For all his flaws, may we find our inner Thomas Jefferson again.

Our Founders didn’t imagine a democracy based solely on the consent of the governed — they wanted the informed consent of the governed. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786, “our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

The sad demise of the Washington Post shows that supine billionaires like the pathetically bulked-up Jeff Bezos don’t even need Trump to threaten them — they’ll do his bidding out of crass self-interest. Transparency begone.

It would mean not attacking legitimate, truth-seeking journalists as enemies of the people.

Real transparency would mean not firing inspectors general throughout the government. It would mean not suing legitimate news outlets for libel and using the threat of retribution to get these outlets to settle — as it did with ABC and is doing with CBS.

But in normalizing far-right propaganda sheets and digital pamphleteers as if they are the equivalent of trained journalists, Trump knows exactly what he is doing — using them to push his narrative in a media ecosystem that is so fragmented that only the biggest and loudest voices break through.

at the expense of legitimate journalists whose access he’s trying to limit, among them AP, NPR, Reuters, the New York Times, Politico, NBC News, and CNN.

To achieve his control of the media narrative, his team has decided to welcome right-wing podcasters, influencers, and media such as Newsmax and the Daily Caller into the White House and administration press rooms —

Trump has long understood that politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from media and information, and if he can control the media narrative, he can then shape the culture which will give him more bandwidth to dominate the politics.

Flooding the zone with soundbites, he hopes that will leave a resource-starved press scurrying to report every one of his impulses and little time to pull the curtain away from what he and his wingman, Elon Musk, are doing to government and the nation.

Let’s call it for what it is, strategic and cynical public relations. What Trump wants is a media hungry for news that will serve as a stenographer for whatever comes out of his mouth every day — rather than a journalism that investigates, uncovers, and pursues the truth.

Don’t believe it. Their use of “transparency” is Orwellian doublespeak.

Regardless of what one might think of Trump, you have to acknowledge his genius in dominating the news and driving the narrative. But answering press questions has nothing to do with transparency.

So when the White House boasts that President Trump has taken more than a thousand questions from reporters during his first month in office — as compared to Biden’s 141 and Obama’s 161 — they then claim that theirs is the “most transparent” presidency in history.