Voters had delivered the president to the White House for a second term, disregarding news about arrests and indictments of former aides accused of breaking the law to help keep him in power. Now, the newly emboldened president and his top officials had a message for the reporters who covered it all so aggressively: It was payback time.
As senior officials blasted journalists as “arrogant elitists” out of touch with “real America,” the administration threatened the licenses of local TV stations carrying the major networks’ newscasts and moved to slash funding for the “liberal-slanted” PBS.
The president was not Donald J. Trump. He was Richard M. Nixon. The scandal he thought he had outrun, Watergate, would ultimately force his resignation. And his brazen anti-press moves, which initially appeared to cow journalists, would stall in an onslaught of revelations about his role in covering up wrongdoing in his West Wing.
That dark chapter in media history is suddenly relevant again, as the second administration of President Trump resorts to a heavy-handed approach to traditional journalists that has all the hallmarks of his predecessor’s attempted press crackdown some 50 years ago.
Trump’s Blueprint for Bending the Media Has Nixon Written All Over It
Trump and Musk Attack Journalists by Name in Social Media Posts
President Trump has made clear his animus toward mainstream media organizations. Now he’s getting more personal.
Mr. Trump and his key lieutenant, Elon Musk, who has been empowered to run what they call the Department of Government Efficiency as a “special government employee,” have attacked journalists by name in recent days on the social media platforms they own: Truth Social and X.
On his Truth Social account on Friday, Mr. Trump called for The Washington Post to fire Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, and labeled him “incompetent.” Mr. Trump frequently posts on the account to his millions of followers and regularly condemns perceived enemies.
Mr. Robinson had written in an opinion column on Thursday that top Republican senators “should be ashamed of themselves” for not standing up to Mr. Trump during the confirmation process for some of his cabinet picks and for not protesting Mr. Musk’s taking an ax to government departments like the United States Agency for International Development, which administers foreign aid programs. Mr. Robinson also appeared on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Friday to discuss his column.
Trump and Musk Attack Journalists by Name in Social Media Posts
Not that attacks on the media are anything new for Don. They are a big part of his schtick. But they are a bit more ominous now that we've seen folks like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and CBS allow trump to sodomize them. Absent the lube.
After Bezos ended the WaPo's tradition of endorsing a prez candidate, followed by the resignation of an op-ed columnist and a political cartoonist in protest of a newly imposed editorial policy designed not to ruffle trump's feathers, should Eugene Robinson be polishing up his resume for stating the obvious? Namely, Repubs should be ashamed of themselves for not speaking out against trump because they know better.
Achieving a cowed and diminished press is autocratic rule 101. Success doesn't necessitate firing journalists though. It can be more subtle. Like coercing them in to not writing a piece they would ordinarily write out of fear of retribution.
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