The top story of the moment is the one story that our most influential newsrooms won’t touch: That the United State has become an authoritarian state.
At some point, the evidence becomes overwhelming — and we have reached that point. The frog in the metaphorical pot of water has boiled to death.

Armed soldiers patrol the streets of the nation’s capital, with more cities apparently to come. Immigrants who have done nobody any harm are abducted and disappeared by masked agents. The state is seizing stakes of national companies. Election integrity is under attack. Political opponents are targeted with criminal probes. Federal judges’ orders are ignored. Educational institutions are extorted into obedience. Key functions of the government are politicized and degraded. Expertise and science are devalued. Trump speaks of serving an unconstitutional third term. Media organizations are paying tribute to the ruler.

Most significantly, perhaps, there are no guardrails anymore. No one inside the executive branch will tell Trump no. No one in in the ruling party in Congress will tell him no. The right-wing majority of the Supreme Court won’t tell him no.

And our dominant media institutions won’t call him out. Rather, they obscure reality under a haze of incremental stories, each one presented as if what is going on is fairly normal. As if it’s just politics. Every outrage is just one more thing Trump has done, rather than the ever-mounting evidence of a corrupt dictatorship. The coverage is a play-by-play as the burners click upward, rather than a check to see if the frog is still alive, which it is not.