OPINION
August 15, 2026
ALTERNET
Dear Mainstream Media,
Please sit down and shut up, while I have a word with you.
Today in America, tired, desperate sailors are jumping off aircraft carriers, masked government agents armed with guns and cattle prods are murdering and caging innocent people, proverbial and real wrecking balls are battering our government offices and landmarks; our national parks are being mauled by bulldozers, our air and water is intentionally being poisoned, and our endangered wildlife is being slaughtered; life-saving vaccines are being shelved, while measles are making a comeback, science is under mass attack, wars and more wars are cropping up with no end in sight, OUR so-called Justice Department, aided and abetted by a bought-and-paid-for Radical Right Supreme Court is torching the rule of law, while protecting the very worst among us; voting rights are being assaulted right out in the open, a money-laundering operation is underway in OUR White House, bigotry and more bigotry is being heaped upon our children, and the torrent of lies coming from that White House is drowning out what is left of the truth.
Oh, and everything costs too much in America these days. EVERYTHING.
So let me stop there, while my keyboard cools, my readers wipe the sweat from their worried brows, and I ask you this:
WHY can’t you take a day off — JUST ONE STINKING DAY — from your sheer incompetence and report these things, and JUST THESE THINGS? It is absolutely staggering what the good people of America are being forced to endure on an hourly basis right now.
Are you even living in the same country we are???
We are a nation under siege by an authoritarian regime with the most powerful — albeit abused — military in the world, and it is almost impossible to see how we survive it unless everybody is clear-eyed about what we are up against.
That is your job.
How is it the most serious homegrown attack on America since the Civil War STILL isn’t grabbing every headline, every day???
Because here’s the thing, you self-important clowns, if this attack continues apace, we are done. Those are the stakes right now.
If your job is to report on the stories that most affect your readership, listeners and viewers (it is), how is it that this attack isn’t getting every bit of your attention?
What in God’s name are you talking about in your editorial meetings each day?
And I don’t need to hear breathless reporting about what Democrats are doing or aren’t doing right now (that is merely a sidebar), only what has been done by the most lawless administration (regime) in American history by far.
Go ahead, point to one administration that is even remotely comparable to this one. They are battering America into dust. And they aren’t apologizing for it, they are doubling down on it.
WHEN will you, our free press, provide the necessary situational awareness and information our citizenry so desperately needs, so that they can properly arm themselves against an authoritarian monster, who doesn't give a damn about them?
And if you are already trying to dismiss this as nothing but a scalding rant from an old, cranky newspaperman who needs more sleep, go right ahead, but I am right about all of this, and you would do well to listen to it, because millions of people out there are scared to death, and have been waiting years for these things to be said.
So what the hell is wrong with you?
Are you really being paid off by the regime to ignore this story?
Is it greed?
Do they own you?
Are you scared? Is that it, you’re scared …?
Are you simply incompetent, and don’t know how to prosecute journalism, and how to order and play stories based on importance?
My God, it has gotten so bad, just weeks ago you were actually wining and dining the guy who wants to end you.
Do you see how terrible that looks?
You are coming off right now as pathetic failures, and slobbering all over a profession many of us gave our lives to.
You need to get it together right now — RIGHT NOW, because we are out of time.
Donald Trump is a rotting, sick old man who can’t even stay awake anymore. He’s exhausted to the point where he isn’t even pretending to care about the country and people he is openly raping each day.
His only remaining goal in what remains of his miserable, destructive life is to make as much money as he can, and destroy everything and everybody around him, who won’t help him do it.
I want you to read that again, too, because it is indisputable that this is what is happening right now.
Are you going to report this at all — much less with the urgency it demands? Because if Joe Biden or Barack Obama, our ANY president in America’s history, had pulled this, you’d be reporting it as a national emergency, and you’d be right to do so.
You’d be calling for their immediate removal.
It would be 24/7 news, because there isn’t a bigger story than this man’s attack on America.
Trump is a sick, rabid dog who when not spending his waking hours counting his money, playing golf and hiding in food trucks, is marking his territory all over Washington. What is happening at the Kennedy Center right now is just obscenely demented.
Who does this?
Dictators, that’s who.
Are you going to start calling him one, or are you hellbent on tucking the word “president” in front of the name of this ignorant, stupid man, who I guarantee you has never read the Bill of the Rights, and couldn’t name more than a handful of Amendments in our Constitution.
He is literally attacking museums, and rewriting our history right out in the open.
Hell, it’s gotten so bad that this sickly old man has even given up on caring what he looks like. I mean he used to shove his ugly face in the oven each morning, so it got that certain orange sheen he likes, and made sure the dead ferret on his head was puffed up just so.
Now he just looks like his mother shortly before her death. Are you seeing this? He looks absolutely ridiculous.
His health is abysmal. You know that, right?
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His ankles are grotesquely swollen, his little, chubby black and blue hands look like they are going to fall off his wrists, and he spends more time at the hospital than an emergency room nurse.
If you think I am being petty right now, go back and read what you were saying about Joe Biden, particularly in the wake of his debate performance. Trump gives these types of performances DAILY.
And at the end of each day of his pontificating, lying, attacking, and taking whatever he can, he heads off to his empty bedroom in the White House where guys like Marco Rubio, JD Vance and Stephen Miller towel him off, so he can be alone with his happy meal and nuclear-powered cell phone, and type absolutely insane things to the world that barely even get a mention by you guys anymore, because you’ve made the editorial decision to normalize it.
And speaking of normalizing … why aren’t you spending time holding the feckless, abhorrent, mouth-breathing Republicans to account for their cover of all this treason, because at the end of the day, that is what it is.
It’s that bad in America right now, and we won’t survive two more years of this. I assure you that many of the people reading this often wonder if we will survive two more hours of it.
The traitor, Trump, has only been in power for 19 months, has 29 to go, and for anybody who truly loves their country, it is almost impossible to process. The damage he has done has already been catastrophic.
This means the opposition better have one humdinger of an election in November that Trump will most assuredly continue to attack, or the next 29 months might as well be the next 290 months, because America as we used to know it — a decent but flawed place — will be long gone, and replaced by something you’d see in Moscow, which was probably the plan all along.
And still I read things that insinuate that both parties are basically the same, while you do your stupid horse race thing. Here’s where I really want to grab you, and shake you until your eyeballs rattle.
I’ll be the first to tell you, and have, that the Democratic Party is flawed, and hasn’t done enough in their own right, to fight off this attack. But they have never openly attacked our country and done this kind of damage. Quite the opposite, in fact. Every good thing that has come along in my long lifetime is thanks to those hapless Democrats, who actually fix economies and don’t break them.
Go ahead, look that up. Then do something crazy like report it.
Democrats fight for people’s rights, instead of attacking them.
You need to start doing your damn jobs, MSM. If you need more suggestions, call me. I’d be glad to talk, and if necessary slap some sense into you, because right now I’d fire 80 percent of you if I could.
To those of you who are doing the good work, thank you. To the rest of you who are quietly working away for chump change in our local communities and keeping an eye on the town hall, the schools and the ball fields, you rock. I’ve been there, and you are doing vitally important work.
To the rest of you so-called journalists suffocating the news inside our Beltway, stop being so pathetic, and start doing your damn jobs.
Because if you don’t, when this teetering country falls, there will only be one word left to describe you: COMPLICIT.
D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.
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