ArcaMax

"This election will determine whether we are a free nation or whether we have only the illusion of democracy but are in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests rigging the system, and our system is rigged," Trump told a rally in West Palm Beach last week.

"The establishment and their media enablers will control ... this nation through means that are very well known. Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed."

Nor does it help that Trump increasingly has called reporters "scum" and "corrupt."

Worse, he occasionally has shown more respect for overseas oligarchs than for our own press freedoms at home. In one glaring example, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough asked Trump in December if his admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin was at all tempered by the country's history of killing critical journalists. Trump's response was: "He's running his country, and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country."

Board members of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists included examples like that in a recent and rare declaration that "a Trump presidency represents a threat to press freedom unknown in modern history."

But another strong defense of the First Amendment hit Trump even closer to Trump Tower last week. After his attorney demanded a retraction by The New York Times of a story that quoted two women who claimed to have been groped by Trump without their consent, the Times's newsroom attorney, David McCraw, sharply suggested that Trump didn't have much of a reputation left to protect when it came to his treatment of women.

Trump has "bragged about his non-consensual touching of women," the letter said. "He has bragged about intruding on beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms. He acquiesced to a radio host's request to discuss Mr. Trump's own daughter as a 'piece of ass.' Multiple women not mentioned in our article have publicly come forward to report on Mr. Trump's unwanted advances. Nothing in our article has had the slightest effect on the reputation that Mr. Trump, through his own words and actions, has already created for himself."

So there. The Donald may well come up with another paranoid theory to explain this setback. But this isn't about a conspiracy. It's about the Constitution.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.