Trump Takes Aim at the Press, With a Flamethrower
“Coming off the violence in Charlottesville, with tensions so high
and the kindling so dry, it felt like President Trump was playing recklessly with fire, singling out a specific group of people — the media — for disliking America and trying to erase our country’s heritage,” Jim VandeHei, chief executive of the Axios news website, told me.
Yet there he was in Phoenix on Tuesday, telling a crowd of thousands of ardent supporters
that journalists were “sick people” who he believes “don’t like our country,” and are “trying to take away our history and our heritage.”
Mr. Trump’s latest attack on the media came at a time of heightened racial tension stoked by a white supremacists’ rally in Charlottesville, Va., and continuing now in the national debate over removing statues
that commemorate Confederate figures from the Civil War.
Look at how People’s Daily of China disputed reports about the torture
that the human rights lawyer Xie Yang said he had endured at the hands of government interrogators, calling it “Fake News,” and how Cambodia threatened to expel foreign news organizations, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, because of Mr. Trump’s assertions that reporters were dishonest.
“When you see 15,000 people turn on your colleagues behind a rope, yeah, you worry about
it,” George Stephanopoulos, the chief anchor for ABC News, told me on Wednesday.
Every time you think President Trump’s anti-press rhetoric can’t get worse, he
finds a way of surprising you and not surprising you all at the same time.
“He’s just wrong to paint so wildly with such a broad brush, and, worse, putting reporters at real risk of retribution or violence.”
The president’s remarks on Tuesday were diciest for the news organizations that he identified by name.
