At odds with the Constitution
President Trump’s expressed contempt for a free press seems right out of an authoritarian playbook, where delegitimizing and ultimately silencing government watchdogs and critical commentators is a cornerstone of retaining power.
“It is frankly disgusting that the press is able to write whatever it wants to write,” he said Wednesday.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution would vigorously disagree. They drafted the First Amendment to declare in unambiguous terms that freedom of the press shall not be abridged.
At the time of that outburst, following a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Trump said he was not proposing a limit on what journalists should report, merely that they should just “speak more honestly.”
The president was supposedly angered by an NBC News report that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s description of Trump as a “moron” came after a meeting in which the commander in chief had talked about increasing the U.S. nuclear arsenal tenfold. Trump called the report “pure fiction, made up to demean.”
NBC has stood by its story, claiming multiple sources. Tellingly, Tillerson artfully deflected direct questions on whether he indeed called Trump a moron.
Never one to know when to stop, Trump tweeted later Wednesday: “Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses much be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked. Not fair to the public!”
A presidential threat to shut down broadcast networks would be alarming if it were not so grounded in ignorance.
The fact is, neither NBC nor any other network possess — or requires — a license from the government. Individual stations do, and some of them are owned by NBC’s parent company, Comcast. But even if the government were to revoke their licenses — we would hope and trust that patriotic Americans would resist mightily this attempt at suppression of free expression — NBC could still produce news programs and entertainment shows, including, yes, “Saturday Night Live” with its devastating satires of Trump.
Trump’s disdain for rigorous reporting has been matched only by his craving for obsequious questioning and over-the-top praise. On the latter, if he doesn’t get it from the media or members of Congress, he showers it on himself.
As a candidate, Trump said he would “open up libel laws” so that when the New York Times or Washington Post publishes “a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” Again, his words betray a basic misunderstanding of libel law. There is no federal libel law; each of the 50 states has its own standards.
A fellow Republican, Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, had a spot-on Twitter retort to Trump’s latest blast at the concept of a free press: “Mr. President: Are you recanting of the oath you took on Jan. 20 to preserve, protect and defend the First Amendment?”
President Trump would seem to be the last person in the world to question anyone’s fidelity to the truth. At last count, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker cited more than 1,300 false claims by Trump since his inauguration.
His propensity to stretch or fabricate facts is as frankly disgusting as his derision for those with a professional commitment to let Americans know what their government and its leader is really doing.