Listeners — not to mention people on our own staff — have been clamoring for me to get Barton Gellman back on the show. So I was glad to have him join us in our latest episode to break down how he and his colleagues at the Brennan Center, including the very serious participants in his war games, are responding to Donald Trump’s near-daily authoritarian power grabs.

One thing we didn’t have space for in the episode? Barton’s take on how journalism is faring in Trump Term II. 

“I think there's been a lot of really great accountability journalism being done, I really do,” Barton told me. 

I mentioned we’ve got a lot of journalists in our audience, and asked if there was a specific story that made him think Yes, more of that please!

“There's been a lot of very good stories about the human cost of the slashing and burning style of going after government programs. So you have, you know, Nick Kristof from the New York Times travels overseas and finds specific children who died because Trump had canceled a program.”

He also gave props to his former colleague Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic for his reporting on the now-infamous Signal group chat. One of the reasons Barton quit journalism last year was his disillusionment with how hard it’s become for stories to escape their publications’ bubbles. But the Signal story? That one busted out.

“The story broke through,” he told me. “It’s so remarkable that it's being talked about, you know, kind of across ideological ranges, that congressional hearings are being held about it, even though republicans control both houses of Congress. It sort of has forced itself into the public consciousness, and it has forced accountability on the government.” 

He thinks it could even be a real threat to Pete Hegseth’s hold on the defense secretary job.

Barton was not without critiques.

“There are times when journalists seem a little overwhelmed and unable to put things to the right context,” he said. “So the recent executive order in which Trump said that from now on in all elections, voters are gonna have to prove they’re citizens, was reported as if the president had just done something. And had just changed the rules. And those first stories, in my view, if I were running them, would've said that, ‘President Trump today purported to change election laws that he has no lawful authority to change.’ That was the story to me. Not that he had changed them, because he hasn't changed them.”

And Barton is not happy with his old employer — or at least its owner. 

“I'm very distressed at the behavior of Jeff Bezos at my old employer, The Washington Post,” he said. “I have seen the owners of large journalistic platforms caving into Trump in ways that have not yet trickled down into the newsroom, but that are very worrisome.”

I pointed out that while the Post’s news side may not have softened its coverage, Bezos’ choices have certainly led to the departures of like a gazillion great journalists. And that has changed the newsroom.

He agreed. 

“If I had still been there,” he said, “I might well have been one of them.”

A few things to listen to while we’re off this week.

Did you catch the interview the Times’ Lulu Garcia Navarro did with Megyn Kelly last week? No matter how you feel about the Times or Megyn Kelly, I thought it was an engrossing listen — especially hearing how clear-eyed MK is about her choices and the changing nature of news. So much of it resonated with things we’ve covered here lately — particularly our recent episodes about when reporters should say what they really think, and V Spehar’s approach to news on TikTok.

I even went and listened to Megyn Kelly debrief about the experience of doing the NYTimes interview… on her podcast, just afterward. It was a little meta, a little self-congratulatory, but also compelling… to get the 360 experience.

And last but certainly not least: our very own Neil Drumming — longtime This American Life producer and Serial producer, director of the movie Big Words, and the mind behind many of the ideas you hear on Question Everything — just dropped an album, Writing on Airplanes. 

It’s so good. Personal. Hilarious. Catchy. Confronting. It’s pretty much a memoir, in rhyme.

I hope you check it out.

(We’re off this week btw. But you may have noticed that we are trying to release episodes more frequently. Anyway, we’ll be back next Thursday.)

Brian