That campaign isn't new. Attacks on news organizations (most prominently from the right but also from the left) go back at least to the 1960s. Under Trump, however, that assault has become uglier, more intense -- and more dangerous.
Calling journalists "enemies of the American people," for example, doesn't just raise echoes of past totalitarian regimes. It gives aid and comfort to present-day officials and lawmakers who want to avoid being held publicly accountable for their acts. That applies not just in the United States but internationally. Trump's anti-media rhetoric abets repressive rulers across the world who suppress independent, critical reporting in their countries.
A recent column by the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl documented the worldwide impact of Trump's anti-media assault. He reported that his search for examples "turned up 28 countries where the terms 'fake news' or 'false news' have been used to attack legitimate journalists and truthful reporting" during Trump's time in office. Around the world, Diehl found, authoritarian leaders like Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, Cambodia's Hun Sen, and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan have explicitly endorsed the American president's attacks or echoed his exact words while cracking down on press freedom in their own countries.
Journalists have responded to Trump with an outpouring of indignant commentary -- an understandable reaction, though it's far from clear whether it helps or hurts their cause. A gesture like the Boston Globe's initiative last month that led more than 300 newspapers across the country to publish editorials on the same day calling for freedom of the press and attacking Trump's stance on the media raised valid challenges to the president's charges, but also may have cemented in place a kind of equivalency in the public mind: Trump is against journalists, journalists are against Trump.
Beyond reasonable doubt, that equivalency reinforces Trump's side more than it defends good reporting or strengthens public knowledge. For his supporters, it validates his posturing as a president besieged by a hostile media -- and his repeated insistence that stories he doesn't like are "fake facts." Pious editorials declaring journalists' devotion to truth and fervently exalting the First Amendment may be justified, but as a practical matter, eloquent self-righteousness seems unlikely to be an effective weapon in the war against the war on truth.
It would be nice to think that tougher, more factual reporting would be more helpful, but as I learned covering the Wallace campaign all those years ago, that has its limits, too.
How to Be Right (Always)
I couldn't read George Wallace's mind in 1964 and can't read Donald Trump's 54 years later. So what follows is speculation, not verifiable fact. With that qualifier, my impression is that Trump's falsehoods come from a different place and have a different character than Wallace's. If there's a Wallace reincarnation on the landscape today, it would be someone more like Corey Stewart. Wallace might not have said it to a reporter -- though I did sometimes sense an unseen wink in our direction when he delivered some outrageous statement -- but I strongly suspect that "of course it was Photoshopped," adjusted for the different technology of that era, exactly reflected his attitude.
President Trump looks like a quite different case. He clearly lies consciously at times, but generally the style and content of his falsehoods give the impression that he has engaged in a kind of internal mental Photoshopping, reshaping facts inside his mind until they conform to something he wants to say at a given moment.
A recent report in the Daily Beast described an episode that fits remarkably well with that theory.
As told by the Daily Beast's Asawin Suebsaeng, at a March 2017 White House meeting between the president and representatives of leading veterans organizations, Rick Weidman of Vietnam Veterans of America brought up the subject of Agent Orange, the widely used U.S. defoliant that has had long-term health effects on American soldiers and Vietnamese villagers.
As Suebsaeng reconstructed the discussion, Trump responded by asking if Agent Orange was "that stuff from that movie" -- a reference evidently to the 1979 film Apocalypse Now. Several veterans in the room tried to explain to the president that the scene he remembered involved napalm, an incendiary agent, not Agent Orange. But Trump wouldn't back down, Suebsaeng recounted, "and proceeded to say things like, 'no, I think it's that stuff from that movie.'" His comment directly to Weidman was, "Well, I think you just didn't like the movie."
What makes the Daily Beast report particularly revealing is not just that Trump was ignorant of the facts and would not listen to people who clearly knew better. That behavior is all too familiar to anyone even casually aware of Trump's record. The argument with the veterans was different because his misstatement did not arise from any of the usual reasons. He was not answering a critic or tearing down someone who frustrated him or making an argument for a policy opinion or defending some past statement.
Sticking to his version of Agent Orange was purely a reflection of his personality. On a subject one can safely assume he had not thought about until that moment, he seized on a fragmentary memory of something he'd seen on a screen years earlier, jumped to a wrong conclusion, and was then immediately convinced that he was correct solely because he had heard himself saying it -- not only certain that he was right, but oblivious to the fact that everyone he was talking to knew more about the subject than he did.
In effect, this story strongly suggests, Trump's thought process (if you can call it that) boils down to: I am right because I am always right.
Lots of people absorb facts selectively and adapt them to fit opinions they already hold. That's human nature. But the president's ability to twist the truth, consciously or not, is extreme. So is his apparently unshakable conviction that no matter what the subject is, no one knows more than he does, which means he has no need to listen to anyone who tries to correct his misstatements. In a person with his power and responsibilities, those qualities are truly frightening.
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