President Donald Trump is again on Twitter attacking the media and frankly sounding strikingly authoritarian. On Tuesday, Trump said that the New York Times should “get down on their knees & beg for forgiveness” for its coverage of his presidency and again called the newspaper “the enemy of the people.” It is easy to dismiss such comments as Trump’s signature mantra but it is far more serious for a president to use such rhetoric to denounce journalists. As someone who has strongly criticized some coverage for biased reporting over the last two years, it is difficult to maintain a neutral viewpoint when the President is engaging in such hyperbolic and reckless comments. The President is justified in objecting to some of the coverage of the media, but he destroys any credibility in that position when he is tweeting diatribes of this kind.
Trump tweeted: “I wonder if the New York Times will apologize to me a second time, as they did after the 2016 Election. But this one will have to be a far bigger & better apology. On this one they will have to get down on their knees & beg for forgiveness—they are truly the Enemy of the People!” Trump tweeted.
No, American media does not get on its knees before any politician to beg forgiveness. That is something found in other countries like China and Iran. More importantly, the New York Times has time and time again disclosed stories that have revealed corruption and deception in our government at critical historical moments. From the Civil Rights Movement to the Pentagon Papers to Watergate, the New York Times have protected core rights and democratic values through its coverage. That does not mean that it has been correct in all of its coverage of Trump. However, even as someone who long questioned that the Mueller investigation would result in criminal findings, many of the key media accounts were reaffirmed by Mueller in his report.
Trump specifically attacked Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman, whose latest op-ed stated that “one of our two parties”—the Republican Party—“no longer believes in American values.” It further accuses Trump of willingly accepting the held of a “hostile foreign power” during the election: “Paul Krugman of the Fake News New York Times, has lost all credibility, as has the Times itself, with his false and highly inaccurate writings on me. He is obsessed with hatred, just as others are obsessed with how stupid he is. He said Market would crash, Only Record Highs!”
Krugman is a commentator expressing his opinion. I have no problem with Trump contesting that opinion but that does not make him or his paper an “enemy of the people.”
Trump also added “In the ‘old days’ if you were President and you had a good economy, you were basically immune from criticism. Remember, ‘It’s the economy stupid.’ Today I have, as President, perhaps the greatest economy in history… and to the Mainstream Media, it means NOTHING. But it will!”
I am not sure when those “old days” were but they were hardly good ole days. Just because an economy is doing well does not mean that president would not be criticized for alleged acts of obstruction or wrongdoing. Nixon was not facing impeachment because the economy was bad. We expect our presidents to conduct themselves with honor, integrity, and adherence to the law (both in letter and spirit). We do not apply a lower standard if our investment funds are up an added 10 percent.
What concerns me is the moral relativism in that last comment. Trump often seems to treat his conduct as immaterial if he is improving the economy. We do not even apply that standard to CEOs who have been sacked even when they produce good returns for their investors. Harvey Weinstein was incredibly successful as was Roger Ailes. It did not matter because conduct matters.
I realize that the President is unlikely to stop these reckless comments but that should not mean that we should simply go silent and shrug when he engages in such unhinged attacks. As discussed today, polls are showing that 57 percent of voters now disapprove of his performance. If anything, the fact that the economy is doing well should concentrate the President’s mind on his comments and conduct. If the President had adopted a more circumspect and presidential approach, he would likely be enjoying a far greater level of support. Indeed, given the many self-inflicted wounds in the Mueller report, much of the controversies over the last two years could have been avoided.
We expect our presidents to conduct themselves with honor, integrity, and adherence to the law (both in letter and spirit).
What we are you referring to? Whoever that we is, they are not living in reality. If that expectation was realistic, then we should just shut down the other branches of government and let the uber president handle stuff with his pen and phone.
Olly,
My guess is that the reference is about Bill Clinton….he topped both Bush41 and Bob Dole in the areas of “Honor and Integrity”.🤭🙄
When somebody very recently stressed the importance of character in a president, that “character matters”, I commented that the voters decided in the 1990s how much it mattered.
Which is not very much.
Well, it does matter. There was an abrupt change in the political ecosystem around about 1990.
Two things:
1. Partisan Democrats commonly have no principles. Merely improvisations.
2. There actually is a principle at stake, but it’s a morally unserious one. Trump flouts the witless p’s and q’s the media wing of the Democratic Party have been enforcing for about 40 years now. For Democrats, this is criminal. They might just lose control of public discourse, and they hate that.
Absurd,
I still say that the American voters put that issue to rest in the 1990s.
I wasn’t claiming that it SHOULD N’T matter; I was saying that, as a whole, it’s not that important to the electorate anymore.
