Category: Authoritarian

Trump blasts media amid chants of ‘CNN sucks’

After a day of tension between the White House and CNN, the crowd at President Trump’s Pennsylvania rally on Thursday night broke out into chants of “CNN sucks” when the president blasted “fake news.”

Trump at the rally in Wilkes-Barre cited multiple examples of what he called “fake news,” including saying the “fake news refused to call” Pennsylvania for him during the 2016 presidential election.

The crowd responded with boos and jeers, with some chanting, “CNN sucks.”

Trump later returned to the issue of the media during the rally, asking, “Whatever happened to fair press? Whatever happened to honest reporting?”

He also referred to the media as “disgusting.”

[The Hill]

Reality

Here is NBC at 5:04 PM on November 8th, 2016 calling Pennsylvania and the presidency to Donald Trump.

Media

 

 

 

Sarah Sanders presents the official White House policy: The media is the enemy of the people

When President Trump derides the media as the enemy of the people — as he’s doing more frequently — he’s not just spouting off his momentary frustration. He’s stating official White House policy.

The White House just made that abundantly clear. Four times in two days, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was offered the opportunity by reporters to clarify whether the president really thinks journalists are the enemy of Americans, or that it’s wrong for people to harass journalists doing their job. It wouldn’t be the first time an official White House statement contradicted something the president said or tweeted.

But four times in two days, Sanders refused to say that the media is not the enemy of the people or to condemn people who heckled a CNN reporter Tuesday in Tampa, to the point where he feared someone was going to get hurt.

Instead, the White House press secretary ticked off a list of sometimes-inaccurate and sometimes-unrelated grievances about how these hyperpartisan times have affected her life and the president’s life, and why they blame journalists for that.

“The media continues to ratchet up the verbal assault against the president and everyone in his administration,” Sanders said.

Basically: The White House thinks that journalists are the enemy of the people.

I don’t need to get into here why this is a problem; that’s Democracy 101.

But it’s worth spending a moment on where we are, both because having this debate in the first place is not normal and because it is shaping up to be a front line in the political battle between right and left in 2018.

In a week full of tension between journalists and Trump and Trump supporters, the most heady moment so far came Thursday, when the journalist at the center of so many attacks from the right (including from the president himself), CNN’s Jim Acosta, twice asked Sanders if she would say that the media is not the enemy of the people.

He was following up on an earlier question in the briefing about how Ivanka Trump said she doesn’t agree with her father that the press is the country’s enemy. Trump later tried to square her statement with his own by claiming he doesn’t think all media is the enemy, just most of it.

“… [I]t would be a good thing if you were to say right here at this briefing that the press — the people who are gathered in this room right now, doing their jobs every day, asking questions of the people like the ones you brought forward earlier — are not the enemy of the people,” Acosta said. “I think we deserve that.”

Instead, Sanders looked down at her notes and appeared to read a prepared statement about her perceived grievances with the media; how, among other things, she was cruelly made fun of by a comedian at the 2018 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. (The association said Michelle Wolf’s performance “was not in the spirit” of the mission of promoting the free press.)

I mention Sanders reading from her notes because it’s a telling detail that she had something ready to go on this. It suggests she knew that she was going to be asked about Trump’s views on the media, she had talked about it with the president, and they decided not to back down, even on the basic question of whether the media contributes a public good to U.S. democracy.

Not that her response was a surprise. On Wednesday, a reporter asked Sanders if she would condemn the heckling of Acosta at Trump’s rally. The president tweeted the heckling to his 53.5 million followers.

Rather than denounce what happened to Acosta, Sanders used that opportunity to rip the media. She didn’t help her contention when she seized on a debunked story about the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Acosta tried again. His question is worth sharing in full because it felt like a moment that may stand out in the dozens of daily contentious moments between the Trump White House and journalists:

You did not say in the course of your remarks you just made that the press is not the enemy of the people. Are we to take it from what you just said — we all get put through the ringer, we all get put in the meat grinder in this town, and you’re no exception. I’m sorry that happened to you; I wish that would not have happened — but for the sake of this room, the people who are in this room, this democracy, this country, all the people around the world who are watching, what are you saying Sarah, and the White House for the United States of America, the president of the United States should not refer to us as the enemy of the American people. His own daughter acknowledged that and all I’m asking you to do, Sarah, is to acknowledge that right now and right here.

