What's Next for Trump's War With the Media?
Since facts tend to be very flexible things in the custody of President Donald Trump, one wonders what comes next with his self-declared "running war with the media."
His constant cries of "fake news" to any news that does not blow him a kiss ratcheted up to a more threatening tone when he sent this Friday afternoon tweet:
"The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!"
With that he escalated from mere trolling to the ominous bombast of a tinpot dictatorship. A cooler head, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, assured us that at least he did not view the media as the enemy. Still, I was left wondering what his boss has in mind.
That's our reality show president. Remember, during last year's election campaign, how delighted he was by the unauthorized and unlawful leaks that came from hacks of the Democratic National Committee emails?
But that was then. Now his cheerleading for leaks against other people has turned to condemnation of secrets leaked from his own administration.
The president was particularly upset by the departure of his National Security Adviser Michael Flynn after he admitted to misleading Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador about U.S. sanctions before Trump took office.
Trump praised the departed Flynn as "a wonderful man" who "has been treated very, very unfairly by the media." Even though it was Trump, not the media, who fired Flynn, media tend to be too inviting of a target for Trump to resist.
A couple of days before he put the media on the same level as the Islamic State and other public enemies, he fumed in a morning tweet: "Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?). Just like Russia."
A few hours later, he sounded like the "shocked, shocked" prefect of police in "Casablanca" as he tweeted about "classified information (being) illegally given out by 'intelligence' like candy. Very un-American!"
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