I find this interesting, some how some youtube links, when I post them, show up as different videos?
Then later the original will show up. WTH?
Yep, & now it shows the correct video, CNN claims they’re not the enemy of the people cartoon.
Can’t argue with facts which the NYT has proven over and over and over again but really everyone without any cognizance has watched them wade in the muck for forty or fifty years so it’s no big news, nothing else is expected from them and to tell the real truth they are gettng very boring. As for NYC if it wasn’t for 911 they would still be remembered as the right coast armpit of the nation along with SF as the left and DC as the …….well only one choice so it’s an easy question. Kind of hate to beat up on them so let’s get NYCs ony triumph out in the open for a cheer. They have been running for the new Moscow for so long and relegated SF to the new Beijing so their is only one left to beat out of first place.
KUSHNER CLAIMS MUELLER PROBE..
DID MORE HARM THAN RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE
Jared Kushner on Tuesday said he believes the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election have been “way more harmful to our democracy” than the interference itself.
“If you look what Russia did, you know, buying some Facebook ads to try to sow dissent, it’s a terrible thing,” Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and White House senior adviser, said during the inaugural Time 100 summit here. “But I think the investigations and the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple Facebook ads.”
Russia did more than buy a “couple Facebook ads,” U.S. investigators have determined. Last year, the U.S. Department of Justice charged 13 Russians and three Russian entities for allegedly carrying out an elaborate plot to interfere in the 2016 election. The Russian operatives allegedly used fake social media accounts, created false advertisements and even traveled to the United States in an effort to support Trump’s White House bid — and to disparage his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. The Kremlin-linked troll farm Internet Research Agency also organized “dozens” of political rallies in the U.S. with the purpose of sowing political discord, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian election interference, which he called “sweeping and systematic.”
Facebook recently acknowledged that at least two networks linked to Russia spent about $160,000 on ads to promote its disinformation campaign. Kushner, who was an adviser to the Trump campaign and considered the architect of its social media operation, scoffed at the figure.
Edited from: “Jared Kusner: Russia Investigations ‘More Harmful To Democracy’ than ‘A Couple of Facebook Ads'”
AOL NEWS, 4/23/19
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Kushner made these statements at symposium hosted by Time Magazine. According to Kushner, Americans don’t really need to know about foreign interference in our elections. After all, it was just ‘a few Facebook ads; no big deal at all’.
Americans didn’t need to know, for instance, that Russian military intelligence units were involved in the interference. And we didn’t need to know that Russian operatives made numerous efforts to contact members of Trump’s campaign. Nor did we need to know that Trump’s aides had to restrain him from quashing the probe. All these findings were just ‘too political’ in Kushner’s view.
We should know about any interference in the election process. We should also know the relative size of the effort (e.g., $100K vs $100M for Facebook ads, etc.). We should also know about the interference by the U.S. in foreign elections, etc. We should know it all.
You are absurd: $160,000 for Facebook ads is comical. And that’s all you’ve got. How embarrassing. $160,000 for ads does amount to “a couple of ads.”
Peter Shill is throwing everything and anything he can copy/paste.
Next he will start pasting all of the listings in the white pages starting with AL, AK, AR….nah he will probably skip AR since the good people are still suffering from Post-Traumatic Clinton Disorder
Estovir, your comments take me back to 7th Grade. In that regard you personify the typical Trump supporter.
The media plays a far greater role than most presidential comments in shaping public opinion. As a result, it is not true that it is “far more serious for a president to use such rhetoric to denounce journalists”.
Presidents come and go but the media is always here and plays a permanent role in a democratic society. It is afforded protection by Article 1 of the Constitution because its role in our society is viewed as essential. Today, however, the U.S. has only a sliver of true media left. The vast majority of the media no longer report news but rather editorialized news which prevents the public from obtaining essential facts needed for informed decisions at the ballot box and elsewhere.
Two wrongs don’t make a right but Trump’s response is understandable and is preferred to keeping anger bottled up. Trump has been remarkably effective while subjected to a constant barrage of garbage from the media from the day he announced his candidacy. A lesser individual would have gone to ground, “disappeared” for four years and wasted four years, as too many presidents have done.
Colion, your argument seems to be that Trump’s unhinged reactions are simply healthy expressions of frustration by a man wrongly maligned. Like ‘scream therapy’, for instance. Like we should take heart in the fact that our president ‘gets things off his chest’ rather than keeping them ‘bottled up’.
Your rational is known by another term: ‘Deviating Down’.
Unhinged is in the eye of the beholder.
