Who Will Makes It to the Finish Line: An Essay
Illustration by PillartoPost.org's F. Stop Fitzgerald
History has a way of pitting institutions against personalities. On one side of the track stands Big Orange Balloon, a man whose political career feeds on hot air turbulence. On the other is The New Republic, a magazine born in 1914, scarred by every decade’s battles, yet still lacing up its running shoes.
The question: which survives the sprint, and which collapses before the tape?
The incumbent administration is built on the brute durability of the presidency. Once seated, an administration has the ballast of the federal bureaucracy—cabinet secretaries, agencies, a Congress that often shrinks from confrontation. Orange Julius (Caesar's) staying power depends less on headlines than on two hard metrics: the patience of his base and the pace of his legal calendar.
Neither is guaranteed, but both have kept him standing longer than critics expected.
The New Republic, by contrast, has no tanks, no Air Force, no executive power to wield. Its armory is the printed word, sharpened into editorials that cut hard against Trump.
TNR’s coverage has been relentless—portraying his press conferences as unraveling, his rhetoric as dictatorial, his impulses as combustible. It has, in short, made Trump a full-time beat, one where alarm is the lead paragraph. Survival for a magazine doesn’t hinge on elections or court filings. It hinges on subscriptions, reader loyalty, and the economics of digital publishing in a media landscape dominated by Fox, Newsmax, podcasts, and the infinite scroll of social media.
Yet here is the paradox: Trump’s hostility toward critical media may actually fortify TNR. Its audience knows precisely what it’s buying—a bastion of skepticism, a century-old organ unafraid to call out authoritarian drift. The “finish line” is an elegant metaphor because administrations are finite by design.
Four years is a maximum, eight if voters will it. Publications are not bound by terms; they rise or fall by stamina.
The New Republic has survived world wars, depressions, McCarthyism, and the collapse of print newsrooms. It is hard to imagine TNR will fold simply because one White House disapproves.
So, who makes it to the tape first?
Odds favor the magazine.
Trump may stagger through a full term, but administrations fade. Magazines, when they keep their readers and their fire, endure.
The real story is not whether TNR outlasts Trump—it almost certainly will—but whether American democracy, in all its noisy, quarrelsome vitality, keeps room for both the presidency and the press to do their jobs. In the end, the finish line belongs not to Trump or to TNR, but to the readers.
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