Washington Post Editor-at-Large Robert Kagan Resigns Over Paper’s Decision Not to Endorse Kamala Harris
By: Mediaite
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Washington Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned on Friday over the newspaper's decision not to endorse Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
While a number of staff are reportedly angry and considering exiting the paper over the decision, Kagan's resignation is particularly notable not just because of his standing at the publication, but because of his ties to Republican politics.
Kagan served as a speechwriter for Secretary of State George Shultz during the Reagan administration and as an advisor to Senator John McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign.
In 2016, he left the Republican party over its nomination of Trump as its standard bearer and endorsed Hillary Clinton. In November 2023, he published an expansive column in the Post under the headline "A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending."
"If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office," wrote Kagan at the time, lamenting that "we continue to drift toward dictatorship, still hoping for some intervention that will allow us to escape the consequences of our collective cowardice, our complacent, willful ignorance and, above all, our lack of any deep commitment to liberal democracy."
Earlier in the day, publisher and chief executive officer William Lewis announced that the Post would "not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election."
"We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don't see it that way," continued Lewis. "We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers' ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president."
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Trump has frightened newspapers into cowardice.
The Washington Post has endorsed a candidate in every one of the last 9 presidential elections. Why not this year? They fear retribution if Trump wins, its that simple.
This of course, destroys the myth that major media is against Trump.
This is all on Jeff Bezos of course, he is the one who forbade the endorsement.
Exactly
Or maybe it’s the owner’s preference.
His preference is directly related to wanting to stay on Trumps good side. The editorial board had already written the outline of an endorsement of Harris when Bezos stepped in. There is only one explanation for this.
LA Times owner did the same.
Likely more than one what with Amazon sniffing Donald's Tariff Tax.
Exactly
On Friday afternoon, the Washington Post announced that it would not be making an endorsement in the presidential race. After that, a number of things happened very quickly.
First, the paper’s former executive editor Marty Baron called the decision “cowardice.”
Second, at least one senior Post opinion writer resigned .
Third, it was leaked that the editor of the editorial page had already drafted the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris when publisher Will Lewis—who is a new hire, hailing from the Rupert Murdoch journalism tree—quashed it and then released a CYA statement about how the paper was “returning to its roots” of not endorsing candidates. The Post itself reported that the decision was made by the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Everything about this story feels like a tempest in a teapot, a boiling story about legacy media fretting over itself in the mirror.
It’s not.
It’s a situation analogous to what we saw in Russia in the early 2000s: We are witnessing the surrender of the American business community to Donald Trump.
No one cares about the Washington Post ’s presidential endorsement. It will not move a single vote. The only people who care about newspaper editorial page endorsements are newspaper editorial writers.
No one really cares all that much about the future of the Washington Post , either. I mean, I care about it, because I care about journalism and I respect the institution.
But this isn’t a journalism story. It’s a business story.
Following Trump’s 2016 victory, the Post leaned hard into its role as a guardian of democracy. This meant criticizing, and reporting aggressively on, Trump, who responded by threatening Bezos’s various business interests.
And that’s what this story is about: It’s about the most consequential American entrepreneur of his generation signaling his submission to Trump—and the message that sends to every other corporation and business leader in the country. In the world.
Killing this editorial says, If Jeff Bezos has to be nice to Trump, then so do you. Keep your nose clean, bub.
We have seen this movie before.
The year was 2003, and the scene was Russia, where Vladimir Putin, still in his first term as president, had not yet let the mask slip.
Putin was carefully consolidating power and he realized that the same oligarchs who had supported him initially were also a source of danger. Their money and control of important industries—especially the media—gave them independent bases of power. And every autocrat knows that dictatorship only works when his subjects understand that the only power they may have is the power he grants them.
At the time, Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the wealthiest man in Russia. He controlled Yukos, a massive oil company he cobbled together from formerly state-owned assets. He had the kind of wealth and power that made him untouchable, and he started making noises about getting more involved in politics—maybe even running for office.
So Putin had him arrested.
You may not remember this, but the Khodorkovsky case was a major piece of international news at the time. In the West, people weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Khodorkovsky’s people waged an aggressive PR campaign on his behalf claiming that his arrest was politically motivated and that Putin was becoming a thug.
Putin’s side portrayed it as an anti-corruption move, since Khodorkovsky was no angel.
Here in the West, we were all still giddy over glasnost and the end of the Cold War. We didn’t want to believe that Russia might be plunging back into authoritarianism. So people mostly took a wait-and-see approach.
But the Russians understood.
Khodorkovsky was convicted and sent to a labor camp in the Russian Far East while the government confiscated Yukos and redistributed it to Putin’s cronies. Khodorkovsky’s money, his power, his connections—none of it could protect him from Vladimir Putin.
The rest of the oligarchs got the message. If Putin could get to Khodorkovsky, he could get to anybody .
And so the oligarchs fell in line and ceased to be a source of concern to Putin. Instead of alternative power centers, they became vassals.
Which is exactly what Jeff Bezos has just taught Jamie Dimon and every other important American businessman.
These guys can hear the music. They’ve seen the sides being chosen: Elon Musk and Peter Theil assembling with Trump’s gangster government in waiting. They see Mark Zuckerberg praising Trump as a “badass .” And now they see Bezos getting in line, too.
What’s remarkable is that Trump didn’t have to arrest Bezos to secure his compliance. Trump didn’t even have to win the election. Just the fact that he has an even-money chance to become president was threat enough.
Or maybe that’s not remarkable. One of Timothy Snyder’s rules for resisting authoritarians is that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” People surrender preemptively much more often than you might expect.
Two weeks ago, Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter wrote what might be the most prophetic essay of the year. They warned about “anticipatory obedience” in the media.
Seventeen days later, Bezos made his demonstration.
In case you needed reminding: The “guardrails” aren’t guardrails. They’re people.
And they’re already collapsing. Before a single state has been called.
No one cares what the Post thinks outside of progressives who think the Post has some moral authority, which means they are all already voting for Harris. Newspaper endorsements are utterly meaningless, and endorsements from explicitly partisan papers even more so. The Post has spent 10 years leading the anti-Trump charge, progressives should be happy the Post embarrassed itself so many times on behalf of their causes.
Newspapers that want to have some creedence outside their own bubble probably should not be endorsing candidates anyway. Because when a paper just reflexively endorses the Democrat election after election, it loses any credibility that its independent of the party. If nothing else, this is a tiny first step for the Post to regain some of the institutional credability its pissed away.
Major newspapers write editorials 365 days a year. But you think they shouldn't about a presidential election? Bezos wants to insulate his business interests from Trumps wrath should he win.
Trump will undoubtedly tout this as an endorsement of him. He said as much as that after the LA Times did not endorse the other day.
I don't really care whether they do or not. But when papers becomes such obvious partisan mouthpieces that a party feels they have a proprietary right to an endorsement, the whole concept becomes completely meaningless.
It is a business and becoming a platform that caters only to the extreme left of the population like 90% of the other media, it isn't a very smart business.
Do you think that Trump will get additional votes do to this lack of an endorsement?
Trump, considering the tsunami of personal unethical (to say the least) behavior he has indulged in, has always been treated with kid gloves by the mainstream media. The truth is the media doesnt give a damn who the president is as long as the stories about it sell papers , get ratings, and sell advertising.