Donald Trump’s time in office was defined by death, destruction, disarray, and multiple attacks on democracy. Yet we must never forget that Trump’s legacy also includes an evil milestone, reached in 2018, when the
United States, for the first time ever, ranked among the top five deadliest countries for journalists. For context, other “top” nations were Afghanistan, Syria, Mexico, India, and Yemen. This was the same year that Trump first called the press “the enemy of the people.”
Though 2020 and the Trump administration are in our rearview mirror, the situation has gotten even more dire. Disturbingly, the
number of journalists killed worldwide in 2020 doubled from 2019.
We have to remember that a free press was viewed as so important to our foundational democracy, it was the only profession the Founding Fathers named in our Constitution. It’s the best, last hope against tyranny, which is exactly why authoritarians hate it so much. Trump’s purposeful attacks on the media not only encouraged violence against journalists in this country, but gave regimes elsewhere a blueprint to crack down on their own press. Dictators, from
Bashir-Al Assad to
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, used the Trumpian term “fake news” to
justify their own violent attacks on journalists who attempted to hold them accountable. The junta in Myanmar is
using a similar argument to justify shutting down internet access amidst a coup.
Donald Trump’s time in office was defined by death, destruction, disarray, and multiple attacks on democracy. Yet we must never forget that Trump’s legacy also includes an evil milestone, reached in 2018, when the United States, for the first time...
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The enemy of the people