Globe Opinion Says Trump's Press Fight Reaches Stars and Stripes

A Boston Globe opinion column published this week places Stars and Stripes, the newspaper that has covered the U.S. military since the Civil War era, inside what its headline calls Donald Trump's broader dispute with the press. The column, titled "Trump's war on the press comes for Stars and Stripes," is labeled as opinion by the Globe, not straight news reporting, according to the outlet's own section placement.

What Does the Boston Globe Opinion Argue?

The column's central claim is stated directly in its headline:

"Trump's war on the press comes for Stars and Stripes."

That framing positions the newspaper's current situation as one entry in a longer list of press disputes the Globe's opinion writer attributes to the Trump administration, rather than as an isolated personnel or funding decision. Because the piece runs in the opinion section, the Globe is presenting an argument and interpretation, not a neutral news account, and the underlying facts of the specific dispute are laid out in the column itself rather than summarized independently here.

What Is Stars and Stripes and How Is It Funded?

Stars and Stripes operates as the editorially independent newspaper serving American service members and their families, with funding channeled through the Department of Defense under a longstanding arrangement that separates its newsroom from military command structures. That structure is what makes any dispute over its funding or editorial control a recurring flashpoint: the publication depends on Pentagon money to exist, but its journalistic mission has traditionally been walled off from Pentagon oversight of content. The Globe column's headline claim rests on that tension between funder and subject.

How Does This Compare With Other Opinion Writing on Trump and Independent Institutions?

The Globe piece is not the only commentary this month arguing over whether a Trump-era institution retains its independence. A separate opinion column by Armstrong Williams, published Sept. 22 and carried on Holier Than Tao's QuoteConservative page, argues the opposite conclusion about a different institution: that the Supreme Court is not "Trump's court," laying out three reasons the justices remain independent of the administration. Read together, the two columns show opinion writers on different sides of the aisle reaching for the same underlying question — does an institution funded, appointed, or overseen by the federal government still operate independently of the president who leads it — and arriving at opposite answers depending on the institution in question. The Globe treats Stars and Stripes' independence as under threat; Williams treats the Supreme Court's independence as intact.

What Timeline Connects These Opinion Pieces?

The Williams column on the Supreme Court published Sept. 22, 2026. The Globe column on Stars and Stripes surfaced in the same news cycle, per the Google News aggregation feeding this report. Both pieces sit within a week that also saw HTT commentary on unrelated culture-war fights — a Colorado fur-trapping ban proposal and European debates over air conditioning — published Sept. 20, 2026, underscoring how much opinion-page output during this stretch has centered on institutional trust and government reach, whether the institution is a courtroom, a military newsroom, or a state wildlife agency.

Why Does Editorial Independence Keep Appearing in Opinion Pages?

The repetition is the data point worth noting. Two ideologically distinct opinion writers, publishing within roughly 48 hours of each other, both organized their arguments around the same variable: whether a federally connected institution can act independently of the current administration. That does not resolve whether Stars and Stripes' situation matches the Globe's characterization, since the specific facts of the dispute live inside the column itself rather than in a separate news account reviewed here. It does show that the independence question has become a shared organizing frame across opinion journalism this month, applied to institutions as different as a military newspaper and the nation's highest court.

Readers looking for the underlying facts behind the Globe's specific claim about Stars and Stripes should consult the column directly, since its headline is the only verified text available for this report.