Sanders did not take him up on that: “I appreciate your passion, I share it. I addressed this question, I addressed my personal feelings. I’m here to speak on behalf of the president. He’s made his comments clear.”

Acosta walked out of the press briefing before it was over. He was downright exasperated.

Bashing the media to gain leverage with one’s supporters is a tactic as old as American politics. But Trump has taken it to new heights by using language that dictators of history also have seize on. He’s exploited heavy public skepticism in journalism to cast journalists as the main villains when things go wrong in his administration. As The Fix’s Eugene Scott wrote after a man gunned down journalists at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis in June:

Those disinclined to trust the media get reinforcement when highly influential politicians and partisan media figures elevate the critiques, sometimes making personal jabs at journalists’ motives and their character. What may start as a difference of opinion eventually becomes a direct assault on the humanity of those in the media — something that those following press freedom issues have witnessed in other parts of the world.

A sitting Republican senator, Jeff Flake (Ariz.), started out 2018 by comparing Trump to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin over his attacks on the media.

At the same time, there is less room for journalists to make mistakes now that Trump has made them a central character in his own political story. On Wednesday a Politico reporter apologized for calling the Trump supporters cursing out Acosta “garbage people.” His apology made national headlines.

None of this is fading anytime soon. It’s a safe bet things are only going to get worse between journalists and the White House and some of Trump’s supporters before — if — they get better. What that will do to journalism, to politics, to democracy is an open, even scary question.

[Washington Post]

Trump Tells Sessions to ‘Stop This Rigged Witch Hunt Right Now’

President Trump called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday to end the special counsel investigation, an extraordinary appeal to the nation’s top law enforcement official to end an inquiry directly into the president.

The order immediately raised questions from some lawyers about whether it was an attempt to obstruct justice. The special counsel, appointed last year to oversee the government’s Russia investigation, is already looking into some of the president’s previous Twitter posts and public statements to determine whether they were intended to obstruct the inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any ties to the Trump campaign.

Mr. Trump’s lawyers quickly moved to contain the fallout, saying it was not an order to a member of his cabinet, but merely an opinion. An hour and a half after the tweet was posted, Mr. Trump’s lawyers contacted a reporter for The New York Times. In a subsequent telephone conversation, one of his lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, dismissed the obstruction of justice concerns, calling it a “bizarre and novel theory of obstruction by tweet,” adding that it was “idiotic.”

Presidents typically do not weigh in on active Justice Department investigations, but Mr. Trump has been outspoken about his anger and frustration with the Russia inquiry. Mr. Trump has also said that he never would have made Mr. Sessions his attorney general if he had known Mr. Sessions would recuse himself from the inquiry.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Mr. Sessions recused himself in early 2017 in part to avoid the kind of conflicts Mr. Trump proposed. Later, the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was appointed to carry out the inquiry.

The president’s lawyers, Jay A. Sekulow and Mr. Giuliani, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Trump was not ordering the inquiry closed but simply expressing his opinion.

“It’s not a call to action,” Mr. Giuliani said, adding that it was a sentiment that Mr. Trump and his lawyers had previously expressed publicly and that it was a statement protected by the president’s constitutional right to free speech.

“He doesn’t feel that he has to intervene in the process, nor is he intervening,” Mr. Sekulow said.

The president wanted the legal process to play out, his lawyers said. “He’s expressing his opinion, but he’s not talking of his special powers he has” as president, Mr. Giuliani said.

[The New York Times]

Trump says ‘polls are fake’ before bragging about poll showing his popularity

President Trump declared during a rally in Florida on Tuesday night that “polls are fake” before bragging about a poll that he claims found he is the most popular Republican president since Abraham Lincoln.

Trump at the campaign-style rally first accused the news media of suppressing polls that indicate positive numbers about his presidency.

“Polls are fake, just like everything else,” Trump declared during the rally in Tampa, echoing his attacks on “fake news.”

