I know. It’s the most ridiculous thing anyone has ever said. Banks, by the way, is the new Chairman of the Freedom Caucus and one of the Republicans Kevin McCarthy tried to foist on the January 6th Committee. I actually feel fairly confident that he is trolling although it’s certainly possible that he is this obtuse. The GOP doesn’t exactly recruit from Mensa these days.
I know this isn’t really necessary but I think it’s important to document this sort of thing for posterity:
“I had a 45-year good relationship with the press, and what the hell happened?” Trump asked Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House communications director, who recalled the moment in an interview with The Washington Post.
“I told him, ‘You declared war! You had Steve Bannon declare war,’ ” recalled Scaramucci, referring to Trump’s former campaign chief and White House adviser. (Scaramucci left the Trump administration after 11 days in office when a tape surfaced of him berating a reporter.)
Some in the White House tried to push back at his broad-brush “fake news” characterizations. Spicer recalled going over stories with the president that had displeased him, assessing them section by section. “We would talk about it,” Spicer told The Post. “He then typically branded it fake.”
Trump spent much of his 2016 campaign beating up on the media. But it wasn’t until after he was inaugurated that he issued something like a formal declaration of war.
One afternoon in February 2017, ensconced at Mar-a-Lago, he deployed his Twitter account to declare with all-caps bombast that the “FAKE NEWS media” is “the enemy of the American people.” He specifically cited the New York Times, CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS.
His statement on that day generated shock in the media world and among his critics. But it caught on with conservative fans who have long nurtured a belief that the mainstream media tilts to the left.
Three years later, the smear has taken hold on conservative websites and in the long lines of supporters outside Trump rallies, functioning like an Internet GIF that cycles endlessly on the screens of the national consciousness.
A master of catchphrases, Trump had created a rallying cry in “enemy of the people” that seems to have penetrated a large part of the national psyche. Already, according to a recent poll, one-third of Americans agree with him that the media is the people’s enemy.
[…]
In recent months, Trump called Chris Wallace, the widely respected host of Fox News Sunday, “nasty and obnoxious,” sniping that he will “never be his father, Mike,” a legendary “60 Minutes” correspondent. He also tarred Peter Baker, a star Times reporter, as “an Obama lover.” And as his Senate impeachment trial got underway, he took a break from the World Economic Forum in Davos to call The Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig “stone cold losers” on Twitter.
On March 20, NBC’s Peter Alexander asked Trump if his administration had offered “a false sense of hope” in talking up the potential of untested drugs, but then segued to a softball: What would he say to citizens who are afraid of the coronavirus crisis?
“I say that you’re a terrible reporter, that’s what I say,” the president responded. “I think it’s a very nasty question.”
The late Roger Ailes built a whole network in Fox News out of the conservative sense of grievance toward mainstream media. But Trump has taken that mind-set to even greater extremes. “He’s now gotten everyone on the right to use the same terminology and that’s the big change,” Spicer noted.
Trump’s quickness to label stories fake has created new peril for media organizations: Any journalistic misstep or factual error, even if it is speedily corrected, can become a talking point in service of the notion that the media is out to get the president.
“You can’t afford to make mistakes because they will be weaponized against you,” said Doug Heye, a longtime Republican strategist and Trump critic, who fears the president’s rhetoric could imperil the lives of journalists.
The irony is that Trump himself makes false statements — more than 16,000 since taking office, according to a Washington Post Fact Checker tally — that he almost never corrects. Nonetheless, he and his friends and family are quick to pounce on any media stumble — even if the journalists involved have corrected it — and their scorn can ripple out in ever-expanding circles, repeated and re-repeated by his political allies and his 70 million-plus million Twitter followers.
One example was a much-criticized obituary headline in The Washington Post, which appeared online only briefly Oct. 27, but lives forever in the images taken by Post critics. It referred to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as an “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State” when he was killed. Conservatives blasted the headline for not specifically describing him as a terrorist, though the Islamic State is well-known in the United States as a terrorist organization.
A statement by The Post acknowledging that the headline was a misstep did little to quell the furor. In a profane tweet, Donald Trump Jr. accused The Post of producing “fawning headlines” about “a serial rapist and murderer,” and of “literally doing PR for a terrorist scumbag.”
“Screw you Wa Po!” Trump Jr. wrote.
Michael Caputo, who served as a communications official in Trump’s 2016 campaign, believes the White House and its press corps “have reached a point of no return.” But he finds what he calls the “defensive attacks” on individual reporters “unnerving. We understand that at some point this could go too far.”
Yet attacking the media is now broadly regarded as a smart move by conservatives. In January, while rebuffing his questions about the impeachment proceedings against Trump, Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) called CNN congressional reporter Manu Raju “a liberal hack” — for which the Trump reelection campaign hailed her as a hero (“THIS is how you handle FAKE NEWS”) with a tweet linking to McSally’s campaign fundraising page.
“All of those punches have landed,” said Caputo, who has remained in touch with the president. “In an election cycle, the president will be able to touch some already softened skin.”
Caputo says he has heard references to the term “Fake News” almost everywhere he goes — in Puerto Rico, Germany and Ukraine. An African diplomat recently used the phrase in a conversation with him. “I don’t know if ‘Make America Great Again’ will last forever as a catch phrase,” Caputo said. “But ‘Fake News’? It will endure forever.”
Banks is likely doing a bit of gas lighting as well. I know that it took me a minute to when I read his tweet to calm myself, ask if I was losing my mind, and then regroup and realize he was either brain damaged or just being an asshole. Shamelessness is their superpower.