The Creeping Tyranny of Donald Trump
While Mr. Page is away for the holidays, Robert Reich is filling in for him.
On the evening of Dec. 7, minutes after a local Indiana union leader, Chuck Jones, criticized Donald Trump on CNN for falsely claiming that he had kept 1,100 Carrier jobs in the United States, Trump tweeted, "Chuck Jones, who is President of United Steelworkers 1999, has done a terrible job representing workers. No wonder companies flee country!"
Since that tweet went out, some news organizations have reported that Jones has received death threats.
A few days before, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg was quoted in the Chicago Tribune gently chiding Trump for being against trade.
Soon after, Trump tweeted: "Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!" Later, he added, "We want Boeing to make a lot of money but not that much money."
Boeing shares immediately took a hit. As it turns out, Boeing does not even have a $4 billion order to make Air Force One planes.
This has been Trump's pattern. In October 2015, 18-year-old college student Lauren Batchelder stood up at a political forum in New Hampshire and told Trump that she didn't think he was "a friend to women."
The next morning, Trump fired back on Twitter. He called Batchelder an "arrogant young woman" and accused her of being a "plant" from a rival campaign.
Almost immediately, Batchelder began receiving threatening messages on her phone. "I didn't really know what anyone was going to do," Batchelder told the Washington Post. "He was only going to tweet about it and that was it, but I didn't really know what his supporters were going to do, and that to me was the scariest part."
Trump doesn't take kindly to anyone criticizing him -- not journalists (whom he refers to as "dishonest," "disgusting" and "scum" when they take him on), not corporate executives, not entertainers who satirize him, not local labor leaders, not college students, no one.
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