He said if the “fake news” did a poll, they would report only 25 percent of Americans have 401(k) accounts, though the correct number is around 44 percent.

He paused, then launched into a tirade about the poll that he says indicates his popularity as a Republican president.

“They just came out with a poll – the most popular person in the history of the Republican Party is Trump! Can you believe that?” he said.

“So I said, does that include Honest Abe Lincoln? He was pretty good, huh?” he continued.

It is unclear which poll Trump is referring to for his claim, which he has repeated several times in recent weeks.

While Trump’s overall approval has remained well below his predecessors, a Gallup poll released in July found that 90 percent of Republicans approved of Trump, which would make him one of the most popular modern presidents with his own party during his first term.

Still, former President George W. Bush had a higher approval rating among Republicans after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to the poll, which stretches back to the Eisenhower administration.

[The Hill]

Media

Trump shares son’s tweet backing supporters chanting ‘CNN sucks’

President Trump on Tuesday night shared his son Eric Trump‘s tweet backing supporters chanting “CNN sucks.”

“#Truth @Acosta,” Eric Trump wrote, in reference to CNN’s Jim Acosta. Eric Trump wrote the message in his retweet of a video with the caption “WATCH: Supporters of President Trump Chant ‘CNN Sucks’ During Jim Acosta’s Live Spot at Florida Rally.”

The president retweeted Eric shortly afterward. His retweet came after a campaign-style rally on Tuesday night in Florida, in which he made fun of the press several times, falsely claiming they “suppress” polls that indicate positive approval ratings for his presidency.

Acosta himself replied to Eric Trump. “No, Eric,” Acosta tweeted. “Not the truth. And you know better.”

The president frequently incites his supporters in chants against the news media, decrying them as “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.”

Trump often specifically targets CNN, the New York Times and the Washington Post. Last week, the Trump administration came under fire for refusing to allow CNN’s Kaitlan Collins to attend a press event because they said she asked questions inappropriately.

Trump has refused to take questions from Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, several times.

During his European trip in July, Trump refused to answer a question from Acosta, claiming that he does not support “fake news.” He instead took questions from Fox News’s John Roberts.

Last year, Trump said he would not take a question from Acosta during a press conference.

“Your organization is terrible,” Trump told Acosta.

Earlier in the day, Acosta tweeted a video of a crowd of Trump supporters jeering, holding up their middle fingers and yelling “stop lying!” at him.

[The Hill]

Mike Pence Defends White House Banning CNN Reporter From Press Event

Vice President Mike Pence stood by the White House’s decision to ban a CNN reporter from a press event last week, citing the need to maintain “decorum.”

“This administration believes in the freedom of the press,” Pence told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo in an interview airing Sunday. “But maintaining the decorum that is due at the White House… is an issue that we’ll continue to work forward.”

The White House was hit with intense backlash from dozens of journalists and media outlets on Wednesday after it disinvited CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, representing five television networks as the day’s chosen pool reporter, from a press event.

Collins was told by the White House that at a brief gathering earlier in the day, she had asked President Donald Trump “inappropriate” questions and had refused to leave the Oval Office, according to CNN. Collins and other reporters present at the time disputed the White House’s claim.

Several cable news networks, including Fox News, issued statements expressing solidarity with CNN and calling for reporters’ full access to press events.

Despite Trump’s repeated attacks on the press, including falsely accusing outlets of publishing “fake news” and calling journalists the “enemy of the people,” Pence told Bartiromo that the administration has provided “extraordinary access to the media.”

“The president answers so many questions in so many different settings, and I can assure that we’ll continue to do that,” Pence said.

While Trump occasionally takes impromptu questions from reporters at various gatherings, he hasn’t held a solo press conference since February 2017.

Pence deflected when asked by Bartiromo whether shutting out Collins was like shutting out “everybody” from the press event.

“I would leave that decision to the White House staff,” he said. “We’ll make sure that every network, every major news organization, continues to have access because we stand for the freedom of the press in this White House.”

Trump and New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, meanwhile, found themselves offering vastly different takes on a meeting they had earlier this month at the White House that focused on journalistic matters.

