Boehlert: Trump's war on the media descends into murder claim, threat to "close down" Twitter

[Dennis Donovan]

Trump's war on the media descends into murder claim, threat to "close down" Twitter (PressRun link)

Eric Boehlert

Trump is this close to demanding a show trial of MSNBC's Joe Scarborough.

Wallowing into the depths of the paranoid swamp that now surrounds the West Wing, Trump continues to try to politicize the death of a young Capitol Hill staffer who died from a heart attack 19 years ago in the office of then-Congressman Scarborough. Lobbying baseless claims about the cable TV host, Trump is barreling towards new lows this week, while simultaneously lashing out at Twitter, threatening to "close" down the social media giant after it finally fact-checked one of his ceaselessly false tweets. (Twitter needs to ban Trump outright.)

As for Scarborough, Trump has stressed that the statute of limitations on the case has not expired, suggesting he'd welcome his corrupt Department of Justice to launch an outlandish, partisan murder investigation in the middle of a presidential campaign. For anyone who scoffs at the idea of the president orchestrating a murder charge against a journalist as being out of the realm of possibility, consider that six months ago nobody thought the President of the United States would be using Twitter to accuse a TV host of killing someone, and doing it over the loud, public objections of the dead woman's family.

Yet here we are, and there's no telling where we're headed in terms of Trump adopting shocking, gutter tactics. On Thursday, he’s expected to sign an executive order that would unleash the federal government on Twitter, Facebook and Google for the supposed sin of silencing conservative voices.

The sad part is, all of this was inevitable because this is how authoritarians treat the press. They do everything in their power to destroy the power of the news media by relentlessly attacking its worth and undercutting journalists with assaults and insults. Unequivocally targeting reporters as the “enemy of the people,” Trump has signaled to the GOP and to the larger conservative movement that it’s open season on the news media.

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He's announcing some sort of an executive order today.

On edit: Jim Acosta reporting:

Link to tweet

Jim Acosta @Acosta

WH draft of Executive Order expected to be signed by Trump today is aimed at some of the legal protections for social media companies under Section 230 of Communications Decency Act, CNN has confirmed. The WH has examined ways to target this provision in the past.

7:38 AM · May 28, 2020

(Boehlert does an excellent job covering media - here's a link to donate to PressRun: https://pressrun.media/subscribe )