Brian: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. For 40 years, Ruth Marcus wrote about the Supreme Court and other things as a reporter, an editor, and an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. Now she writes for The New Yorker. We'll talk to Ruth Marcus now, mostly about two of her latest articles. One is on the Supreme Court's blockbuster decision on tariffs last week and the implications, not just for the cost of living, but also for American democracy, she says.

It's just the first big democracy case they'll rule on in this election year, by the way. We'll talk about Ruth's article this month about her former employer. It's a piece of fact-based journalism and a lament at the same time, following the recent layoff of around 300 people from The Washington Post newsroom staff. It's called, How Jeff Bezos Brought Down The Washington Post. Ruth, it's always good to have you on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Ruth: Thank you so much for having me. It's always nice to be here.

Brian: You know how we sometimes say when somebody dies, "It's good to see you. I'm sorry it's under these circumstances." It's kind of like that with respect to you and The Washington Post, right? Let's talk about that first, then we'll get to the tariffs ruling. Tell us the origin story. When and why did the owner of Amazon buy The Washington Post?

Ruth: Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, bought the Washington Post in 2013 from Donald Graham and the Graham family. The thinking and expectation at the time and the reason that the Grahams sold the crown jewel of not just their professional lives, but really of their family and motivation to Bezos was that the thinking was that he was not one of these venture capitalists that was going to strip it for parts, that he had the technological know-how and the financial wherewithal and the commitment to help turn around this business that was not going to be a going enterprise for the Graham's.

I always say we about The Washington Post because I can't stop myself. We were a publicly held company, and it just wasn't working that way anymore. Jeff Bezos came in, and I have to say he was a terrific, wonderful owner until suddenly he wasn't.

Brian: The Post already had revenue problems at that time. Why was that circa 2013?

Ruth: The Post had revenue problems, and the rest of the industry had revenue problems. There are two strands that weave together that create the tragedy of The Washington Post today. That sounds like a little bit of a hyperbolic word to use, but it really is a tragedy in part because it's an unnecessary tragedy, which I'll get to. Look, all of our journalism in various ways due to the glories of the internet that has allowed us to reach so many more millions of people so much more quickly, it also destroyed newspapers' business model.

Our classified advertising was gone. Our real estate advertising was gone. Our display advertising was gone. We at The Washington Post and in most other news organizations could not figure out the alternative, whether it was digital advertising or selling subscriptions, that would replace that lost revenue. That was masked for some time by the Trump bump of Trump's first term. People were agog. Many of them appalled. They were turning to The Washington Post and The New York Times, which were in this great old-fashioned newspaper war for scoops.

We at The Post were equaling The Times many months, exceeding them in some months in terms of the number of eyeballs that were attracted to our site, but that Trump bump didn't last. After he left office, like many other news organizations, our traffic plummeted, and we didn't have, unlike The New York Times, a theory of the case for how to maintain our subscribers and attract new ones.

Brian: Now, about Bezos, you describe him in the early days as being optimistic. You quote The Post veteran Sally Quinn, saying he was interested and joyful, a person of integrity and conscience. How did you and the staff experience Bezos's ownership originally? Then we'll get to today.

Ruth: We're journalists, so I think that means we're inherently skeptical, but I think the vast majority of us were very excited by this new owner. First of all, we have a lot of trust in Don Graham and the Graham family that he was not going to put us in dangerous hands. Bezos came in, and while it took him a little while to come talk to the staff, and while he wasn't very hands-on, he talked about the runway we needed. It was financial runway. He was willing to dig into his pocket and provide that.

He also had this kind of Amazon, they famously talk about keeping a day one attitude of energy. He improved our seemingly minor things, like the quickness with which the site would load, that really improved a reader's experience of it and kept them with us. I think we were all extremely positive about Jeff Bezos. Then when Donald Trump came into office, even though he had other corporate interests that were threatened by his ownership of The Post, he was absolutely resolute.

Marty Baron, our former executive editor, writes about this in his book when Donald Trump was threatening things like Amazon World Services, which is a very lucrative cloud computing network, which had multi-billion dollar contracts with the federal government that Trump was threatening. Bezos did not back down. In fact, he coined what I had thought at the time was a little bit of a cheesy motto, which I've come around on this. He insisted that democracy dies in darkness, and he was going to stand by us.

