He is going to get someone in the media killed
Brian Stelter at CNN has a detail I didn’t know:
On Sunday morning the president’s personal Twitter account, which has 33 million followers, posted a 28-second video of a WWE broadcast. The video was edited to show Trump beating up a man with a CNN logo on his face.
A short time later, the official @POTUS Twitter account retweeted Trump’s tweet to its 19 million followers.
The official potus account. Oyyyy. Goes in the library and all, that does.
Sunday’s video was part of an escalating anti-media campaign by the president.
CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post have been some of the targets.
On Saturday Trump tweeted that he wants to rebrand “Fake News CNN” as “Fraud News CNN.”
Sunday’s video reiterated that message with a Photoshopped “FNN” logo.
The video was immediately scrutinized on social media and television.
Some commentators, especially those inclined to support Trump, laughed at the video and savored the president’s latest media critique.
Others, perhaps, began planning to seek out particular journalists for the named outlets, to get in their faces or body slam them to the floor or shoot them in the face. Trump is working them up, and who knows how far it will go?
Some media figures expressed real concern that the video could encourage violence against journalists.
“It’s not just anti-CNN. It’s anti-freedom of the press,” CNN political analyst Carl Bernstein said on “Reliable Sources” on Sunday. “It’s very disturbing. There’s nothing lighthearted about it whatsoever.”
Bernstein, who with Bob Woodward broke the Watergate story as a reporter for the Washington Post in the 1970s, noted that Trump praised campaign coverage that was critical of Hillary Clinton.
“When it suits him, it’s great news,” Bernstein said. “When it doesn’t, it’s fake news.”
On ABC’s “This Week,” Ana Navarro called Trump’s tweet “an incitement to violence. He is going to get someone killed in the media.” Navarro, a Republican who is fiercely critical of the president, is a commentator on both CNN and ABC.
I’m sure Trump just wants them to get beaten up a little. I’m sure he doesn’t want them actually killed. Well ok I’m not sure, exactly, but I think it’s possible. Maybe.
Oh, I’m quite sure he’d like to see some people killed, and quite sure he’d relish it publicly.
This weekend also marks the anniversary of the Night of the Long Knives. Actually an event that took place over a few days (June 30th – July 2nd, 1934), people mostly remember it for the extrajudicial killings of the leadership of the SA. But there were other victims, including Fritz Gerlich, a journalist who had been arrested when the Nazi’s seized power. He was murdered on June 30th at Dachau concentration camp.
More than anything Trump does, his attacks on the press are what really chill me. No president loves the press, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But his insistence that because he managed to become president, that this should mean he is above criticism and in fact should be universally lauded like that creepy cabinet meeting recently, is truly terrifying. And his sycophantic followers nod solemnly along to every ghastly utterance. He is dangerous and I’m afraid he will inspire people to do terrible things.
Many of his followers are already a ticking bomb ready to go off; they have been building up for a long time, and more fuel is constantly added – Civil Rights Act, women’s suffrage, etc…anything that gives rights to people they don’t think should have them. Same Sex Marriage and acceptance of refugees are simply the current petrol that flame this particular fire. Not that their hatred for women’s rights and Civil Rights has been quenched in any way. It’s a fire that just keeps getting larger.