It was a very momentous week for would-be Emperor Donald Trump, who held a press conference in which he barred reporters from many of the nation’s major news organizations, including the New York Times, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, and also the BBC.
Trump’s issue with them: reporting what is actually happening in Mr. Trump’s administration, rather than regurgitating, as news, the lies that the new President and his cronies are generating each day.
The new President is determined to ramrod his version of reality down upon the American public, and part of his strategy is to diminish any whistleblowing and reporting of malfeasance by calling it “fake news”. He and his staff have repeatedly, and very publicly, labeled the mainstream press as “The Opposition”.
Interestingly, our Commander in Chief relies upon fake news on a daily basis to craft and support his policy initiatives. Recently, he used a bogus “Bowling Green Massacre” (no such thing!) and a bogus immigrant crime wave in Sweden (the Swedish Prime Minister said, “What has he been smoking?”) to support his discredited plan to bar travel to U.S. from 7 Muslim nations. The fact that he is using fake news to bolster his policy initiatives doesn’t seem to bother him at all.
Thus, if we are to believe the Leader of the Free World, it is he, and he alone, who will determine for us what is true and what is not. If he elects to lie about something, Fox News will trumpet is as the unvarnished truth, and it will be “real news”. If any of the traditional, mainstream news organizations have facts to counter his claims, then those should be considered…lies, un-patriotic propaganda, actual fake news. etc.
This is pretty scary stuff, my fellow Americans. As Walter Lippmann once said, “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies”. If we allow Donald Trump to not only run our government, but to also determine what “news” shall be available for public consumption, then we are sliding down the proverbial slippery slope, and accelerating toward Hell. Even Richard Nixon couldn’t get away with this, and he tried.
A few weeks ago, when President Trump’s 7-nation travel ban was overturned by a Federal Judge, and later by a Federal Appeals Court, he lambasted both in unkind terms, and twitted, essentially, “How dare they!” The problem with Trump is that he doesn’t understand democracy or, worse, doesn’t support the idea. He feels as if he has been elected Emperor, as if the government of the United States is simply an extension of his family-owned business wherein he is not subject to the opinions of a Board of Directors or the stockholders. In this world, he makes the rules and everyone else either kowtows to him or is run over.
We have a problem, Houston.