Trump vs. Jefferson

The best monument to our Founding Fathers is a robust First Amendment and free press.

Now that President Donald Trump has taken to lamenting the fate of monuments to the nation’s Founders — “Where will it stop?” he muses — we would humbly submit that many of those men we venerate with statuary were unabashed supporters of a free and, yes, obstreperous, media. Even when they endured press coverage more scathing than the current president rails about in his increasingly unhinged attacks on the “damned dishonest” media, they acknowledged — through gritted teeth, no doubt — that democracy works and freedom and liberty survive only in nations where channels of communication are open and free.

Here, for example, is James Madison, drafter of the First Amendment to the Constitution: “Among those principles deemed sacred in America, among those sacred rights considered as forming the bulwark of their liberty … there is no one of which the importance is more deeply impressed upon the public mind than the liberty of the press.”

In an 1823 letter to Marquis de Lafayette, Thomas Jefferson observed: “The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.”

Of course, Jefferson is most famous for an opinion he expressed about the press in a letter written nearly four decades earlier: “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Unless “Fox and Friends” has quoted the nation’s third president lately, it’s doubtful the 45th is familiar with Jefferson’s veneration of the media and its irreplaceable role in the republic. In Phoenix, Trump’s Casey Kasem-like reprise of the greatest hits of yesteryear (campaign 2016), seasoned with a selfindulgent re-litigation of Charlottesville and unhinged attacks on the media, gave off the whiff of the strongmen he seems to admire, whether Putin in Russia, Erdogan in Turkey or Duterte in the Philippines.

These guys do their utmost to silence reporters. As a demagogue in the making, Trump sounds as if he’d love to do the same.

“All presidents end up with grudges against reporters, editors, and commentators. It goes with the territory, and has since the time of George Washington onward,” James Fallows of the Atlantic wrote the morning after Trump’s Phoenix 77-minute rant.

Fallows noted that Trump went further by “attacking not just the missteps of reporters, or their assumptions, or their selective focus, or their process-mindedness, or any of the multiple other failings we reporters actually have. Instead he attacked their — our — loyalty, patriotism, motivation, and honesty.”

Journalists, Trump proclaimed, are “really, really dishonest people.” They are “bad people” who “really don’t like our country.” Journalists are “sick people.” Keep in mind, these are the words of the president of the United States.

Journalists can take the juvenile insults, but Trump’s attacks are more than just vicious and absurd. They’re an affront to those brave journalists in Mexico still risking their lives to report the truth in the face of drug cartels who have made our southern neighbor a killing field for journalists. They’re an affront to those combat correspondents in Afghanistan and Iraq — where Saddam Hussein chopped off reporters’ hands — and in countless other war-torn regions of the world, where they share mortal danger with the brave men and women they cover. His rants are an affront even to those reporters and cameramen who have to sit and take it — and who keep the cameras rolling, of course — as he stokes hatred among his frenzied faithful (“CNN sucks! CNN sucks!”)

Most important in this democratic nation, Donald Trump’s attacks on the press are an affront to the American people. This president may not know it, but the people he presumes to lead are heirs to those who fought for freedom and liberty, who wrote the First Amendment and whose loyalty to truth demanded free and untrammeled information. In a nation governed by the people themselves, the media have a job to do.

This president may not know it, but the people he presumes to lead are heirs to those who fought for freedom and liberty, who wrote the First Amendment and whose loyalty to truth demanded free and untrammeled information.