitted in the alarmist “everything is breaking news” short soundbite formats of the typical cable news outlets.

Also not included in the list above are admittedly far-left outlets such as the Daily Kos, The Intercept and others — platforms that make no pretense of being anything other than far-left, Trump-hating entities. Unlike the traditional outlets listed above, they don’t pretend to be fair or balanced, and they have relatively little influence outside their small bubbles.

TDS Party is Not Journalism

As a proud longtime journalist, I used to hesitate to engage in sustained criticism of other journalists. But when it comes to the former “mainstream media” outlets bullet-pointed above, it’s OK to rid ourselves of any guilt or hesitation in calling them out as the political movements they have become. They are partisan, far-left political organizations populated for the most part by radical activists masquerading as journalists. They are an affront to actual journalism. To identify them as what they have become is not to criticize journalism. The TDS Party and actual journalism have nothing in common.

Despite their diminished print reach compared to just a couple of decades ago, the New York Times and Washington Post continue to set the agenda for most other news outlets. Stories that appear first thing in the morning in the NYT and WaPo tend to be magnified and repeated by other media throughout the day, even including conservative outlets such as Fox News. And the Associated Press, by virtue of the number of news clients that subscribe to the AP services, is just as influential in its own right.

Fox News boasts that it is cable’s No. 1 news station. That is true. But the average viewership of Fox News during the day is about 2 million, and in primetime about 3 to 3.5 million. Another 15-25 million unique visitors check out the foxnews.com website each day. Meanwhile, estimates put the moderately conservative Wall Street Journal at about 10 million unique visitors per day.

Compare all that to the liberal broadcast networks. The combined viewership of the 6:30 p.m. nightly news broadcasts on NBC, ABC and CBS is roughly 16 to 19 million viewers. That’s not counting the morning programs or other news programming from the broadcast giants.

Meanwhile, the combined digital reach of the New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press and Gannett (based on available public information) is roughly 20 to 40 million unique readers per day. Let’s split the difference and call it 30 million.

There are a couple of smaller conservative cable stations, and, of course, there are sites like National Review, the Daily Wire, Breitbart, The Federalist etc., on the conservative side of the ledger. And talk radio continues to be dominated by the right.

But there is no combination of right-leaning outlets that comes close to matching the daily overall societal influence of the TDS Party, starting with the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press, coupled with the broadcast and liberal cable networks.

Media Cheered Military Resistance

Over the years — until Trump — there was no doubt that if a serious rift developed between the U.S. military and our elected civilian leaders, the media would side with preserving democracy over a military coup. But the far-left media’s hatred for Trump and the Trump administration is so pronounced that if the military resisted orders from Trump, the TDS Party would almost certainly side with the military.

As mentioned earlier, this was made crystal clear as far back as January 2021, when said media lionized then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for conspiring to ignore orders they feared might come from Trump, the duly elected president.

As TDS Party affiliate CNN reported at the time, “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told House Democrats in a letter on Friday that she spoke with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley to discuss President Donald Trump and the nuclear codes, as Democrats call for the President to be removed from office after a violent pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol.”

The story noted that “after speaking with Milley Friday, Pelosi told her caucus that she has gotten assurances there are safeguards in place in the event Trump wants to launch a nuclear weapon, according to multiple sources on a caucus call.”

In other words, the speaker of the House and the top military general conspired to make sure that any orders from the president that they did not like would be ignored — a shocking admission that the far-left media treated as entirely appropriate and even praiseworthy.

Think about it. The stated worry — “without evidence” as the far-left media likes to say these days — was that Trump was an “unhinged” president who might order a reckless nuclear strike. American voters, keep in mind, trusted this same president with their vote and reelected him in 2024.

Fast forward to this week’s meeting of U.S. military leaders. From the time the meeting was announced, the TDS Party went out of its way to sow discord and division about the gathering.

