Media Must Cover Militia Rise as Trump-Enabled Threat

On the Fourth of July — America's 250th anniversary — a photo went viral showing a Black woman on a Washington, D.C., Metro train surrounded by members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist paramilitary group marching openly through the capital. It was not an anomaly. It was a snapshot of a decade-long trend that legal experts and former federal prosecutors say has been directly enabled by Donald Trump. Mary McCord, a Georgetown law professor who has successfully prosecuted paramilitary groups and won consent decrees against rally organizers, is unambiguous about what is happening: Trump is "aligned with them, whether he believes in white nationalism, Christian nationalism, or not." The permission he began granting in 2016, she says, is now greater than ever — and these groups are responding by becoming louder, more organized, and more public than they have been in decades.

Meanwhile, the Trump DOJ — the very institution responsible for prosecuting paramilitary activity — has been transformed into a vehicle for political vendettas, with career prosecutors replaced by loyalists and domestic terrorism enforcement redirected away from the far right. The result is a vacuum: white nationalist militias recruiting openly, marching freely, and facing virtually no federal accountability.

We call on the media to cover the rise of right-wing militias not as a fringe curiosity or a culture war footnote, but as a direct consequence of deliberate political choices made by this administration. When a sitting president gives permission to paramilitary groups — and then dismantles the institutions that would hold them accountable — that is a story about power. The public deserves reporting that names it as such.