Yesterday’s exchange between CNN reporter Jim Acosta and press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in which Sanders declined to say whether she disagrees that the media is “the enemy of the people,” is yet one more piece of evidence that Donald Trump’s attacks on the media are a crisis for American democracy. As I wrote a few days ago, treating this as a situation in which the media should be left to defend itself on its own against the president is absurd, and indeed, is just how the president wants to frame this assault on American democracy.
While it’s entirely understandable that Acosta, who has patiently weathered the deranged howling and threats of countless Trump supporters, would want to query Sanders on whether she supports the president’s authoritarian position, Sanders chose to spin his remarkable question into a complaint about the personal attacks that have been made on her. In this way, she suggested that Acosta’s complaint was simply personal, and that the larger issue was actually the alleged incitement of violence against a member of the Trump administration. Needless to say, this is a typical Trumpian reversal of reality. It is not that Acosta did something wrong so much as demonstrate the structural limitations to journalists being forced to defend themselves. The Trump administration is all too eager to make such defenses seem simply personal and tied to a vendetta against the president, even as Trump and his staff pretend that their self-serving attacks on the media are actually being done in the name of the public good. Another way of putting it: Acosta asked a question that no reporter should even have to ask a press secretary in the United States — a press secretary, moreover, who clearly would refuse to answer the question or signal disagreement with the president.
It’s also worth noting the related news that Ivanka Trump, when asked the same question, replied that she doesn’t believe journalists are the enemy of the people. That this is even news is another sign of the larger free press crisis. After all, acknowledging the legitimacy of the media is a baseline assumption for democratic citizenship. What is really newsworthy is a president who had adopted a perspective and a language shared by authoritarians and other killers of journalists.
When the American president attacks the free press for simply existing, it cannot be left to journalists and opinion editors alone to point this out and offer a defense. In the first place, this plays into Trump’s specific strategy of trying to personalize this fight and isolate the media. Second, and more importantly, a free press is so central to our democracy that all of society should take part in its defense. In particular, Democrats should be making news by talking every day about how this language demonstrates Trump’s unfitness for office, and by proposing legislation that increases criminal penalties for threatening or killing journalists. The idea that the media is the one on the defensive is absurd. The president stands in contempt of American democracy, and should be on the defensive over this every day.
If you want additional motivation for why we need to collectively mount this defense, look no further than the feral and benighted supporters who show up at the president's rallies to scream insults and threats at the reporters who are there to simply do their jobs. Think about the mentality of a person who has adopted the authoritarian mindset that you must simply shoot the messenger and replace him with a pliant mouthpiece who echoes everything that dear leader wants him to say. Every American has a choice as to how they get their news and information; anyone who chooses only to listen to the propaganda of Fox News and other conservative outlets dedicated to fetishistic worship of President Trump have committed dereliction of their democratic duty.
The president would be well within his rights to criticize particular reporting by any media outlet he wanted. However, he’s chosen to do something else entirely. He attacks the free press simply for existing; attacks the idea of reporting as itself intrinsically treasonous. Such a mindset is so far outside the bounds of American democracy that some may have trouble believing that this is actually happening. But this is not a case where his supporters can remotely claim that this phenomenon is being misreported by a hostile media. In this matter, at least, the president’s own words can be counted on to tell the true story.
For Donald Trump, fake news is simply accurate news, news that reports the facts. He has not a quibble with Fox News, whose reporting ranges from tendentious to purely fictional, but has the virtue of nearly always casting the president in a positive light. And it is also clear that the president’s anger against the media, apart from being a deliberate strategy to create an enemy for his base to rally against and for him to exert fuller control over what information his backers believe, is also founded in its accurate reporting about his own misdeeds. He is not attacking the media on principle; he is attacking it as a personal enemy.