The Washington Post: “The directive (to attend the meeting) comes in the wake of Hegseth’s firing of numerous senior military officers without cause, upending military norms and creating a culture of fear in the Pentagon, the people familiar with the matter said.”

Creating a culture of fear in the Pentagon?

“Some Pentagon officials questioned the wisdom of launching a relatively large gathering on short notice to hear Hegseth speak for a matter of minutes, and bristled at the idea that long-serving military leaders — a segment of whom spent years in combat earlier in their careers — needed instruction on how to fight. ‘They don’t need a talk from Secretary Hegseth on the warrior ethos,’ a defense official said.”

What defense official said that? We don’t know, since he or she was granted anonymity, of course.

The New York Times: “Mr. Hegseth and other top administration officials have not disclosed a rationale for the meeting, not even to the officers who have been summoned from all over the world. The secrecy has caused anxiety among the military’s top ranks at a time when Mr. Hegseth has fired several senior generals and admirals, many of them people of color and women.”

If merely being called to a meeting causes anxiety among our generals and admirals, we need new generals and admirals.

“One general said he had received ‘no info whatsoever’ and had been told to just be there.”

Exactly. What’s the problem? When generals give orders to their subordinates, do they have to explain themselves? No, nor does the president or the secretary of defense/war need to explain himself to the generals who serve under him.

Then there was this from the same story: “In a social media post on Friday, Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who is retired from the Army, compared the gathering to a ‘surprise assembly’ in 1935 at which German generals were ‘required to swear a personal oath’ to the Nazis and Adolf Hitler.”

There you have the real message the TDS Party desperately wanted to impart. The Trump administration, by calling a meeting of military leaders, was behaving like Nazis.

In fact, the meeting came and went without requiring any personal oaths to Trump, Hegseth, MAGA, the Republican Party or anyone or anything other than the United States and the Constitution, but who’s keeping track? Not the TDS Party, to be sure.

Coverage of the actual meeting resulted in similarly derisive stories. How dare Trump and Hegseth inconvenience these generals and admirals! How presumptuous of them to “lecture” these men and women in uniform!

The New York Times: Trump gave “a rambling and sometimes incoherent speech...” Trump and Hegseth both offered “more criticism of the military, which Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth complained had, under their predecessors, become distracted by political correctness.”

And this: “Even before the event was finished, former military officials were criticizing the president’s and Mr. Hegseth’s remarks. “I couldn’t be prouder of our highest-ranking leaders for maintaining an apolitical face under immense pressure,” said retired Army Maj. General Paul D. Eaton, who served in the Iraq war.

“He added, ‘Pete Hegseth spent millions to fly in all of our generals and admirals to rant about facial hair and brag about how many pull-ups he can do, and have Donald Trump sleepwalk through a list of partisan gripes.’”

The Associated Press: “The fact that admirals and generals from conflict zones were summoned for a lecture on race and gender in the military showed the extent to which the country’s culture wars have become a front-and-center agenda item for Hegseth’s Pentagon, even at a time of broad national security concerns across the globe.”

Civilian Command is Sacrosanct

No matter how irritated generals and admirals might get, no matter how silly they consider the orders or directives of their civilian overseers (and again, I don’t concede that those are the prevailing sentiments of the military; they are the sentiments the TDS Party wanted to convey), civilian command of the military is one of the most sacrosanct principles of U.S. democracy — reaffirmed time and again throughout history. Let’s take a refresher course:

“The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the King of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior... it would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first general and admiral.” — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 69, 1788.

“The fact that there is a civilian head of the Army and Navy and Air Force is unquestioned. There can be no question about the President’s authority as Commander in Chief. The Army is not a separate entity; it is subject to the orders of the President and to the policies of the Congress.” — Gen. George C. Marshall, WWII Army Chief of Staff, 1945.

“In the United States the people have set up their government as a republic. The President is the Commander in Chief... That is the way we run things here.” — President Harry Truman, 1947 (in regard to his clash with Gen. Douglas MacArthur).

“Civilian control is not one among many possible principles of civil-military relations; it is the essential principle.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State, 1957.

