Even when something Trump says chances to be true

It’s still a lie

By Moristotle

That may seem a contradiction, but Trumps continually makes so much stuff up, we have to be skeptical of everything he says.
    It’s a sorry state of affairs when the President of the United States has no respect for truth per se, and even actively undermines the journalism We the People rely on “to constrain the abusive exercise of executive authority,” to quote the op-ed piece, “One Thing Donald Trump Would Like Is Freedom from the Press,” by Thomas B. Edsall [NY Times, March 15]. Excerpt:

More than any president in living memory, Donald Trump has conducted a dogged, remorseless assault on the press. He portrays the news media not only as a dedicated adversary of his administration but of the entire body politic. These attacks have forced the media where it does not want to be, at the center of the political debate.
    Trump’s purpose is clear. He seeks to weaken an institution that serves to constrain the abusive exercise of executive authority. He has initiated a gladiatorial contest pitting the principle of freedom of the press against a principle of his own invention: freedom from the press.
    Trump has his media favorites, Fox News and other organizations that serve as approved public relations outlets, versus the “fake news,” meaning virtually everything else....
    There is an underlying strategy to Trump’s critique of the media. Rosen continued [Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at N.Y.U.]:

Trump is not just attacking the press but the conditions that make it possible for news reports to serve as any kind of check on power. Trump is the apotheosis of this history and its accelerant. He has advanced the proposition dramatically. From undue influence (Agnew’s claim) to something closer to treason (enemy of the people.) Instead of criticizing ‘the media’ for unfair treatment, he whips up hatred for it. Some of his most demagogic performances have been exactly that. Nixon seethed about the press in private. Trump seethes in public, a very different act.

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Copyright © 2018 by Moristotle