There is little doubt that Donald Trump and those serving in his administration are at war with the press.
Trump has said that the press is “the enemy of the people.”
Is it coincidence that he uses a characterization favored by both Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin ?
If there is one thing we know, it is that Trump has deep admiration for dictators and thugs.
Think, Vladimir Putin.
Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, has declared the press to be the “party of the Opposition.”
Bannon, is the former chief of Breitbart News, which he admits is a platform for the “at-right.”
This collection of neo-Nazi’s, Ku Klux Klanners and other haters, celebrated the Trump inauguration in a Washington, D.C. convention where they were led by Richard Spencer in chants of “Heil Trump’ with the right arm extended Nazi salute.
In Bannon, Trump has his own Joseph Goebbels.
Trump’s war on the press has manifested itself in various ways.
His press secretary, Sean Spicer, recently barred reporters from CNN, the New York Times and other media outlets it views as critics from a White House news conference.
Trump repeatedly accuses a wide variety of news outlets of peddling “fake news” when they report facts that are critical of him or about his campaign.
Nothing seems to set him off more than the reports of the campaigns increasingly apparent involvement with the Russian Government at the height of its hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton Campaign this past year.
In the wake of President Obama’s imposition of sanctions on the Russian Government for the hacking, Trump’s National Security Adviser designee, Michael Flynn, discussed the sanctions with a Russian official and then lied about it, apparently to the FBI and Vice-President Pence.
When Flynn was fired, it was not because he discussed the sanctions at a time when he was not allowed to, but because he lied about it to Pence and embarrassed the Vice-President.
Most recently, Trump’s Attorney General has been accused of being untruthful during his confirmation hearing, when he told Senator Al Franken that he had not had any contact with any Russian officials.
It turns out that Sessions met with the Russian Ambassador to the United States twice during the 2016 presidential campaign and one of the occasions was during the period that Russia was hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
Sessions, who has finally and correctly recused himself from conducting any investigations into the issues surrounding the campaign, has decided to “clarify” his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a written statement.
When it comes to lying to Congress, this isn’t Sessions first controversy.
In 1986 his nomination for a Federal Judgeship was rejected when it was disclosed that he had made racist comments while serving as the United States Attorney in Alabama. Sessions denied making the comments but his nomination was withdrawn after Alabama’s Senior Senator, Howell Heflin declared that there were “reasonable doubts” about whether Sessions could be “fair and impartial.”
Trump continues to have confidence in Sessions and sees no reason for Sessions to recuse himself in conducting the investigation into the Russian hacking.
It isn’t a surprise that Trump would want his hand-picked Attorney-general to conduct the investigation.
Trump denies that anyone in his campaign had anything to do with the hacking, even as the evidence mounts that his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had numerous contacts with Russian officials throughout the campaign.
Indeed, Trump blasts the disclosures about evidence of the hacking as “fake news” while he claims to have won the popular vote only to have been cheated out of the victory because “millions” voted fraudulently for his opponent.
Trump now maintains that President Obama is behind the thousands of demonstrators who turn out to protest his policies without a shred of evidence.
Even more recently, he accused the former president of wiretapping his campaign at Trump Tower.
There are no boundaries for his madness.
Like most Trump claims, he offers no evidence to support them.
Trump continues to claim that climate change is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese government.
He claims he inherited an economic mess despite the fact that unemployment dropped from 7.8% to 4.8% during the Obama Administration and the stock market recovered to levels greater than existed when Obama took office.
He claims that millions of people lost health coverage under the Affordable Care Act when, in fact, 20 million gained coverage and the uninsured rate has dropped to 10.9 %.
He claims that his deportation policy is directed at criminals and “bad hombres” when, in fact, thousands of undocumented immigrants with no criminal record and their children who entered the country with them, are being swept up, detained and deported.
Trump held up Sweden as an example of a terrorism target due to unrestricted immigration.
The only problem with that claim is that there have been no terrorist attacks in Sweden.
This past week, I happened to strike up a conversation with an engineer from Sweden who was working in this country. I asked him if he knew what Trump was talking about in Sweden.
He told me that he had no idea and neither did anyone that he spoke to in Sweden.
The ancient Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, declared “In war, truth is the first casualty.”
We’re six weeks into the Trump Administration and he and his appointees have massacred the truth.
It’s a shame that it’s not a war crime for which they could be held accountable.