Hundreds of newspapers across the country ran editorials Thursday pushing back on Donald Trump’s slur against the media as the “enemy of the people.” These are the very same newspapers that offer a litany of mealymouthed excuses for not labeling Trump’s lies as lies and helped put him in the White House by focusing on imaginary Hillary Clinton scandals while ignoring real Trump scandals, but now that he’s openly campaigning against the free press, they are bringing the weight of their editorial pages, if not their news coverage, to push back.
The Miami Herald wrote that “If one first comes successfully for the press as an ‘enemy of the American People,’ what stops someone for coming next for your friends? Your family? Or you?” According to the Des Moines Register, “The true enemies of the people—and democracy—are those who try to suffocate truth by vilifying and demonizing the messenger.“ And the Boston Globe, which coordinated the editorial effort, wrote that:
Replacing a free media with a state-run media has always been a first order of business for any corrupt regime taking over a country. Today in the United States we have a president who has created a mantra that members of the media who do not blatantly support the policies of the current US administration are the “enemy of the people.” This is one of the many lies that have been thrown out by this president, much like an old-time charlatan threw out “magic” dust or water on a hopeful crowd.
Trump responded by making the newspapers’ point for them:
The media continue to bend over backward to both-sides every issue that can possibly be both-sidesed and to avoid that L word that comes up so much when Trump opens his mouth. That’s not enough for Trump—he sees them not just as critics but as “the opposition party,” which means they are “bad for our Great Country.” Donald Trump not only doesn’t believe in freedom of the press—kind of a major item in the Constitution—but he doesn’t get that there’s a difference between what’s good for Donald Trump and what’s good for the United States of America. His most basic political beliefs are unconstitutional and un-American. And America’s newspapers need to channel the alarm that produced these editorials into their news coverage of what Trump is doing to this country.