Donald Trump’s attacks on a free press were disturbing the moment he began making them as a candidate for the presidency. And when he started to incite the anger of campaign crowds against journalists in attendance, his war on journalism disqualified him from ever being considered a legitimate president of the United States. Attempts to discredit and intimidate the free press, whether by legal or physical means, are the mark of an authoritarian mindset, not a person fit to be the American president. Even more than his “fake news” refrain — as self-serving a term as any tinpot dictator might come up with — nothing captures this anti-democratic attitude more than the president’s increasingly frequent declarations that journalists are "the enemy of the people.” If this phrase sounds foreign and weirdly translated from another language, that’s because it’s been previously employed by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Even putting aside that provenance, it’s a phrase that’s curiously propagandistic and absolutist, and alien when compared to the generally uplifting sloganeering of American politics.
But aside from its generic oddness, it’s a phrase that, particularly when spoken by the president, constitutes a declaration of war on the United States. There really is no other way to consider Donald Trump’s phrase, given the reality journalists, editors, photographers, and others are the cornerstone of American democracy itself. After all, there can be no democracy without public access to information, and a journalistic profession that presses our government to provide that information.
We have long been able to see that for Donald Trump, the only way the press would not qualify as “the enemy of the people” would be for it serve as an unquestioning outlet of state propaganda. Accordingly, the one news outlet he considers legitimate is Fox News, which at this point is indistinguishable from a government television service dedicated to the protection of Donald Trump.
Many have long warned that, apart from being a transparent attempt to protect himself from bad deeds by discrediting those who would bring the truth to the light of day, the president’s extremist rhetoric would inevitably lead to violence against journalists. This fear was realized in Maryland last month, when an Annapolis newspaper suffered a mass shooting - the worst single loss of life of media professionals since 9/11. An ordinary person might be chastened by such an event, and lay off the “enemy of the people” rhetoric. Unfortunately for our country, Donald Trump is no ordinary person, resuming use of his anti-democratic language a mere week after the slaughter.
For the president, this return to form was a real two-fer, because these new tweets were in the context of his upcoming trip to Helsinki to meet with Vladimir Putin. Putin, a master dissembler in so many ways, doesn’t bother to dissemble when it comes to a free press. Journalists who get out of line are beaten or killed as a matter of course in Putin’s Russia, which Donald Trump is aware of, and which he effectively endorsed when resuming his attacks on the free press so close to the Helsinki meeting.
As enraging as the president’s incitement of violence against journalists and clear wishes to substitute a regime of propaganda in place of a free press, though, is the general lack of an adequate response on the part of America’s elected officials. Republican silence has edged into complicity with this man’s deranged war on journalism, and stands as one more firm reason why the Republican Party must be routed in 2018, in 2020, and beyond. And though Democrats have been far more outspoken in criticizing these attacks, the party as a whole has failed to recognize, and respond to them, as the unforgivable, code red attack on American democracy that they are. If journalists cannot do their jobs, then it matters not at all how progressive and assertive the Democratic Party becomes in the coming years.
There seems to be too much of a mindset across the political spectrum that the press is fully capable of defending itself — but this is a complete misreading of where we are, and plays into Trump’s fake critique of the media. The adversarial relationship between the press and the government holds true when we are talking about the general idea of reporters trying to cover a particular story, but not when the government, in the form of the president, is attacking the press for simply existing. Such an attack is so far outside the bounds as to necessarily trigger a political response from other major actors in American society, particularly the other branches of government.
The events and stories out today related to a July 20 meeting between New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and Donald Trump only reinforce the point that this is no longer a situation in which we can say that the press should simply be left alone to battle the president. The narrative goes as follows: On July 20, Sulzberger met with the president, at the president’s invitation. The meeting was off-the-record, but on Sunday Donald Trump tweeted the public’s first news of the meeting, writing, “Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, “Enemy of the People.” Sad!”
Sulzberger soon responded to the president’s tweet, which made it sound like he had acquiesced to the president’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” rhetoric. Sulzberger said he had in fact accepted the meeting mainly in order to raise his concerns with the president’s anti-free press language, and that he pressed this point during the meeting, including his belief that such language will lead to violence against journalists. There is no reason to dispute Sulzberger’s summary of the meeting, and at any rate, the White House has not challenged it thus far.
This means that Sulzberger met with the president off-the-records to defend the free press, only to have Donald Trump use the meeting as fodder for his anti-free press message, suggesting that Sulzberger actually agreed with him.
Even for this president, such a maneuver is grotesque. Trump essentially turned a meeting in which a major American publisher attempted to privately communicate his concerns about the president’s rhetoric into yet another example of his anti-press vitriol. One can critique Sulzberger’s decision to take the meeting, and his relative level of naiveté in thinking anything good might come of it, but any debate over whether Sulzberger made the wrong decision pales in comparison to the monolithic bad faith and anti-democratic darkness of this president. It is yet one more demonstration that the president’s overriding interest is in constructing a storyline that journalists are "the enemy of the people."
As if to hammer home the point of his own perfidy, Donald Trump has now responded to Sulzberger’s version of events by a series of tweets calling the media “very unpatriotic,” and accusing journalists of putting lives at risk — an obvious black-is-white, up-is-down response to Sulzberger’s critique.
At this point, it is clear the press can offer no facts or other rational response to counter the president's accusations, since they are accusations based not on reality, but on an overriding desire to discredit the work of the one force in our country holding this president to account more than any other.
The overwhelming silence of Republicans over the last two days only highlights the peril of this moment, and the need for Democrats to make the defense of a free press both a central piece of their critique of Donald Trump and of a positive vision for America that aims to restore the presence of local and independent news sources across this country.