After years of warnings about what Donald Trump would do if he returned to power, the president is dismantling institutions, warping law enforcement agencies, seeking retribution on his critics, treating undocumented immigrants with cruelty, imposing and threatening seismic tariffs, and openly musing about seizing foreign territories. The American experiment is convulsing before our eyes.

And yet, you wouldn't quite realize it from the tone of the news coverage.

Trump’s courts-based intimidation campaign against the press descends from handiwork of one of his most prominent Silicon Valley backers, venture capitalist and neo-reactionary ghoul Peter Thiel.

The brave few who stood up to the magnates of the Gilded Age came to mind this month, when Ann Telnaes, a Washington Post cartoonist, resigned over the paper’s refusal to publish a cartoon in which she skewered today’s titans of industry—­Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, among them.