Americans have learned to ignore The Democrats and the Main Screed Media
——
Many Reject Mueller’s Findings But Not Sure Why
Monday, April 22, 2019
A sizable number of voters don’t agree with the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, although many of them are not exactly sure why. Most voters think politics is the reason for the criticism.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that a plurality (47%) of Likely U.S. Voters agrees with Mueller’s conclusion that there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and no prosecutable obstruction of justice by President Trump. Thirty-nine percent (39%) disagree, while 15% are not sure.
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted on April 18 and 21, 2019 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC.
The NYT is nothing more than political rhetoric in print and has about as much value. Good riddance to bad journalism.
“If the President had adopted a more circumspect and presidential approach….
Had he adopted any of your ideas he would have been elected President to defeat the Kracken, the Main Stream “enemy of the people” Media and the most demagogue of all demagogues, the Clinton Machinery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrIJLWISdlQ&app=desktop
Let Trump be Trump as if you had any choice. Have your tizzy if you must (drama queen?) but the man is a billionaire, had a monster real estate empire, ran a successful TV series and was elected president of the USA as stipulated by the US Constitution
Get over yourself and while you’re at it, start drafting papers on the corruption of DOJ, FBI, CIA under Obama, and “the third rail” falling over the edge since Richard Nixon
You have to be kidding! After the President of the United States of America was called ‘traitor”, “enemy agent” and God knows what else you come off with this BS.
TRUMP’S TWEETS SINCE MUELLER REPORT..
CONFIRM HIS IRRATIONAL, PARANOID STATE OF MIND
In case anyone thought The Mueller Report ‘exonerated Trump’, the president’s tweets and statements on said report have been more unbalanced than ever. No politician with any degree of savvy would respond with such language. On Thursday alone Trump dispatched a series of tweets that could have been written by Gambino boss John Gotti.
Professor Turley’s column above includes a link to Paul Krugman’s April 22 column. That column contains the following paragraph:
“The key point is that Republicans are committed to a policy agenda that is deeply unpopular. By large margins, the American public believes that corporations and the wealthy don’t pay their fair share in taxes. By even larger margins, the public opposes cuts to safety-net programs like Medicaid. Yet as far as I can tell, every G.O.P. budget proposal over the past decade has combined big tax cuts for the rich with savage cuts in Medicaid”.
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Krugman points out what should be obvious to everyone: ‘The Republican agenda is essentially at war with the needs of most Americans’. It’s the Koch Brothers agenda; reflecting the views of libertarians with no connection to average folks. Mitch McConnell has championed this agenda for years. So how do Republicans win any elections at all?
Republicans, enabled by right-wing media, win elections by what they’re against. They’re against abortion, gun regulations, ‘socialized medicine’, civil rights and urban America in general. These views all resonate with older Whites outside big cities. This voting block sees Trump as their ‘only choice’. Which explains why support for Trump is always, always prefaced with “What about Hillary?”
Troll
Send us new trolls. The present ones are tired, predictable and infertile
Good stuff, the problem here is the Trolls here keep changing their handles after they bottom out with their BS and return.
“strikingly authoritarian”? Surely you must be joking!
After more than 2 years of the worst character assassination any sitting President has had to endure what the hell do you expect? R U a snowflake? You should read Victor Davis Hanson’s book – The Case For Trump. You just might then understand who it was that was elected President by our system of elections. I will vote for him AGAIN!
Even a blind sow can stumble across an acorn, but it will come up empty more times than not.
When it comes to observation of Trump and his administration, JT is just as blind, rarely finding reality or truth while foraging only on left-wing ground where media droids indoctrinate the electorate with promotion of open borders, sanctuary for illegals, abortion, selective censorship, increased taxation and growth of government.
JT’s dual standard is not unlike that of conflicted abortion proponents, who are already born, having absolutely no problem with murdering the unborn.
Question for the smart one- is Trump holding his own with just his Tweets? I think it is a Davis and Goliath story.
NYT didn’t cover the Appalachian Outlaws during Ginseng Season
Jon: you seem surprised at today’s diatribe. Trump IS unhinged. He IS petty and vindictive. He DOES aspire to be a dictator. He really thinks that the NYT should get down on its knees and beg his forgiveness. For what, exactly? He doesn’t understand the role journalism plays in a free country. All he knows is that he got to be POTUS, even though he cheated to do it and received fewer votes than HRC, so now the world should kiss his big, fat ass. He really doesn’t understand that he has nothing to do with the economy. He inherited a robust economy, after President Obama turned around the worse economy since the Great Depression. In fact, the economy is slowing down, in part because the tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy have hurt people who aren’t in the 1%. The fact that we aren’t in a recession doesn’t mean that he deserves praise, or even that he had anything to do with it. We’ve already covered the Mueller report. Trump and his son refused to be interviewed, and Trump’s attorney-drafted responses to questions were not complete nor satisfactory. The Russians did not sit for interviews, either. Mueller’s hands were tied. There was no way he could prove conspiracy without full information from at least one of the conspirators, which he couldn’t get. TRUMP DIDN’T WIN. In fact, Mueller described him as “corrupt”, which he is. There is a massive amount of disturbing evidence about his conduct, which is more than sufficient for impeachment.
