All the president’s enemies
by Tom Sullivan
“Now, you will behave yourselves hereafter, won’t you? Or I shall be very, very angry.”
Allies of the acting president seek $2 million for an effort to investigate reporters at the New York Times, Washington Post, and others, Axios reports this morning based on a three-page memo it obtained.
Groups listed as “Primary Targets” are “CNN, MSNBC, all broadcast networks, NY Times, Washington Post, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post, and all others that routinely incorporate bias and misinformation in to their coverage.” Including reporters and editors.
Other GOP 2020 groups will target social media platforms for alleged bias.
He wants it now
The New York Times reported in late August on this or a related effort by “a loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House.” Four sources claimed the network is compiling dossiers of “potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements” from news gatherers at prominent news organizations. Also targeted are family members involved in politics, as well as liberal activists and other known opponents of the president.
The president wants impunity and he wants it now.
Not even Fox News is exempt. Donald Trump rage-tweeted his exasperation at his pet news outlet, writing “Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”
“To fact check him is to be all but dead to him,” Fox’s Neil Cavuto answered in an on-air rebuke.
The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent responded over the weekend and reiterated in a tweet this morning:
The whole point here is the open declaration that something meant to be a news network should function as his personal 24/7 propaganda and disinformation outlet. It’s a double-fisted declaration of impunity: Trump must be immune from journalistic scrutiny and be permitted to operate and lie with absolute impunity, and he will publicly assert that an ostensibly journalistic institution should be entirely subservient to him with absolute, shameless impunity as well.
This is a form of insidious corruption — corruption of our discourse. All politicians shade the truth; politics inescapably involves artifice of one kind or another. But most hew to some kind of underlying belief that gaslighting voters too shamelessly treats them with a form of deep contempt; that at some point, factual reality has to matter; that journalism plays a legitimate institutional role in restraining political dishonesty; and that all this is a necessary foundation for deliberative democracy to function.
Trump demands “a form of autocratic disinformation,” Sargent writes, “designed to render fact-based deliberation and argument impossible.” He considers it his birthright. Anything less is betrayal. And he gets very, very angry when he feels betrayed.
Born into wealth, raised by the elite, boasting of powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, Donald Trump has no use for democracy if it fails to deliver glorious victory and boost his net worth. He has spent a lifetime surrounded by yes-men and fawning sycophants who laugh at every joke. They agree, smiling, at his every lie, at every uninformed opinion. They say, “Yes, sir, how high?” at every barked request. And they learn, as the imprisoned Michael Cohen did, that when he offers suggestions in code to commit crimes, they are formal orders, as from a crime boss.
Thus, his remaining janissaries plot retribution against critics. The sultan himself need not give the order. They know his mind, what there is of it.
The impudence of reporters who challenge his proclamations is galling. The ingratitude of beautiful people like, like Debra Messing, enrages him. This isn’t what he imagined — with all that power — being president would be like. With every morning’s rage-tweets he confirms his frustration with a reality he cannot dominate completely.
Trump always wanted his own planet to play with. (He can’t really play the harpsichord better than anyone else. Or at all.)