My latest piece from the Nieman Reports

The Trump administration’s penchant for secrecy is not a media issue; it is a democracy issue. And that makes it the weak spot in Trump’s otherwise successful jihad against American journalism.

Ponder this irony: A political movement driven by populist fervor is now aggressively shutting the public out of the business of government. The proclivity for concealment extends from White House briefings to federal agencies to Congress’s taste for hiding the legislative process from the prying eyes of taxpayers.

Alex Jones, the conspiracy trafficker who runs the website Infowars, believes that Sept. 11 was an “inside job” and that the massacre of children at Sandy Hook was faked. These are cruel falsehoods that most people don’t want to confront on broadcast television. Megyn Kelly’s decision to interview him, for a show to air Sunday night,has been roundly criticized by people who suggest that we would be better off denying this fringe extremist exposure.

Indeed, when Mr. Jones was merely a marginal figure on the paranoid right, the case could plausibly be made that he was better left in obscurity. But now that, at least according to Mr. Jones, the president of the United States has praised him and thanked him for the role he played in his election victory, it’s too late to make that argument. We can’t keep ignoring the fringe. We have to expose it.
 

This last year was just this really soul‑crushing, disillusioning slog for me, because I really did think I understood what the conservative movement was about. In Wisconsin, we had a very robust conservative movement, a lot of success, and I really thought that this was a movement based on concepts of freedom and individual liberty, small government, constitutionalism. When Trump came along, I kept expecting that the conservative movement would stand up and say, “This is exactly what we aren’t.”