Bear this in mind, too: as to Bill Clinton, none of his dishonest statements about the Lewinski matter had any implications for the country as a whole. The entire investigation was a politically-motivated hit job. However, everything about Trump’s corruption does have implications for all of us, including his attempts to do business with Russian oligarchs, feeding Russians sensitive polling information, and interference with our elections, which he refuses to admit, much less address in any meaningful manner.
You seem to think, Jon, that somehow Trump is going to wake up one day and be “circumspect and presidential”. Nope. Not going to happen. He is a malignant narcissist, and is now displaying delusions of grandeur: “enemy of the people”. Dear Trump: most of “the people” didn’t vote for you and most of “the people” have consistently disapproved of you. You have set one record, however: the longest-running low approval ratings in the history of presidential polling. All the presidency has ever meant to him is attention and adulation to feed his narcissism.
One other point: because he can’t think on his tiny feet and because he is so corrupt and messes up every time he is interviewed, he communicates via Twitter. He goes on rants when the world isn’t bowing down to him. He’s no statesman.
you go on rants too I guess
the difference is, yours are the cries of a mosquito and his are the roars of a dragon
Lewinski didn’t matter but the Whitewater investigation did
“Vacuum Rose law firm files” was Hillary’s command of course, to destroy evidence.
It’s entirely possible she was responsible for whatever trouble Bill Clinton had of many different things.
But they didn’t collude with a hostile foreign government to hijack our elections, dispute the truth of the facts uncovered by our intelligence agencies on such election interference, and then didn’t do anything significant to help prevent it from happening again.
Ladies and Gentlemen — this TDS rant by Natacha is what a steady diet of MSNBC/CNN does to your brain. Remember that old commercial where they hold up an egg and say, “this is your brain”….then they crack it open and drop it into a fying pan and say, “this is your brain on drugs”…? Well, this right here is an example of Natacha’s brain on BSNBC and DNC talking points. Her brain is being fried like an egg. 😉
Here is a new twist on the tag line from the film Love Story: Journalism is.never having to say you’re sorry.
Well, this is all true and I don’t disagree. But the only reason this comment of Trump’s gets as much play as it does is because there is a lot of truth to the idea that the NYT had (and has) a political agenda. There has long been much great writing on this fact (see Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, for example, Noam Chomsky, etc.), and it is no secret to anyone that the “paper of record” was committed to dethroning Trump from day one, and sought in the most irresponsible manner (from a journalistic point of view) to pump up the specious spy thriller of Trump and Putin conspiring to fix the election. Even after the Mueller report, however, the Times is now doubling down on the “Russia threat”, just in case anyone would get the idea in his or her head that Russia did not have to be an enemy of the United States which poses a mortal threat to democracy. Thus, the Times, along with its media counterparts, is indeed an enemy of the people, though that does not warrant Trump insinuating that it should be met with a violent response, or that it should be shut down. In this respect, it is ironic that the Times has not roared to the defense of Julian Assange, but I’ve long adjusted to the fact that the paper would never stand on that kind of principle. The Times is primarily in the business of manufacturing consent, and thus is frequently an intellectual enemy of the general public. That public would do well to educate itself about how it is misled by the paper’s illustrious reputation into believing that its coverage has some kind of extra credibility that “alternative” media lacks. When the paper ceases to do what it has always done with few exceptions, and actually challenges the political establishment without fear or favor, then Trump’s comments will fizzle out like the rest of the moronic blather in his brain.
exactly. the accusation is well merited.
who was that guy, walter duranty? didnt the NYT print all his lies about how wonderful the USSR was in the middle of collectivization that caused a major famine in Ukraine in the 30s that killed a million or more? dishrag it is, but the fiction is well written.
The New York Slimes is an enemy of truth.
Yeah, just an accident that everything we read there about Trump Tower, Papadopulous, WH chaos, etc has been confirmed by the FBI.
not confirmed except in the penumbras of the vague writing style filled with innuendo that passes for journalism today from the local broadsheet to the dishrag of record
They are not Journalists at the New York Times they are propagandists there is a difference. In my opinion they are the enemy of the people as with all “propaganda”. President Trump is NOT a politician he is a Business that saved your Country. God Bless America and Her POTUS! Graham Moore, London, England.
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