Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melbert. Later this hour, we have the latest reporting on the horrific flooding tragedy in Texas. Just a terrible scene down there. We have the latest numbers. There's also new tariff threats from President Trump that are upsetting the markets, stoking talk of inflation. By the end of the hour, we will hear from the great author Ta-Nehisi Coates,

as we always try to go deeper and broaden out over the course of our news program.

We begin tonight with Donald Trump abusing executive power, some of it blatantly admitting it,

other times doing it in ways that take critical scrutiny, reporting, investigative journalism to pull

apart and make sense of what's happening. And some of these are stories that have echoes,

they have a mood of repetition, but that's part of the problem, not a government doing something

once and getting dialed back or making a mistake, but rather what has accrued into a

pattern. And while any serious journalists, all the journalists we studied under over the years,

say that you don't try to make journalism the story, you don't try to make the act of reporting

the story. When the government cracks down on it, as we've seen in many countries, from Russia to Hungary,

well, you don't ignore it either.

Journalists and First Amendment experts, advocate.

Across the political spectrum, to the extent that lawyers have the spectrum,

and journalists, many of whom are completely nonpartisan in their careers,

are united right now, this week with concern,

criticism, and some outright sounding serious alarms about it happening here.

That what Trump once mused about or only tweeted about in the first term is now part of our

lived reality in the autocratic frackdown against free speech, the free speech of journalists to report,

unfettered both by government interference, and by something that also can amount to censorship.

Government pressure on other entities, including the capitalist corporate structure,

to constrain censor or change the journalism that the public uses and

needs to govern itself. I am talking, of course, about this highly unusual and costly settlement

...