One of the most alarming things to me during the campaign was Trump’s constant attacks on media outlets. He has been training his supporters for months that they should not trust the media. The Washington Post has a compilation of clips of Trump doing this in a video that won’t imbed here, in case you haven’t seen him do this.
Despite saying he probably would not use his Twitter account much as president on 60 Minutes tonight in an interview taped Friday, Trump launched an attack on The New York Times in two tweets, reported in the same Washington Post article, which debunked both Tweets.
President-elect Donald Trump sounded very much like presidential candidate Donald Trump on Sunday morning in a pair of misleading tweets about the New York Times.
According to the New York Times Co.'s latest earnings report, the number of print copies it sold in the third quarter was down from the same period in 2015, but the decline was more than offset by 116,000 new digital-only subscriptions. Overall, third-quarter circulation revenue rose 3 percent; through the first nine months of the year, circulation revenue was up 2.8 percent.
Since Trump launched his White House campaign in June 2015, digital-only news subscriptions to the Times have increased 35 percent, to more than 1.3 million.
These constant attacks on the media will probably not stop, despite Trump's assertion that he would be using Twitter and Facebook less once he assumes office. He’s certainly lying about that, because any time somebody criticizes him, he resorts to attacking them and the fastest way he can do that is by sending out a Tweet for his 15M followers to see. Trump admitted on 60 Minutes tonight that he has learned the value of social media and attributes it as one of the reasons he was able to win the election without spending as much money as the Clinton campaign.
If you have already read Autocracy: Rules for Survival, then you already know Rule 3:
Rule #3: Institutions will not save you. It took Putin a year to take over the Russian media and four years to dismantle its electoral system; the judiciary collapsed unnoticed. The capture of institutions in Turkey has been carried out even faster, by a man once celebrated as the democrat to lead Turkey into the EU. Poland has in less than a year undone half of a quarter century’s accomplishments in building a constitutional democracy.
Trump has been sowing the seeds of distrust of our media for months, and after today, it’s obvious that he plans to continue his assault, while continuing to use conservative outlets to disseminate his lies [see Why People Keep Claiming Trump Won The Popular Vote], while trying to silence his critics in other ways [see Kellyanne Conway to Trump critics: Be careful what you say.]
I watch Rachel Maddow just about every night, and she often encourages her viewers to subscribe to their local print newspapers and/or the digital version of the paper, emphasizing the valuable of the hard news research and reporting that they do. Please consider subscribing. We need every weapon in our arsenal to protect our freedoms, especially for those who have so much more to lose then a lot of us do:
Perhaps the rest of America can trust you to hold the leader of our government to the change you so uncompromisingly sought. But we won’t trust you to look out for our fellow Americans who are different. So get ready for four years of vocal, loud, peaceful I pray, dissent. If you thought the core Trump supporters would be loud if Hillary Clinton won, what do you think is going to happen now that you’ve marginalized a group that has much more to lose than freedom from background checks for guns and a ten percent lag in wage growth? At stake for them, is participation in our society. And if their vocal insistence on it is something you aren’t willing to tolerate, then perhaps you might consider a different path in thirty months when you get to choose your next leader without the looming evil of Hillary excusing your choice. You can’t point to her any more as cause.
What Now?
The above article was posted by a friend on Facebook earlier this evening. It is well worth your time to read the entire piece as it so eloquently expresses a response to all the Trump supporters calling for liberals to accept the outcome of the election and shut up. It’s also a great piece to add as a link in response to any of those posts.