What the Media Missed: Trump’s war on religion and tech bros battling
Presidents Day sure hits differently this year. The long weekend is supposed to celebrate the presidency and, in a bigger sense, our country’s long tradition of peacefully transferring power between political parties.
Instead, President Donald Trump kicked off the festivities by comparing himself to French dictator Napoleon and implying his illegal attempt to fire thousands of government employees is above the law.
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he posted on social media Saturday.
Yeah, the vibes are definitely off.
Trump’s historic war against government employees accelerated this week, though most of the nation’s major news outlets chose to focus instead on the sideshow in Congress, where Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard became the latest incompetents to win a federal paycheck.
The circus around Trump’s nominees has worked wonderfully as a smokescreen to mask his administration’s historic efforts to dissolve the Department of Education, a longtime conservative goal. That play worked so well that Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee to lead the department, didn’t face a single serious media interview this week. She’ll now coast into this week’s planned confirmation hearing having faced no serious press scrutiny.
What a mess. Let’s dive into two more big stories the mainstream media missed this week.
Trump’s war on religion
Millions of Republicans view Trump as a savior “anointed by God” to save the world from evil. But the faith leaders who lead some of the nation’s largest houses of worship disagree—and as Lisa Needham reports for Daily Kos, over two dozen Jewish and Christian religious groups are now suing Trump over his extreme immigration reforms.
Twenty-seven religious organizations—including the Mennonite Church, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Episcopal Church, the Latino Christian National Network, and North Carolina Council of Churches—allege that Trump’s order allowing ICE agents to raid churches violates those groups’ religious freedom. Ironically, the churches are suing for violations under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a law passed by Republicans with the intention of protecting houses of worship from Democrats. Go figure!
As Needham points out, “RFRA is a conservative fan favorite. Indeed, two powerhouse conservative legal organizations, the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Becket Fund, were founded after RFRA’s passage just to litigate religious freedom cases, usually for evangelical Christians.” Now that RFRA is being used to promote Christian inclusion, though, conservative media outlets have gone completely silent on the importance of religious freedom.
The speed and severity of Trump’s inhumane immigration orders has done something unexpected: united many of America’s mainstream Christian churches against the Republican Party for the first time in decades. As Christianity Today reports, faith leaders have never felt more divorced from the GOP’s national policies. That creates an opening for Democrats to begin building a new electoral coalition. Unfortunately for Democrats, the religious world’s huge political realignment hasn’t yet captured the interest of cable news’ editorial directors.
Battle of the tech bro billionaires
One advantage of having media industry CEOs on speed dial is that it becomes alarmingly easy to control what coverage even makes it to the headlines. That’s definitely the case for the latest feud between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his on-again, off-again friend Elon Musk. Musk initiated the brawl with his unsolicited, $97 billion offer to buy OpenAI out from under Altman. In the weeks since, the tech titans’ massive battle has quietly consumed both Washington and Silicon Valley.
Only the Wall Street Journal dedicated feature-length coverage to Musk and Altman’s battle to control the future of America’s AI industry, and would you believe they fumbled the ball completely? Instead of digging into the huge power Musk would amass by controlling OpenAI and its main product, ChatGPT, the Journal instead focused on the high drama of two rich dudes at war. The media can’t help but turn a fight over the future of American information security into one more piece of vapid horse race coverage.
Musk’s acquisition of OpenAI would make him undeniably the most powerful tech tycoon in the world. More importantly for Musk’s aims, it would also put him in charge of the world’s largest and best-funded generative AI platform at a time when disinformation and misinformation are major threats—and judging by Musk’s own Grok AI platform, priority No. 1 would involve shifting ChatGPT’s ideology sharply to the right and filling it with pro-Republican training data.
A healthy democracy could depend on federal regulators to investigate any potential sale of OpenAI to Musk. That’s not the case in this hollowed-out Trump administration, where Alex Samuels reports that Musk has amassed even more control of federal policymaking. Without safeguards like the Federal Trade Commission to keep Musk from using federal influence to bully his rivals into selling their businesses, it’s anyone’s guess who owns OpenAI by this time next year. If it’s Musk, get ready for a tidal wave of disinformation crashing onto Americans’ screens just in time for the 2026 midterms. Yeesh.
Campaign Action