Brian: Maybe this is the central question, because you gave us some of the hard economic realities of recent years. I'll add a little bit to that from what I read. After that first spurt of profitability in Trump term one, it then began losing enormous sums, The Washington Post. $77 million in 2023, $100 million in 2024. With all those big losses, you document how Bezos started shrinking the staff. "Staggering" is your word.

Down from more than 1,000 newsroom staffers to, I guess, around 400 something, after the recent cut of about 300 people. Now it's 400 plus, I guess. You wrote that Bezos, who once posted the slogan, "democracy dies in darkness on the masthead," appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement.

Ruth: I'm sorry about this bad dog in the background. That is Augie, and I apologize to all listeners. Augie?

Brian: Oh, we barely hear him. Good dog,-

Ruth: Okay, go ahead.

Brian: -Augie. Good dog. You wrote about how Bezos now appears to be pursuing a policy of appeasement toward Trump. I guess the central question would be, how much is Bezos dismantling The Post to appease Donald Trump, and how much is he doing simply what most business owners might feel they have to do, not take a $100 million loss every year.

Ruth: I'm sorry, I just had a little headphone problem. Look, I am not a mind reader. All I can do is look at what has been happening. Unlike in the first Trump term, we see a different Jeff Bezos. We see Jeff Bezos, along with the other corporate internet tycoons, on the dais at the inauguration. We see him and Amazon giving money to the inauguration and the ballroom. We see him having dinner at Mar-a-Lago with his new wife, the president, and Melania Trump. We see the purchase at a very inflated price of the Melania Trump documentary. We see a much more positive set of statements from Jeff Bezos about Donald Trump than we saw during the first Trump term.

Brian: Why would Bezos have motivation to appease Trump if that's what he's doing, rather than just having a genuine personal evolution of his politics or something? Bezos is one of the richest people in the world. Does Trump have some kind of leverage over him?

Ruth: That's a great question. I would say it may well be that there has been an evolution in Jeff Bezos's politics. I think there was always a strain of libertarianism in his politics. I think that what he and other tech tycoons viewed as the excessive regulation and the hostility that they perceived towards, especially Silicon Valley, during the Biden administration from the FTC chair, Lina Khan, and others, probably changed his attitude both towards Democrats and perhaps towards Trump.

I think that people are entitled to have the facts on the ground as they perceive that change their minds. At the same time, we had Trump coming into power, and this is not a phenomenon that affected Bezos alone. We saw many of these tech tycoons who would have the cushion of billions of dollars, one would think, to resist Donald Trump doing anything but and appeasing them in various ways. We see media companies essentially paying off Trump to settle flimsy lawsuits that he has brought against them. Bezos is not alone here, but for him, there is also the phenomenon that he has these other corporate interests that may be nearer and dearer to his heart than the money-losing Washington Post.

By the way, we had reports yesterday that the Post lost another $100 million last year in 2025. That is a staggering sum. Bezos is very worried about his rocket company and its ability to compete with Elon Musk's rocket company, that's very dependent on government connections and contracts. Obviously, Elon Musk has an in with the president. There are a lot of external facts that you could look to and say, "Maybe this is part of the explanation for his evolution."

Brian: Ruth Marcus with us for another few minutes, long of The Washington Post, now with The New Yorker. I guess we should say, in addition to the staff cuts, and in addition to whatever business decisions Bezos may be making in that respect, because of these massive losses, you very much object, as a former opinion columnist there, to how Bezos has now defined content in the opinion section as being in favor of "personal liberties and free markets." Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others, they now say.

This may be self-serving as a public radio person in the nonprofit sector. As part of the largest story here, the persistence of corporate or billionaire power over where America gets its news, I think you were just alluding to some of this, whether it's David Ellison acquiring CBS and now going after CNN as part of Warner Brothers, NBC's parent company spinning off MSNBC, Bezos at The Post, I could go down a list. Is there a context like that to your eye here?

