Enemy of the People
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 J Trump, President of the United States, 8/5/18
They are “…sick, dangerous, an enemy of the people.” They are so dangerous that the President of the United States, using his “bully pulpit,” has made them the primary target of his attacks. In our reality show political world, he has cast himself as the “hero” facing the massive attack of lies and hate.
Many Presidents have set up “alternative enemies” to their “good guy” images: George W. Bush and the “axis of evil,” Ronald Reagan and the “evil empire.” And every President has had conflicts with the press. But, other than Richard Nixon, none have tried to establish the press as his personal enemy. And even Nixon did not try to incite this level of hatred towards them.
President Trump has made his administration’s primary goal to attack the “MSM” (mainstream media), trying to make them seem the evil enemy threatening to destroy the United States. And, with one very notable exception, Fox News, he has claimed that the press is willing to lie, steal, create stories out of nothing, and in fact are willing to do anything to “destroy” the Trump Administration.
It is normal for a President to find domestic “rivals” to contrast his views and programs. In Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration, the first two years with a Congress of his own party was deemed a failure, most notably with healthcare. The Congress was more “progressive” than the President, and Republicans weren’t supporting him. It made Clinton look weak.
It wasn’t until the “Revolution of 1994,” when Congress swung to the right with the Republican Newt Gingrich as the new Speaker, that Clinton began to find success. It was in contrasting with the Gingrich’s House of Representatives that Clinton was seen as becoming a more effective executive. The government was shut down, and Clinton “won” the exchange. He was able to “compromise” and achieve some legislative action.
Trump is in a similar position, starting from when he entered office in 2016. His Republican Congress provided little contrast, but an immense amount of frustration. Trump was the “leader” of the party, but, even as the “great deal maker” he was unable to negotiate many of his legislative programs, notably immigration and health care. He needed to find a contrast, “bête noire” to rail against, and one that wasn’t a war hero and tragically ill.
The “liberal, corrupt, and dishonest” media became the perfect foil. Jim Acosta and Don Lemmon of CNN are constant targets of the Presidential “tweets,” and Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski at MSNBC are “personal friends” who have “turned against him.” The “failing New York Times” and the “Amazon/Bezo’s Washington Post” are both under constant attack.
This use of the media as his foil has two major values for Trump. First: it gives his base something to focus on, an enemy that can be vilified and insulted. While that is apparent at more recent Trump rallies, with signs, middle-finger salutes, and shouted profanities; it has been going on almost from the beginning. The only slightly veiled contempt that Press Secretary Sarah Sanders uses when addressing the press conferences; and the unbridled hatred shown by senior advisor Stephen Miller; all set the tone that encourages more public attacks. Trump needs to be seen as “winning.” It’s not happening: not on the world stage, not in the courts, and even not in Congress. So he can win against the press.
As a long time coach I learned something early: to have a winning record, schedule losing opponents. But I also soon learned something else: to get the best out of my athletes, I needed to test them against the best opponents. We might lose, but we would become better. Trump has picked an opponent, the press, that generally doesn’t fight back. He wins, but he doesn’t get better, or in this case, achieve a lot of his goals.
Should the Democrats take back the House, the Senate, or both; it is likely that Trump, like Clinton, will focus his attacks on the Democrats instead of the media. It’s a healthier target, and one that he can more effectively defeat, getting “more wins.”
The second value of attacking the media is more insidious. If the President can get a large portion of the American people believing that the “facts” as reported are lies, then when the truth of his campaigns corruption and alignment with Russian intelligence is revealed, it will be more difficult to believe. If he can establish that the press is in fact, “…the enemy of the people;” then when the press reports the reality of the Mueller results, the President can brush them off as, well, “fake news.”
Twenty-five percent of Americans still approved of Richard Nixon the day he resigned from office. That was in an era when most trusted in the press. In our much more fragmented news environment today, especially one with Fox News as the Presidential spokesman; there will be a much higher percentage of Americans who will not believe in Mueller’s truths. Whether that number will be so high as to prevent action against the President, it’s hard to know. But what we do know is that the President is doing everything he can to bolster that group, by making the press the “enemy of the people.”
“The American people have good common sense;” that’s what Chet Huntley said as he left the NBC Huntley-Brinkley report for the last time in 1970. It was a time of crisis and tumult too, Vietnam and Civil Rights and Nixon as President. We will need all of the “good common sense” we can muster in the next several months. I believe America will find it.
