Talking points
Trump vs. the media:
“Press freedom in America is in a wrestling match for its life,” said Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Daily News. President Trump’s ongoing feud with the mainstream media hit “a new rock bottom” in recent weeks after he launched a vicious personal attack on MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski—claiming he recently saw her “bleeding badly from a face-lift”—but then retweeted a video from a far-right supporter that showed Trump body-slamming a person with a CNN logo for a head. “Trump’s unholy jihad” against the press has resulted in an avalanche of death threats against journalists in recent months; at the G-20 summit last week, he happily agreed when Russia’s authoritarian President Vladimir Putin said that American journalists were “hurting” him. The goal of Trump’s “fake news” campaign is to persuade supporters not to believe anything they read or hear about him, said Will Oremus in Slate.com. “When there is no objective source of truth, the best liar wins—and that’s exactly how Trump wants it.”
The media’s outrage over that silly CNN video is laughable, said Kurt Schlichter in Townhall .com. When a recent theatrical production of Julius Caesar in New York City depicted Trump as an emperor being stabbed to death, the mainstream media insisted it was “artful political commentary.” The mainstream media is “hopelessly biased” against Trump, said Jonathan Tobin in NationalReview.com. CNN was recently forced to retract an unsubstantiated story connecting a Trump associate with the Kremlin; on the front pages of The New York Times, anti-Trump opinion pieces are presented “as straight news.” Driven mad by Trump’s unorthodox governing style, journalists believe they are in a “virtuous” war against a dangerous president. No wonder Trump sees them as “the opposition.”
Trump’s attacks on the press “please his most devoted supporters,” said Daniel Dale in Toronto Star.com, but this war has a steep cost. The majority of Americans cringe when they see Trump’s unhinged, childish Twitter attacks on critics. That’s a major reason his approval rating has been stuck around the “dreadful plateau” of 38 percent. Without a governing majority, Trump can’t push through a legislative agenda, and his unpopularity poses a grave threat to the GOP’s prospects in the 2018 midterms. If Trump wants any chance of succeeding as president, he must stop “speaking to just a third of the public.”