The president tweeted on Sunday that they spent “much time” discussing “the vast amount of Fake News being put out,” his erroneous phrase for stories that displease him.

But Sulzberger, in a statement to HuffPost, said his “main purpose for accepting the meeting was to raise concerns about the president’s deeply troubling anti-press rhetoric.” He said he told Trump “directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.”

[Huffington Post]

Reality

Here is a list of over 300 times Trump has not held the same decorum he wants the press to be held to:

https://www.stopthedonaldtrump.com/category/unpresidential/attack-the-press/

Trump Goes On Anti-Media Tweetstorm, Attacks Reporting He Says Puts Lives ‘At Risk’: ‘Very Unpatriotic!’

President Donald Trump is going on yet another Twitter tirade about the media, this time attacking certain reporting as “very unpatriotic!”

To recap: Trump tweeted this morning that he recently met with New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger and talked about the “fake news.” Sulzberger shot back by saying he specifically told the President he’s concerned about his “dangerous” attacks on the media.

Well, um, he’s still doing it (not that he ever stopped).

And not only that, but Trump is now accusing reporters of putting lives at risk by reporting on “internal deliberations of our government”:

You will also notice that Trump, hours after revealing his meeting with Sulzberger, is back to attacking the Times again.

The Times report on this meeting features Sulzberger making one very serious point to the President:

Mr. Sulzberger recalled telling Mr. Trump at one point that newspapers had begun posting armed guards outside their offices because of a rise in threats against journalists. The president, he said, expressed surprise that they did not already have armed guards.

[Mediaite]

Trump calls press the ‘Enemy of the People’ after claiming he confronted publisher of New York Times over ‘fake news’

On Sunday morning, Donald Trump tweeted that he met with the publisher of the New York Times and confronted him over what the president calls “fake news,” adding that the free press is becoming the “Enemy of the People.”

According to Trump, “Had a very good and interesting meeting at the White House with A.G. Sulzberger, Publisher of the New York Times. Spent much time talking about the vast amounts of Fake News being put out by the media & how that Fake News has morphed into phrase, ‘Enemy of the People.’ Sad!”

Earlier in the morning Trump bizarrely boasted that he had higher polls number than even President Abraham Lincoln — who served when there was no polling

You can see the tweets below:

[Raw Story]

Trump policy shop filters facts to fit his message

President Donald Trump’s appointees in the health department have deleted positive references to Obamacare, altered a report that undermined the administration’s positions on refugees and added anti-abortion language to the strategic plan — part of an ideological overhaul of the agency’s research office.

While every administration puts its imprint on the executive branch and promotes ideas that advance its own agenda, this one has ventured several steps further — from scrubbing links to climate change studies from an Environmental Protection Agency website to canceling an Interior Department study on coal mining risks and suppressing reports on water contaminationand the dangers of formaldehyde.

Inside the Health and Human Services policy research shop, staffers say the political pressures to tailor facts to fit Trump’s message have been unprecedented.

Several pointed to embarrassments such as PolitiFact grading a lawmaker’s statement, based on the agency’s May 2017 report on Obamacare premium hikes, as “false,” and concluding the study had serious methodological problems.

Another report suggesting that millions more people would get health coverage if Obamacare were rolled back — a finding at odds with nearly every independent analysis — was widely mocked and produced over the objections of career staff at the office of the assistant secretary for planning and evaluation, known as ASPE, say several sources.

“The heartbreaking part is that ASPE is the source of the evidence and the science for how decisions are made,” said a former senior official, who worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations. “It’s just another example of how we’re moving to a post-fact era.”

The office has been especially vulnerable to political pressure because its leadership remains in flux. The University of Minnesota health economist tapped to lead the office by Trump has been dogged by questions about his financial entanglements, leaving his nomination in limbo for more than a year. The acting head of ASPE was recently reassigned to a regional office, and the top deputy altered McKinsey-produced data to make it more favorable to the Trump administration, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the changes.

“I find the attack on the integrity and the culture of the office to be disturbing,” said Richard Frank, a Harvard health economist who ran ASPE as an Obama administration political appointee. “This is really a departure to an office that has a 50-year history to it.”

