By Jeff Robbins
7/3/18
After five employees at Maryland’s Capital Gazette were murdered last week, Donald Trump issued the serviceable statement that his staff undoubtedly insisted he make. “Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from fear of being violently attacked while doing their jobs.” This bit of checking-the-box would have been well and good but for one small problem. First as candidate and now as president, Trump has attacked journalists both individually and collectively with historic viciousness, encouraging his crowds to turn on them and his supporters to hate them. He has done so in terms and tone that would have fit neatly within the playbooks of the most notorious authoritarians, dictators and outright fascists on the planet over the past century, without precedent in the America poised for its annual celebration of independence from the rule of tyrants. The list of examples is well known and well-nigh endless: the repeated labeling of the press as “the enemy of the people,” a phrase used so ruthlessly by Joseph Stalin, as “very dishonest,” and as “a pile of garbage.” The mocking of a reporter’s disability, the stuff of fifth grade bullies. The taunting of reporters who had the temerity to ask him questions, or to question his assertions. The president has actively enlisted others in inciting hatred of journalists. His closest allies have followed his lead with enthusiasm; National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch, one of many who have answered the call, proclaimed that journalists should be “curb-stomped” for being “the rat bastards of the earth.”
Trump’s profession of concern that journalists be able to carry out their constitutionally protected responsibilities without fear of reprisal is simply more in the endless flow of hooey. The truth is that we have listened to so much balderdash from the president, ranging from phony to just false, that by now the experience of having a leader so practiced at con-artistry barely leaves an impression on us. Our president, whose supporters include Ku Klux Klansmen and other white supremacists, could not bring himself to simply condemn the incitement and the violence of neo-Nazis at Charlottesville. His attorney general announced with fanfare a policy of wrenching young immigrant children away from their parents, while he variously boasted about it, falsely blamed others for it and defended it. Almost half of our countrymen are either substantially untroubled by this spectacle or enthusiastically embrace it. And that means that, on the eve of this marking of our founding and the annual tribute-paying to American values, the hard and painful fact is that we are not the country we thought we were, let alone the one we had hoped to be. On July Fourth eve, there is much in our past of which to be proud. The last 18 months, however, are not part of it. What has made America great is a deep, real regard for the First Amendment, for diversity, for tolerance and for civility. What we have recently witnessed from the president and too many of his supporters is not greatness. It will be up not only to the president who follows Donald Trump to figure out a way to make America great again, but to Americans themselves.
