Joseph Goebbels hated the press and confronted it head-on before the ink was dry on his boss’s agreement to serve as chancellor. Being an honest journalist became impossible in 1933 Germany. Richard Nixon hated the press, too, and a few journalists were on his enemies list. Michael Beschloss notes that in December 1972, Tricky was taped saying to Henry Kissinger: “The press is the enemy, the establishment is the enemy, the professors are the enemy."
Donald Trump is no Goebbels nor is he a Nixon, both of whom, despite their manifest evilness, were quite smart and quite well read. Like them, the man squatting in the White House does despise the media, but without having any cogent analysis of its flaws, just a personal grudge.
On Friday, he trotted it out in a Tweet, as Sahil Kapur noted:
After deleting, Trump clarified:
It’s rather obvious to anybody watching that Trump believes the press is his enemy. So, in another example of what Shep Smith pointed out yesterday, the new pr*sident is shown to lie practically every time he encounters a microphone or pops into his Twitter account.
While the paranoid Nixon believed the press was his enemy, he was smart enough not to hammer on it repeatedly or even say it aloud outside his inner circle, although his vice president, Spiro Agnew, was given a free hand to spew publicly about the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Trump, on the other hand, whatever he actually believes, is merely using press hatred as a prop to distract his base from developing doubts about him. That doesn’t mean he won’t try something more aggressive than a mere 140-character blast at the “enemy press.” He and his pals who are working hard to curb government data collection and interpretation could move us into dangerous territory impinging on the press.
There’s plenty to critique the media about—Daily Kos writers have hardly been shy about doing so over the past 15 years. Overly concentrated, homogenized, free of voices from a big hunk of the political spectrum and other media flaws have been catalogued by progressives for decades. But there’s about as much depth to Trump’s evaluation of the media as there apparently is about world affairs in his daily briefings.
Just another example today of how Trump seeks to make everything about him while pretending it’s about the American people. A favored fascist technique. And an especially worrisome one when used to incite serious reaction, as his choice of “enemy” certainly does.