As drastic as such a scenario would be, it would be better to follow the command of a president ordering a nuclear strike than for a general to step in to prevent such a lawful action. The short-term effect might be a few more days or weeks without nuclear war, but the long-term impact would be a nation finding itself under military command — just the kind of martial law leading to dictatorship that the left claims to worry about.

There are illegal orders a president could theoretically give that the military could and should ignore. But nothing Trump has suggested would fall under that category. From using the military to police our cities (sadly made necessary by liberal mayors or governors who have allowed crime to spiral out of control) to potentially sending troops to Mexico to fight drug cartels, the legality of such orders might become test cases in court, but nothing rises to the threshold of being so obviously illegal that the military could decide on its own to ignore it.

And yet. that’s exactly what some are suggesting. For instance, a Democrat congressional candidate and Army veteran from Illinois recently produced a video suggesting that the military should refuse Trump’s order to send troops to Portland. He says following such orders could be comparable to committing war crimes. Which side do you think the TDS Party would take?

‘Seven Days in May’

And yet, starting with the Pelosi-Milley incident in 2021, and continuing through Trump’s reelection and Hegseth’s appointment, the TDS Party has churned out alarmist story after story painting Trump as dangerous. Recent stories abound quoting mostly anonymous sources complaining about the direction Trump and Hegseth want to take the military, citing “worries,” “concerns,” “anxiety” etc. whether in regard to troop patrols in U.S. cities or Trump’s threats to use the military for the war on drugs.

A famous scenario describing a military coup was laid out in the novel and movie of the early 1960s, “Seven Days in May.” The plot centers on the Joint Chiefs of Staff hatching a coup against a president with low public approval ratings. “Disguised as a training exercise, a secret army unit known as ECOMCON, training at a secret Texas base, will take control of the country’s telephone, radio, and television networks while the president, participating in a staged ‘alert,’ is seized.”

In the plot, the military commanders believe they are doing the right thing. They think, according to the story, that the president is weak and is not properly standing up to the Soviet Union, even preparing to sign a nuclear disarmament treaty.

What if top military leaders forged an alliance and announced that they considered Trump, Hegseth and others in the administration to be reckless, or dangerous, or in violation of the Constitution, and felt compelled to ignore the orders of their commander-in-chief? Based on the reporting on Trump and the military which is published for all to see, which side would today’s far-left (formerly mainstream) media take? Is that really a hard question to answer? If it came to pass, the support of the former mainstream media outlets would help legitimize such a rebellion in the eyes of many Americans.

The TDS Party platform is focused on supporting LGBTQ and "trans” rights, protecting abortion, belittling Bible-believing Christians, promoting the religion of climate change, ushering in an age of socialism to replace capitalism, and severely curtailing Americans’ Second Amendment rights. But the most important issue for the TDS Party is defending the entrenched bureaucracy, a bureaucracy heavily populated by like-minded liberals devoted to protecting their own livelihoods and turf.

In other words, the TDS Party positions itself on the opposite side of Trump on every issue. They report endlessly on his low approval ratings, every day producing stories featuring anonymous sources from inside the government expressing fears about Trump’s actions on various issues. They compare Trump to Hitler and describe his intentions in the most apocalyptic terms.

The TDS Party has at its fingertips a propaganda network built from the traditional print, broadcast, cable and digital platforms of its predecessors when they — once upon a time — served as legitimate news agencies. They have inherited or acquired the previously respected names (New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, etc.) and publish their propaganda under those banners.

Most Americans recognize the difference and acknowledge what the former mainstream media has become. But the TDS Party retains enough power and influence to effectively wage a political war — more effectively than the Democratic Party, to be sure.

The damage done by a radical left political movement masquerading as journalism must be called out for what it is — including by real journalists. The charade must be acknowledged and condemned. It is no longer just political rhetoric to call the daily output from the TDS Party what it has finally, indisputably become — not only fake news, but a danger to democracy.