Trump's Coming War on the Free Press

If one reads accounts of how Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime came to power playing to German resentment and silencing a free and independent press were among crucial elements of Hitler's rise. Newspapers that were critical of Nazi policies and Hitler himself found their offices attacked and ransacked by Nazi thugs and subjected to threats and intimidation and outright violence. Eventually, news outlets critical of the Nazi regime were closed and silenced or driven from the county.   Trump and his MAGA henchmen would like to see similar - some in MAGA world have stated that those critical of Trump should be executed for treason.  Despite Trump's threats and seeing what has happened in Hungary or under Putin's dictatorship in Russia - critics of Putin keep falling from buildings in "accidents", including most recently the lead dancer of the Mariinsky Ballet in St. Petersburg - too many Americans continue to think and say "it cannot happen here."  This type of intentional blindness and denial of a very real threat plays directly into the hands of a would be dictator like Trump.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at Trump's coming war on America's free press.  Here are excerpts:

Reliable outfits such as the Pew Research Center report that the news media, which, in the middle of the twentieth century, was among the most highly regarded institutions in public life, now dwells in a dank basement of distrust, alongside the members of the United States Congress.

And yet there is a difference between criticism and demonization. Donald Trump has spent years painting the press as the “enemy of the people,” though he is hardly the first modern President to do so. “Never forget, the press is the enemy,” Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger, in the thick of the Watergate scandal. “Write that on a blackboard one hundred times.” Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s lieutenants, compiled an “enemies list,” which included the names of several dozen editors and reporters. . . . . The government tapped journalists’ telephones; two of Nixon’s Watergate henchmen, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, discussed plans to assassinate the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.

Trump bears at least as much resentment toward reporters as Nixon did, but his psychology is arguably more complicated, because he was initially a creation of the media. In the nineteen-eighties, as a real-estate hustler, he repeatedly called in to the tabloids about his exploits, real or imagined. . . . .More recently, Trump’s obsession with the Murdoch press, particularly Fox News, has grown so deep that he is attempting to fill crucial roles in his Administration with Fox hosts and commentators.

Trump is keenly aware that the ecology of the press has changed radically since Nixon’s day. Local papers have thinned or vanished entirely. The Old Guard outlets are struggling for audiences, subscribers, and ad revenue. So, while Trump finds refuge and amplification in friendly ports––Fox News, Newsmax, Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk’s X–––he has increasingly made plain his intent on doing battle with the rest from a position of strength. He often threatens violence and humiliation.

In his first term, Trump was so agitated about his coverage on CNN that he reportedly pushed the Department of Justice to block A.T. & T.’s acquisition of the network’s owner at the time, Time Warner. (The Justice Department denied any White House intervention, and eventually the deal went through.) Trump also is said to have urged the doubling of shipping rates for companies such as Amazon, a move that would have been onerous for Jeff Bezos, whose newspaper, the Washington Post, had the irritating habit of committing journalism critical of the Administration.

Media lawyers now fear that Trump will ramp up the deployment of subpoenas, specious lawsuits, court orders, and search warrants to seize reporters’ notes, devices, and source materials. They are gravely concerned that reporters and media institutions will be punished for leaking government secrets. The current Justice Department guidelines mandating extra procedural measures for subpoenas directed at journalists are just that: guidelines. They are likely to be shredded. Nearly every state provides journalists with at least a qualified privilege to withhold the identity of confidential sources, but there is no federal privilege, and Trump has opposed a bipartisan congressional bill that would create one, the so-called PRESS Act. “REPUBLICANS MUST KILL THIS BILL!” he posted on Truth Social.

Retribution is in the air. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections,” Kash Patel, a leading MAGA soldier, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Trump’s lawyers have already threatened or taken legal action against the Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, Penguin Random House, and others.

The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, meanwhile, calls for ending federal funding to NPR and PBS. It insists that there is “no legal entitlement” for the press to have access to the White House “campus.”

A longer-range worry is that the Supreme Court may weaken or even overturn the 1964 landmark decision New York Times v. Sullivan. Sullivan limits the ability of public officials to sue journalists for defamation, finding that the Constitution guarantees that, at a minimum, journalists can write freely and critically about public officials, as long as they don’t publish statements that they know to be false, or probably so. Nixon regarded Sullivan as “virtually a license to lie.” Trump shares the sentiment.

All these threats and potential actions are hardly the stuff of legal arcana or the frenzied obsessions of self-involved Podsnapian journalists. They are the arsenal of a would-be autocrat who seeks to intimidate his critics, protect himself from scrutiny, and go on wearing away at the liberal democratic order.