Trump brings a new edge to Reagan's 'South Succotash'

President Donald Trump expressed a familiar beef in his recent travels: The "fake news" media won't cover his fake news.

"What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening," he told a crowd estimated at 4,000 Tuesday at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, Mo.

What people were seeing and reading was a mixed picture of whether his trade war is a good idea. For example, Trump would celebrate Thursday the reopening of a U.S. Steel plant in Granite City, Ill., near St. Louis. Officials credited the reopening to Trump's steel and aluminum tariffs on China and other steel exporters.

But China struck back with retaliatory tariffs that were hurting the state's soybean farmers, who, as the Chicago Tribune reported, ship more to China than any other state. By Thursday, in Iowa, Trump would be touting a plan to provide as much as $12 billion in emergency relief to farmers caught in the crossfire of the trade war that his tariffs ignited.

At the VFW gathering he singled out a sad story about farmers that he saw on NBC earlier in the day. "It was heart-throbbing," he said. I think he meant "heartbreaking," unless he has a previously undisclosed coronary condition. "In fact, I wanted to say, 'I got to do something about this Trump. Terrible.' "

But, no, the real problem, he said in an oddly paranoid-sounding scenario, is that NBC's piece was "done by the lobbyists and by the people that they hire," whoever that is.

Advising farmers and other Americans to "just be a little patient," he pulled a familiar rhetorical move: He pointed at the press riser, attacked "the fake news" media and assured the crowd, "Stick with us. Don't believe the crap you see from these people."

With that, he reminded me of another president's media complaints. "Is it news," asked Ronald Reagan in 1982, "that some fellow out in South Succotash someplace who has just been laid off should be interviewed nationwide?"

You bet. The journalist's job is to cover news, not make us comfortable.

But Reagan, as some of us news consumers recall, responded to such media disclosures with jolly kindness compared to today's president. Reagan didn't have Twitter to get his message out, but "The Great Communicator," as one of his aides branded him, didn't need any such gadgets either.

After Trump's speech, in which he laced into prominent Democrats, the nonpartisan VFW issued something else that differentiated him from Reagan: an apology. "We were disappointed to hear some of our members boo the press," VFW spokeswoman Randi Law said in a statement. "We rely on the media to help spread the VFW's message, and CNN, NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS, and others on site today, were our invited guests. We were happy to have them there."

Thank you, fellow veterans. As a Vietnam-era Army draftee, I was as disappointed to hear the VFW crowd's booing along with the president as I was by the booing that similarly broke out when Trump attacked his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton and then-President Barack Obama in his speech to the National Boy Scout Jamboree last year. Some things should stay above partisan politics.

"Have those veterans who booed and taunted the media in response to Trump's cue forgotten that some members of the press corps are combat veterans?" wrote Martha Raddatz, chief global affairs correspondent at ABC News in a Washington Post op-ed.

"We shared foxholes," read the headline in print editions of the piece, "Now they boo us."

She described her decades of working alongside American soldiers in the Middle East and the trusting bond between reporters and the press. She cited journalists who have given their lives while reporting from war zones and others whose reporting of the treatment of wounded veterans resulted in improvements by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Unfortunately that public service side of journalism is not what people always see, especially in coverage that runs up against their own political positions. Trump, new to politics but a master of media messaging, knows that the old warning against making an enemy of someone who buys ink by the barrel has gone out of style in the digital age. Almost.

Trump all but gave the game away by declaring, "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening." Both news media and news consumers need to be aware of the polarizing impact that competing versions of reality can have on our democracy. Otherwise we risk devolving into the divided society that our real enemies want us to be.

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