President Trump: savaging the media
Donald Trump has had arguably the worst start to any US presidency in modern times, said Todd S. Purdum on Politico. He has “hung up on the Australian prime minister, cancelled a summit with the Mexican president”, and initiated worrying rows with both China and Nato. He has sparked “global chaos” by banning the nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US, and has viciously turned on the federal judges who struck down the ban. Last Thursday, he rounded it off with a staggering 77-minute press conference, in which he insisted his administration was “running like a fine-tuned machine”; claimed that America’s intelligence agencies were conspiring against him; and argued that he’d won the biggest Republican victory since Ronald Reagan’s. When a reporter pointed out that the last point was plain wrong, he breezily replied: “Well, I don’t know, I was given that information.” He went on to launch an unprecedentedly ferocious attack on the US media. “Many of our nation’s reporters will not tell you the truth,” he declared. “The press honestly is out of control.”
“For months, cool, responsible heads have been counselling hot, impulsive heads to avoid overreacting to Trump,” said David Remnick in The New Yorker. But by now, the scale of the danger is all too clear. “The attacks on the legitimacy of the courts, on the intentions of the intelligence agencies, and on the patriotism of the press have become too evident, too repulsive, to be discounted.” Trump is behaving like “an old-fashioned autocrat”. Last week he actually branded the media “the enemy of the American people”. It’s not surprising that, after a disastrous few weeks, Trump has turned on the media, said Chris Cillizza in The Washington Post. It is, for him, “the perfect scapegoat”. The media represents everything that his supporters dislike about America. It is composed, they think, of “Ivy League-educated coastal elites, who look down their noses at the average person” – who said that Trump couldn’t win, and are now concealing all the good he’s doing.
Trump has a point, said Michael Goodwin in the New York Post. Much of the media is deeply opposed to his presidency (just as the intelligence agencies have indeed been leaking against him). The newspapers have given scant publicity to the successes of the past month: the green-lighted pipeline projects and the booming stock market. The press conference was his version of a “reset”. He was “serving notice that he, and not the media, sets the nation’s agenda”. Trump isn’t a threat to free speech; he’s embracing it. The president has every right, “like all Americans, to speak his mind”.