“The president of the United States is inciting violence against a free press. In America, we cannot stand for it.”
One of the liberal elite, getting all precious after Donald Trump’s latest attack on the media cabal that is out to get him?
No, actually—this was Ana Navarro, a Republican strategist, denouncing Trump on live television for his latest Twitter outburst.
To see just how shocking this is, you only have to imagine a similar scenario in the UK: replace Trump with Theresa May and Navarro with a Conservative party strategist. May’s position would be untenable.
The latest social-media storm to engulf Trump saw him post a video of a mock wrestling fight between him and an opponent who had a CNN logo as his head. It wasn’t particularly hilarious in the first place—but in the context of his ongoing verbal attacks on that network and others, the WWE clip was downright sinister.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/881503147168071680Yet in Trumpworld, we must contend with the bizarre reality that the president will not only survive this latest outrageous incident but might even benefit from it. As he himself said during last year’s election campaign: “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters.”
A pattern of behaviour
There is a school of thought that the president's latest outburst was just another poorly thought-out brain-dump—he saw something online he thought was hilarious, and reposted it with no more than a second’s thought and without considering its wider implications.
But it’s just the latest unpresidential behaviour from the man who is redefining how the Commander in Chief treats the press. Last week, he turned his fire on the hosts of an NBC programme, using personal and offensive language that would have got him in serious trouble if he’d spoken that way in the school playground.
Trump’s GOP “enablers”
But it’s not all about Trump. These episodes also shine a spotlight on other senior Republicans. There have been some notable GOP critics of Trump’s behaviour (John McCain, Lindsey Graham and John Kasich among them), but the vast majority of senior GOP figures have said very little following his outbursts. These people are acting as the president’s “enablers”—a term Navarro used during her critique on ABC.
Then you have Trump’s officials—the likes of Kellyanne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. They might be paid to defend their boss, but they are tying themselves in knots doing so and hardly helping engender a sense of trust in Washington.
Conway, who is Trump’s “counsellor”, responded to the storm over the WWE tweet by blaming the media, suggesting the press should be focusing on other issues. She told Fox News: “I know it’s a heck of a lot easier to cover 140 characters … than it is to learn the finer points of how [healthcare] is funded in this country and how that would or would not change under the Senate bill, how the childcare tax credit might affect your family.”
But that was a ludicrous defence to make—it was Trump himself this week who took to Twitter (where else?) to insist that his use of social media was “modern-day presidential”.
An endorsement of violence?
Deputy press secretary Huckabee Sanders, meanwhile, told a recent press conference: “The president in no way, form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence.”
But go back to early 2016, during the election campaign, and you’ll find this quote from then-candidate Trump: “There may be somebody with tomatoes in the audience. So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. OK? Just knock the hell—I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees.” Was that another joke? There were also pledges during the campaign to crack down on the “fake media” who were “lying” about him by tightening up the libel laws.
Given all this, it’s not surprising that members of the Fourth Estate consider his latest outburst to be particularly worrying. There are so many obsessive die-hard Trump supporters, many of whom are armed to the teeth, that it doesn’t require a huge leap of imagination to envisage someone taking his messages literally and attempting to take out someone from CNN for real.
In this regard, it is not irrelevant that this latest tweet also comes hot on the heels of a real-life incident that saw Greg Gianforte, then a candidate but now a Montana member of the House of Representatives, apparently “body slam” a Guardian reporter who was trying to question him. (Gianforte has since pleaded guilty to assault.)
A tried-and-tested distraction
Don’t expect any of this behaviour to change, though. The latest firestorm has once again diverted attention from the fact that his administration has achieved virtually nothing of any substance during its first six months.
Appointing a Supreme Court judge was a simple process needing no Democrat support, and the implementation of his travel ban was only partial.
But on tax reform, infrastructure spending, healthcare reform, international relations and setting a budget, he has so far proved to be little more than useless.
And as long as that state of play continues, expect more of these petty Twitter outbursts as Trump attempts to steer the spotlight away from the things that matter.
