This Thursday, a large number of newspapers from across the country will separately produce independent editorials concerning Trump’s constant and virulent attacks on the media. I’m looking forward to reading some of them but will first add my own small voice to the mix.
Although there are many examples, this tweet seems representative as a starting point:
The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!
– Donald Trump, August 2018
Let’s first try a mental exercise.
Imagine for a moment that Barack Obama had issued this exact statement during his Presidency. Close your eyes and picture the immediate reaction of the Republican Party. Personally, I see a tree. And some rope.
At a bare minimum, does anyone believe that McConnell and Ryan would not have called for a full retraction from Obama under the threat of impeachment? They would have argued that such a direct challenge to the First Amendment easily rose to the “high crimes” threshold in the Constitution. And they wouldn’t have been wrong.
Clearly, all Presidents have had issues with their press coverage. Every occupant of the White House would certainly prefer stories that favored their policies, ignored their mistakes, and cheered their accomplishments. Most have understood that to be wishful thinking. Trump, unfortunately, sees the state-run media in Russia and North Korea constantly praising their leaders and he expects the same treatment from the American press. That’s just not the way it works in a democracy.
Several conservative politicians and commentators, while voicing tepid disapproval of Trump’s angry tweets toward the press, have largely dismissed them as some variation of “Trump being Trump”. This needs to stop and it needs to stop now. This is not normal political rhetoric and it cannot be deemed acceptable simply due to the fact that it is coming from Donald Trump. The man is the President of the United States, not the old man down the street screaming at kids to get off his lawn. His tirades have gone far beyond random statements of annoyance. His language is now dangerous.
Beyond the constitutional issues, Trump’s constant dismissal of any negative press coverage as “Fake News” is also particularly offensive given his own total disregard for the truth.
Just yesterday, Trump claimed that the newly approved National Defense Authorization Act provided an “historic” $700 billion for the military. As reported in the New York Times, Obama passed an even larger military budget his first year in office. So that’s a pretty short span of history. Much more ludicrous was Trump’s claim that “They never gave us money for the military for years and years. And it was depleted.” Uh, no. The military’s annual budget has averaged about $600 billion for each of the past several years.
There is an excellent, apolitical essay titled “On Bullshit” written in 2005 by Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosophy professor, which discusses the differences between a lie and bullshit. In essence, a lie is a deliberate attempt to subvert a truth while bullshit requires no conviction at all with respect to the truth. Bullshit is produced when someone is unconcerned with facts and when any notion of objective truth is simply irrelevant to the argument being made. Since a lie at least requires knowledge and acceptance of the actual truth, Frankfurt posits that bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than a lie.
It’s a valid distinction and a relevant hypothesis.
A cornerstone of American democracy is a free press. It is not the job of the media to stroke Trump’s massive ego. It is their job to call bullshit.