Seldom do editorials make the news. However, The Washington Post, following in the footsteps of The Los Angeles Times, has managed to accomplish that feat by not printing one. William Lewis, the paper’s publisher and chief executive officer, declared on Friday that “we are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” So much for democracy dying in darkness and all that. Lewis, an editorial import from Great Britain, created an instantaneous uproar with his decision.

Marty Baron, the former executive editor of the paper, deemed it “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” He went on to call the paper’s stand if that’s what it is, “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for its courage.” By that, he was, of course, referring to the paper’s determination to uncover the Watergate scandal in the face of multifarious threats from the Nixon administration. Robert Kagan, a prominent columnist for the paper, has resigned from it in protest.

The ostensible justification for abstaining from weighing in on the side of a candidate is that it connotes a kind of Olympian detachment. It’s apparently meant to suggest that the paper won’t soil itself by mixing itself up in the hurly-burly of politics. But this linguistic subterfuge won’t wash.

The fact that the owners of the Post and The Los Angeles Times, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, respectively, are billionaires has not escaped the attention of their critics, who see democracy as dying in the C-suite. Couple it with the news that Elon Musk, a staunch backer of Donald Trump’s third bid for the presidency, has been having secret conversations with Russian president Vladimir Putin, and you have the basis for a perfect storm of suspicion about oligarchs tending not to the public weal but to their own private pecuniary interests.

The Wall Street Journal, no critic of American capitalism, proffers the judgment that the “regular contacts between world’s richest man and America’s chief antagonist raise security concerns, topics include geopolitics, business and personal matters.” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson declared that an investigation into Musk’s dealings is imperative as SpaceX has access to top-secret information. “I don’t know that that story is true,” he said. “I think it should be investigated. If that story is true that there have been multiple conversations between Elon Musk and the president of Russia, then I think that would be concerning, particularly for NASA, for the Department of Defense, for some of the intelligence agencies.”

Meanwhile, a slew of former Trump administration officials emerged on Friday to support former chief of staff John Kelly, who called Trump a “fascist” earlier this week. “The revelations General Kelly brought forward are disturbing and shocking. But because we know Trump and have worked for and alongside him, we were sadly not surprised by what General Kelly had to say,” the letter declares. Its sentiments correspond with Vice President Kamala Harris’ attempts in the final weeks of the election to depict Trump as a unique threat to American democracy.

For his part, Trump is trying to reverse the charge. On Friday, he declared on X that he will be scrutinizing the 2024 election returns with forensic exactitude: “I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election. It was a Disgrace to our Nation!” If the Post’s capitulation to Trump is anything to go by, his threats are already working.

Jacob Heilbrunn is editor of The National Interest and is a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He has written on both foreign and domestic issues for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Reuters, Washington Monthly, and The Weekly Standard. He has also written for German publications such as Cicero, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Der Tagesspiegel. In 2008, his book They Knew They Were Right: the Rise of the Neocons was published by Doubleday. It was named one of the one hundred notable books of the year by The New York Times. He is the author of America Last: The Right’s Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators.

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