HHS officials vigorously disputed portrayals of the office as ideologically driven.

“I reject the premise of your question and allegation,” said spokeswoman Caitlin Oakley. “Secretary [Alex] Azar has made very clear that HHS is a science- and evidence-based organization and it will operate accordingly.”

Oakley said the 120-person office has been refocused to work on Trump administration priorities like drug pricing and the opioid epidemic. Two staffers say those topics are regarded as safer ground because they are not part of the health care culture wars. Under Azar, who assumed leadership of the agency about six months ago — after most of these incidents occurred — the office has produced a six-page research brief on drug pricing, which published this week, and two studies on the opioid epidemic. Oakley said more reports are coming.

But the group’s morale and role remain diminished, as key staff and teams have dwindled; there are just three staffers working on analyzing health coverage, down from about a dozen at the end of the Obama administration, said a staffer.

Republican health policy analyst Lanhee Chen, who served as an HHS senior counselor in the George W. Bush administration, scoffed at the notion that this policy shop is more partisan than the one that preceded it.

“I don’t believe the Trump administration ASPE has put out reports that are any less analytically or methodologically rigorous than those of the Obama administration ASPE,” Chen said. “Those who express concerns regarding the quality of reports ‘falling off’ are probably using that argument as a cover for the fact that they disagree with the findings of the reports.”

Chen said he regards the policy shop as a vehicle to advance administration policy, “so in that sense, methodological rigor has not necessarily been a metric I have used to evaluate their reports. That’s why we have studies from academics and analysts outside of government.”

This story is drawn from interviews with nine individuals with knowledge of ASPE operations, most of whom asked for confidentiality to speak freely, as well as with outside observers.

Shift in office’s focus

ASPE historically has been used to investigate the impact of HHS policies and help shape future strategy, and under the Obama administration, it focused closely on the expansion of health insurance coverage and the Affordable Care Act — issues on which Barack Obama had campaigned heavily and made central to his presidency. The office published 43 reports on the ACA’s effects on rural hospitals, women’s health and other discrete corners of health care between January 2015 and January 2017 alone, generally extolling the effects and sometimes overlooking the drawbacks.

For instance, one 2016 study on choosing health plans in the ACA market was criticized for slanting its findings.

[Politico]

White House disputes that CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was ‘banned’

The White House took issue with the characterization that they banned CNN’s Kaitlan Collins from covering a White House event Wednesday after the White House informed her that she was not welcome to attend.

White House deputy chief of staff for communications Bill Shine challenged reporters on Thursday about whether the administration had ever used the word “ban.”

On Wednesday, Collins was representing the television networks in an Oval Office event where she shouted several questions to the president related to his former lawyer Michael Cohen and about a White House invitation to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Could you ask her if we ever used the word ban?” Shine said to reporters on Thursday, referring to Collins, standing outside the West Wing and addressing reporters standing several feet away.

Even as he refuted that Collins’ denied access amounted to a ban, Shine repeatedly declined to tell reporters what word he would use to characterize the White House’s decision to block her from attending the event.

“When you ask her if we ever used the word ban, then I will answer that question,” Shine said in reply to reporters inquiring about what word he would use. “You ask her, focus now, you ask her if we ever used the word ban.”

The White House statement issued yesterday said Collins was “informed…she was not welcome to participate in the next event.”

The White House Correspondents’ Association issued a statement condemning the White House’s decision.

“This type of retaliation is wholly inappropriate, wrong-headed, and weak. It cannot stand,” WHCA President Olivier Knox said.

While Shine did not engage in a full conversation with reporters on Wednesday’s incident, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the White House doesn’t object to reporters asking questions of the president but that she felt Collins’ exchange didn’t demonstrate a necessary level of civility and politeness.

“The question isn’t are the press allowed to ask questions, this president obviously isn’t afraid of taking questions,” said Conway, who said it’s about “being polite and not shouting questions long after the press has politely been asked to leave.”

Collins’ behavior was not out of order from the standard procedure of White House reporters who regularly pose questions to the president at the conclusion of press events. The president has, on numerous occasions, responded to these shouted inquiries.

[ABC News]

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