This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

When our story went to print that June 2019, Trump went ballistic. He took to his favorite medium, Twitter, to demand that we immediately release our sources, and to accuse us of “a virtual act of treason.” It was the first time the president had ever dropped the word treason. For years, we had become inured to his attacks—“fake news,” “the enemy of the people,” “the failing New York Times”—but now he was accusing us of a crime punishable by death. It was a serious escalation in his war on the press, an attack that until now had been reserved for autocrats and dictators. To his eternal credit, our publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, came to our swift defense, writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that the president had crossed a “dangerous line.”