The Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump, at a rally in Mint Hill, North Carolina, in September. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Donald Trump, the once-and-future president, holds special animus for people who dare question his statements and actions. At a rally just before Election Day, he placed journalists in the cross-hairs, at least figuratively.
Trump told rallygoers in Pennsylvania it wouldn’t bother him if someone shot the reporters there covering the event. He had mentioned an opening between the panels of bulletproof glass; Trump had faced an assassination attempt during a July rally.
“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much,” Trump told the crowd. Folks there laughed and shouted howls of approval. Nothing like bloodshed, I suppose, to satisfy the masses.
In an eight-week period before the election, Trump verbally attacked the media more than 100 times, Reporters Without Borders noted. That total didn’t even include social media posts.
He’s recently called journalists “monsters” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.” (That’s rich coming from the guy who lied or otherwise uttered misleading statements more than 30,000 times in his first term.) He sued CBS News some $10 billion for its editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris, though such editing is commonplace.
Disabuse yourself of the notion these are merely routine comments by Trump, the nation’s only convicted felon to be voted commander in chief. Doesn’t he do this all the time? Sure. Have such statements ever really led to harm? Well …
Circumstances are different now, since he’ll have sycophants and supreme loyalists staffing his second administration. That’s not like the first term, when he often faced pushback from top advisors.
And we all witnessed – in real time and shocking video footage – how he incited a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Trump’s oft-unhinged rantings matter. His fervent followers could take a directive to attack reporters as a call to (fire)arms.
Which is exactly the point. He wants journalists looking over their shoulders and focusing on would-be attackers, rather than writing forcefully about Trump’s leadership – including its deficiencies.
“If we’ve learned one thing about Trump and contemporary authoritarians, we have to take them at their word,” Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at Columbia University, told me in an interview. “Making the press the enemy of the people is central to the MAGA project.”
The president-elect’s words “give permission to people in his movement” to assault others, Shapiro added. “It’s not mere bombast when a ‘joke’ is part of a movement that valorizes violence, that declares people ‘the enemies from within.’”
This may sound far-fetched to you. But as a member of the profession constantly under siege by a politician who wouldn’t accept his 2020 defeat, and who sees any criticism as a reason to erupt, I don’t take these attacks lightly. Nor do my colleagues.
“It takes a toll on the journalists” who cover the president, Shapiro said.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit group based in New York City, reported recently that Trump has mulled strengthening libel laws, weakening First Amendment protections and prosecuting reporters for critical coverage. For a man willing to excoriate anyone, and who wields such a huge megaphone, he has notoriously thin skin.
Journalists face this onslaught at a time of shrinking newsroom budgets, fewer local reporters and the closing of many publications around the country, CPJ noted. Its interviews with journalists, lawyers, and press freedom advocates “found that media workers are confronting challenges that include an increased risk of violence, arrest, on- and offline harassment, legal battles, and criminalization.”
Joel Simon, director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Graduate School of Journalism at City University of New York, noted Trump’s bombast is often used to draw attention to himself, rather than issues that have greater importance.
The language can be “incredibly menacing and threatening,” Simon told me, but it also “can be used to manipulate coverage.”
“It’s incredibly destructive,” Simon said. “But I don’t think it’s causing journalists to cover him in a different way.”
Relatively few journalists in this country over the past 50 years have been slain because of the stories they were covering, but it does happen. Victims include my onetime associate Chauncey Bailey, who worked at the competing daily newspaper in Detroit when we both were reporters there. We chatted about the craft, and we often played basketball together.
Bailey was gunned down in 2007 in downtown Oakland while walking to work. He had been reporting on a story about financial problems at a business called Your Black Muslim Bakery. A coalition of local media formed the Chauncey Bailey Project to investigate the death and the police handling of the killing. Eventually, three men were sentenced to prison in the case.
Jeff German, an investigative reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was stabbed to death in September 2022. He had reported on a hostile workplace environment in the office of Robert Telles, a then-elected official. Telles was sentenced last month to at least 28 years in prison.
Trump doesn’t need to know reporters personally, but he can still place their lives at risk. His own statements could “nudge” any one of his followers nationwide to commit violence against journalists. He’d also enjoy some plausible deniability.
Trump, one of the most reckless presidents in U.S. history, is rushing headlong into fascism. He enjoys a pliant, spineless Republican Party. After the House of Representatives impeached Trump over Jan. 6, GOP senators whom he placed in jeopardy that day refused to convict him.
He benefits from an overtly partisan Supreme Court majority. It blessed his attempts this summer to gain broad immunity from prosecution related to his plot to overturn the 2020 election. It was a shocking ruling.
My colleagues in the Fourth Estate are one of the few lines of defense left. We’re willing to say when Trump is wrong, lying or violating the Constitution. It’s why the Narcissist-in-Chief has placed a target on our backs.
That’s no accident.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.