Six months after leaving the Washington Post, Ruth Marcus still speaks in the first person plural by referring to the renowned American newspaper team – probably, a side effect of over 40 years in which she worked on the vehicle.

The journalist entered the post at 26 and left – or had to leave, as she says – at 66, in early March this year. The resignation was resigned after the vehicle barred a column of it that criticized the decision to limit the opinion section, of which Ruth had already been an adjunct editor, to defend “individual freedoms and free market”.

The person responsible for the change was Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of the almost 150 -year -old newspaper Since 2013. At the time, he justified the change by stating that “a large part of the success of the United States is due to freedom in the economic scope and everywhere else.”

The background of the decision was Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January. The billionaire, as well as other technology tycoons, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg of the goal, were in a prominent position during the inauguration ceremony.

In December, when Trump was already an elected president, bezos told New York Times that the Republican was “calmer than the first time and more confident, more stable.” Prior to that, in October, on the eve of the elections, the businessman changed a conduct adopted by the newspaper since the 1980s and decided not to support any of the candidates, canceling an editorial in favor of Democrat Kamala Harris.

“When I concluded that I could no longer tell my readers that I was allowed to write what I believed, I had to resign,” he says to Sheet Ruth, who will participate in the Piauí Journalism Festival, on September 6 and 7, in São Paulo.

After 40 years at the Washington Post, like Mrs. Have you been working on another vehicle in recent months?
To be honest, I am very sad to have left the post. In fact, I am very sad to have had to leave it. The institution I left is not the institution I joined or the institution in which I grew up. But I am very honored and, in a way, challenged to be on New Yorker, where I am doing things a little different from the one I did in the post.

Looking retrospectively, how do you see the decision to sell the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos?
I respect Don Graham (former Washington Post Publisher) more than anyone else in the world. I think he made a decision that seemed to be the right choice at the right time. Bezos said, “Do your job. Write about me. Write without fear.” But when the newspaper began to suffer financial losses and Trump returned to the scene, there was a remarkable change.

Since the 1970s, our editorials have supported a presidential candidate. Last year, at the last minute, with an endorsement of Kamala Harris written and ready to publish, Bezos decided to change this conduct and block the column. It is not crazy to say that voters do not need the Washington Post or New York Times advice to decide who to vote for president, but that was different. It was late October, and we were in the midst of an incredibly important and disputed presidential campaign.

At the end of February came a worse signal. Bezos said that from our editorial page and our columnists would focus on two things: free market and individual freedoms. And worse than that, he said that the dissent of these two pillars would not be included in our pages. We always believe, and I thought Bezos also believed, that if you expose people to a wide range of thoughts, they can form their own opinions, and our job is to help them do it. So I wrote a column disagreeing with the decision to change the focus of the opinion section, and this was barred by the editor. When I concluded that I could no longer tell my readers that I was allowed to write what I believed, I had to resign.

In December 2024, Bezos told the New York Times that Trump was “calmer and more confident” in his second term compared to the first. How do you evaluate this statement?
For their readers who may not be following the inauguration in January, Bezos was on Trump’s stage. It was cold in Washington, so he had to be moved inside at the inauguration ceremony with the other technology billionaires. They were sitting closer to the president than the own nominees for the cabinet. It is simply inappropriate for someone who has one of the main newspapers in the country to do this. The notion that Trump is calmer, I don’t know what that means – Trump’s second mandate is much more dangerous and alarming than his first term, which had already been dangerous and alarming.

Indirectly, Trump has already changed the post …
Can I interrupt it? I would like to contest this. I think the climate among reporters is nervous and worry, but they are also resolved. They have done a phenomenal work covering Trump. And from what I can see, there was no interference from bezos or administration in relation to what they write in the news. I worry a lot about the right turn in the opinion section. The range of opinions is no longer so different.

But Mrs. See any climate of self -censorship in the American press in general?
Yes. I think you would have to be naive in this context so as not to think that there is some degree of self -censorship in some places. We have a very vibrant, robust and controversial press that has done a great job covering Trump. But we also saw two of our main stations (CBS and ABC) accept completely frivolous agreements of processes that Trump moved because they wanted to avoid problems with him – and one of them wanted to have an approved merger agreement. This is a terrible and cowardly behavior on the part of these networks. This was not self -censorship, it was total capitulation.

When Trump was elected in 2016, it was not uncommon to read that the US brake and counterweight system would stop him. How do you consider this kind of opinion at that time and today?
I wrote many columns in 2016 and after Trump took office in 2017 about Congress’s position on Trump. I would say things were no longer pink in terms of brakes and counterweights and the rule of law during Trump’s first term. But we have a different supreme cut now, and Congress Republicans realized that facing Trump puts them in danger, so they don’t face him.

What about the position of the Democratic Party in this second term of Trump?
They honestly don’t know what to do. They can’t believe they lost to this guy once again. The Democratic Party does not have an obvious leader, does not have an obvious proposal besides “We are not Trump.” Perhaps this is enough to help them recover the House in the middle of office elections next year, but may not.

When you lose an election and don’t have an obvious alternative, you need some time in the desert to let the next generation of competitors and the next leader appear, to develop a proposal of what the party is and what it fights. At this point, I think the Democrats are very much in the position they were in 1992, when they were out of power by two Ronald Reagan terms and then for a term of George HW Bush. And Bill Clinton appeared, won the democratic appointment, presented himself as a new Democrat that would make the party more centrist and won the election, defeating a president in office. I think Democrats need their Bill Clinton now, but without the problems Bill Clinton brought.

In a column for the post in February, Mrs. He described a kind of civil war in the Department of Justice, which he covered in his early years in journalism. Can this position explain and how things have developed since then?
The Justice Department is part of the Executive Power. So when a new president assumes, it is totally acceptable for this president to say, for example, which organ should focus, for example, drug cartels and non -foreign bribe. Different presidents may have different political priorities and instruct the Justice Department to follow these priorities. But especially since the Watergate (political spy scandal that led to the fall of Richard Nixon), there were very respected restrictions.

We like to tell ourselves that we do not live in a bananas republic, where presidents can use the justice system to process their political enemies. But this is what we are starting to see now. President Trump keeps rancore and wants to eliminate these grudges. He tried to do this very little success in his first term. But now we are seeing the instrumentalization of the criminal justice system for its purposes.

The other day there was an operation of the FBI at John Bolton’s house, who was the national security counselor during Trump’s first term. He says Hillary Clinton should be in jail, James Comey should be in jail, all his political enemies-Jack Smith, who investigated him during the term of (former US President Joe) Biden. And the Justice Department, unlike the first term, is not opposing him. I am very worried about what we can see next year.

Ruth Marcus, 67

Graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School, the political journalist and commentator worked from 1984 to 2025 at the Washington Post, where she was a deputy editor of the Pulitzer Editorial section and finalist Commentary Prize in 2007. Currently writes in New Yorker magazine.

The journalist is one of the guests of the event promoted by Piauí magazine on September 6 and 7, in São Paulo, with the theme “The Counter History-reporters who mess up national myths”. She speaks on Sunday (7) at 18h. Tickets from R $ 650 (full).