Nilay Patel

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute — and previous Decoder guest — runs down the list of major media companies capitulating to frivolous Trump lawsuits and investigations, with particular scorn for Meta, which agreed to donate $25m to Trump’s presidential library instead of fighting a case it would have won handily. And not fighting has real consequences — as Jaffer says:

Great catch by our friends at 404 Media — a declassified WWII-era US government guide to sabotaging fascism is currently the 5th-most downloaded ebook on Project Gutenberg.

Here he is talking about it during today’s big data center announcement, with Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, and Masa Son standing in the room with him.

The USDS was set up under Obama, and it was more or less the federal government’s software product management group. I interviewed outgoing head Mina Hsiang on Decoder in 2023, and it was one of our most popular episodes that year — it turns out being the PM of healthcare.gov looks a lot like being the PM of any other software product.

TikTok went hard on Dear Leader flattery with its we’re-banned-we’re-back messaging, but it didn’t even get the full 90-day extension Trump promised — it’s only 75. And Trump loves nothing more than leverage, as he made clear while signing the EO. This thing is getting sold, one way or another.

The app is partially back online in the US with a message explicitly thanking President Trump. The chances that all this desperate messaging backfires and he still forces a sale are steadily rising — that’s what Trump is saying, and the rest of the GOP is insistent that the law be enforced.