Ruth: I have a response that might be a little bit surprising. I very much lament the transformation of the opinion section in this newest phase. I want to say, I'm a believer in individual liberties and free markets, by the way, but I'm also a believer, and this is why I ended up leaving the paper, in a very robust array of views so that readers and everybody can get exposed to different arguments and decide for themselves which one they think is the best.

It is also true that the owner of a news organization has the moral and traditional authority to determine what the editorial page says. The new editorial page is a, I hate it, I have to say, it's gone way, way, way, way to the right, but that is Bezos' prerogative as an owner. When he came in, Fred Hiatt, then the editorial page editor, offered to resign if his views were not in line with Bezos' views. Bezos said, "No, we're all good. I agree with what you've been saying. Keep going." He's entitled to change that.

What he is not, I think, morally entitled to do is to destroy the news gathering. Of course, he has the power to do it, but what he has done here is much worse than trashing the opinion section. People can get opinions anywhere. You can have a very conservative opinion section and a fantastic news operation, see the Wall Street Journal, but what Bezos is doing to the newsroom, to me, is the real moral failing here, not his work on the opinion side.

Brian: Now you brought your legal affairs reporting and column writing expertise to The New Yorker. Your latest article is about the Supreme Court's tariffs ruling. You wrote it's a welcome signal, but you also wrote, "Don't go overboard with the champagne." Where on the champagne matrix are you about this, and what's it a welcome signal of?

Ruth: It's a welcome signal that even this super-majority conservative Supreme Court has at least some of them, three of them, of the six conservative justices, its limits. Its limits, particularly when it comes to unleashing untrammeled executive power of the type that Trump has been claiming and claiming and claiming, and that for much of the Trump presidency, the court has been accommodating. We have this emergency docket where things come to the court before they're really ready for final decision, and the question is, can Trump get away with doing what he's been doing in the interim?

In those situations, the court has been extremely indulgent of Trump in issues like the terrible decision on presidential immunity that we saw before Trump took office. They've been very indulgent of executive power in general. This is not a Trump-specific thing, but it's a court whose conservative majority is very well inclined towards a very broad conception of presidential power.

I'm not a big champagne drinker, especially when I've got 170 pages of opinions to speed read, but it was a pivotal moment and one of very few that we've seen in the last year plus since Trump took office, where the three of the court's conservatives, the chief justice, Justice Barrett and Justice Gorsuch said, "No more, too much. You cannot take this statute and read it to allow you to impose any tariff on any person at any time for any reason." I think that's a very important signal.

Brian: Last question, looking ahead to the rest of the Supreme Court's current term, are there other pivotal decisions yet to come that will further set limits or not on executive power, or what many people consider the drive toward authoritarianism?

Ruth: I think there are going to be two extremely important decisions on presidential power, and I suspect they are going to go in the opposite directions. One is the birthright citizenship case, where President Trump, on his first day in office, I believe it was his first day in office, asserted the authority to basically rewrite the Constitution through executive order and deny birthright citizenship to anyone who's born in the United States. Spoiler alert: that's not what the Constitution says. It's not the way the Supreme Court has interpreted the Constitution for more than 100 years.

I don't think that this conservative court will allow the president to get away with this. On the other side of the presidential power ledger, there's another president, 90-something years old, called Humphrey's Executor. It tells the president that he doesn't have the authority to fire heads or members of independent agencies without cause.

This has been a bête noire of the conservative legal movement and those who believe in the unitary executive for decades. They are finally on the cusp of getting rid of Humphrey's Executor and allowing the president to fire anybody he wants in a position of authority as part of his role as head of the executive branch. That was something that the conservatives on the court has been itching to do for a while, and Trump has just given them the opportunity to do it.

Brian: If you can do it in 20 seconds, why is that important? Why should that matter to the general public?

Ruth: Oh, that's a wonderful question. It should matter because Congress has the authority to determine the structure of the executive branch, and it has decided that there are some agencies, I mentioned the FTC, the SEC, and others, that should have a degree of independence from presidential authority. Government has functioned that way very well since the New Deal. Why shouldn't Congress be able to set out how government should operate?

Brian: Ruth Marcus, now a contributor to The New Yorker. Thank you very much. Good to still be seeing you in print.

Ruth: Thanks so much, Brian.

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