David Remnick: Trump and the Enemies of the People

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https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/trump-and-the-enemies-of-the-people

Trump and the Enemies of the People
By David Remnick
August 15, 2018
The refusal to bend to President Trump’s assault on the press is essential to the future of American democracy.

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Nearly every day, Trump makes his hostility clear. He refers to reporters as “scum,” “slime,” and “sick people.” They are cast as unpatriotic––“I really think they don’t like our country,” he says. They are “trying to take away our history and our heritage.” Trump has smeared critical news organizations as “fake news,” a term gleefully adopted by Putin, Bashar al-Assad, and other autocrats who are delighted to have their own repressive reflexes endorsed by an American President. Trump has threatened to sue publishers, cancel broadcast licenses, change libel laws. He betrays no sense of understanding, much less of endorsing, the rudiments of American liberty. During a visit from the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, Trump told reporters that he thought it was “frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write.”

By casting the press as an “enemy,” Trump is not merely joining a long list of Presidents who have bristled at criticism. He goes much further than his predecessors, including paranoiacs like Richard Nixon, who assembled a secret “enemies list” and raged in the Oval Office to his chief of staff about barring the Washington Post from the White House grounds. Trump’s rages are public. They are daily. And they are part of a concerted effort to undermine precepts of American constitutionalism and to cast his lot with the illiberal and authoritarian movements now on the rise around the world.

Trump’s assaults are, of course, hardly limited to the press. His targets include immigrants, African-Americans, Latinos, women, Muslims, judges, environmentalists, and any person––foreign or domestic––who dares to question him. While the world overheats, Donald Trump feels it imperative to slander LeBron James. The assaults are part of his effort to cultivate—at any cost—a core political following, turbocharged by resentments, and thereby to boost his bid for reëlection.

It would be easy to dismiss Trump’s behavior as farcical, a subplot in his reality-TV Presidency. And yet it is essential to recognize what damage the President is doing, and how intent he is on eroding inviolable rights. What the Russian experience makes plain is the fragility of press freedom. This week’s editorials on this topic, here and elsewhere, aim to maintain American vigilance in defense of that freedom. This is not a matter of the press seeking to protect itself as an interest group. The interest group in question is the United States.

Because Trump knows little about policy or history, it is tempting to imagine that he knows nothing at all. This is a mistake. He knows well that the American press is hardly popular and, in many ways, is on the defensive. He knows that many news outlets are, in his pitiless term, “failing,” or at least struggling for survival in the wake of vast changes in technology and in the advertising market. He knows that the ecosystem of information and its distribution has changed radically, and he has figured out how to exploit that change. He has seized on the capacities of right-wing radio, cable television, and social media to form an alternative, fact-free, Trumpian universe. For decades, Trump took little interest in matters of state, but he has studied the media for years. Even as a real-estate mogul, he was not a master builder; he was a master manipulator. He spent decades honing his self-aggrandizement in the pages of the New York tabloids and on local television. Then he took his graduate degree in media studies as the central figure on “The Apprentice.” He learned the dark arts of misdirection, bullying, and lying. He came to believe that he could fool enough of the people enough of the time to suit his purposes. He learned how to render himself as a distinctive and “colorful” character. He sensed the weaknesses in lesser reporters: their laziness; their willingness to cut a deal or make a trade; their desire to please an editor with cheap sensation, a “story.” He even made “catch and kill” deals with tabloids such as the National Enquirer, which protected him from carnal and financial scandal.

Just as he has made enemies of women, Muslims, Latinos, and African-Americans, Trump has calculated that it is to his political advantage to isolate skeptics in the press and declare them “enemies of the people.” At a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in December, 2015, he sarcastically set his limits where his view of the press was concerned. “I would never kill them, but I do hate them,” he said. “And some of them are such lying, disgusting people.” His supporters at such rallies take their cue from the President and shake their fists, scream epithets, make threats, and threaten violence. It would be reckless to assume that, over time, all those supporters, incited to the point of fury, of violence, will contain themselves.

Recently, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned that this demagoguery could have bloody consequences, setting in motion “a chain of events which could quite easily lead to harm being inflicted on journalists just going about their work and potentially some self-censorship.” He observed that, globally, the United States “creates a demonstration effect, which then is picked up by other countries where the leadership tends to be more authoritarian.” But, then, the language of Stalinism has always come at a cost. If it persists, a toll will be extracted from journalists, from the institutions of liberal democracy, and—here and elsewhere—from the people.