Add my name to the top of the list. I say Trump should be arrested and removed from the White House, now. –
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION – If Donald Trump’s crazy tweets, undignified behavior, unqualified cabinet appointments, disastrous policies and authoritarian bashing of the press has not been enough to turn the people against him, this week’s avalanche of bad news probably won’t do the trick either. But there is one bit of underreported news that should rise to the top of the list of things the public should be very, very concerned about.
This doesn’t seem to be making the rounds of news commentary in the Sunday newspapers or television news talk shows, but it made the top of my list of national concerns this week when Bloomberg News broke the story that Trump has ordered the Department of Homeland Security to monitor hundreds of thousands of news sources around the world and to compile a database of journalists, editors, foreign correspondents and bloggers to identify top “media influencers.”
I mean President Trump already had a press blacklist, banning some long-standing U.S. news organizations from direct access to his campaign and administration and calling CNN and other outlets “fake news” and the New York Times “failing.”
But this is way over the top and a clearly unconstitutional breach of First Amendment freedoms that should cause the press and the public grave concerns that fascism has indeed arrived on America’s shores.
We warned in this space from the first day Trump was elected that his aim was to rule as a fascist dictator, and that he was fascinated by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and other dictators around the world because of their power to jail and even kill critics.
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Many American presidents and politicians have been critical of the press in the past, from Obama and Bush to Reagan, Nixon, McCarthy and even Thomas Jefferson. But none of them ever publicly charged the nation’s top law enforcement agency with chronicling every news agency and journalist in a database to judge their worthiness to be allowed to publish news. We don’t even allow corporations to do that, much less the federal government.
Not only is the order to allow the data to be collected and complied, an algorithm will supposedly be developed to judge the “sentiment” of reporters and news outlets along with their geographical spread all over the world in all languages.
“Services shall provide media comparison tools, design and rebranding tools, communication tools, and the ability to identify top media influencers,” according to the DHS statement. It is alleged that law enforcement needs this tool and information as “critical … to incorporate these functions into their programs in order to better reach federal, state, local, tribal, and private partners.”
It is not clear what the term “reach” means in this context, but I think it is fair to say Trump is not simply interested in compiling an email list for where DHS can send press releases.
Trump wants the department to track more than 290,000 global news sources, including print, radio, and television as well online publications, trade and industry publications, local, national and international outlets, and social media, according to the documents. He also wants the ability to track media coverage in more than 100 languages including Arabic, Chinese and Russian, with instant translation of articles into English.
According to the report and the department’s listed justification, this request “comes amid heightened concern about accuracy in media and the potential for foreigners to influence U.S. elections and policy through ‘fake news,” according to the announcement, which was apparently prompted in part by a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions last month from 19 members of Congress, including Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, questioning whether Qatar-based Al Jazeera should register as a foreign agent because it allegedly “often directly undermines” U.S. interests with favorable coverage of Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaeda’s branch in Syria.
But Trump is clearly not interested in Russian influence on our country and its media. He wants to operate just like Russia by totaling censoring the press and killing anyone who reports anything critical.
The department is looking to select a vendor to setup an online “media influence database” giving users the ability to browse based on location, beat, and type of influence. For each influencer found, “present contact details and any other information that could be relevant, including publications this influencer writes for, and an overview of the previous coverage published by the media influencer.”
Responses from interested contractors are due April 13. But we are left wondering if Cambridge Analytica will get this contract too. They already collected the user data on 87 million Facebook users and used it to help get Trump elected. They must be the only company with the computing model and power to do such a thing.
While many press critics have compared Trump’s appeal in the media and bashing of the press to Nixon, McCarthy and others, this latest official move is clearly unprecedented.
Senator Joe McCarthy loved to both appeal to reporters for coverage and then savage them in public back during the Red Scare and the Communist Black List days during the 1950s. Trump appears to be taking his tactics to a whole new level of evil.
McCarthy would often single out by reporters by name at his rallies in the 1950s.
“Stand up, Dick, and show them what a reporter for a communist newspaper looks like,” he’d say, and the crowds would roar their approval as their plain-speaking hero fingered the enemy. Trump and McCarthy share a populist, demagogic speaking style and a propensity to say anything to win the moment, according to previous commentators.
“The two men are often compared because they both aggressively hit back at their critics and tended to inflate minor slights or partisan rows into threats against the nation. But their similarities go deeper,” writes Marc Fisher. “Both won and cemented support by using, attacking and foiling the news media. Both deployed a crazy quilt of behavior to demand news coverage — and then stomped on those same organizations as disloyal liars conspiring against them. And both enjoyed extended periods of popularity even amid reporting about their erratic behavior and tendency to say things that weren’t true.”
Yes, in the end, McCarthy fell. But Trump still must see him as a model to get what he wants, to be more like his dictator idol, Putin. Trump’s entire personal brand grew out of his close association with Roy Cohn, who was McCarthy’s chief counsel during his investigations targeting communists and homosexuals in the government. As Trump’s mentor and lawyer in New York two decades later, Cohn taught the young real estate developer the core strategies that would come to define his business and political careers: “Use the news media to stay firmly and consistently in the public eye, and when criticized, hit back far harder than you’ve been hit.”
“The press made McCarthy,” the managing editor of the Raleigh News and Observer said in 1953. “We go hog wild whenever he speaks. How much longer are we going to quote irresponsible statements of so-called irresponsible persons?”
What will it take to get all the media and the press in America to realize Trump wants to be a fascist dictator who will stop at nothing to get what he wants? What will it take to force the corporate mainstream media in America to stop competing with one another to make money from kissing up to Trump and start clearly pointing out to the public the damage he is causing at every tweet and turn?
While Thomas Jefferson, who was critical in establishing press freedom on the U.S., might have railed against newspapers as “polluted vehicles” of falsehood and error at times, and Richard Nixon may have tangled with reporters in the toxic atmosphere of Watergate, considering them the “enemy.” But Trump’s antics and tactics are far worse than anything we’ve ever seen before.
“There has never been a kind of holistic jihad against the news media like Trump is executing,” says Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley. “Trump is determined to beat and bloody the press whenever he finds himself in a hole, and that’s unique.”
Princeton historian Julian Zelizer has warned that “the scale and scope of this is unlike anything that we’ve seen in the past.”
Trump has gone so far as to call news reporters and outlets “enemies of the people,” a phrase that goes back to ancient Rome and was used with chilling finality during the communist revolution in Russia a century ago.
“It is one of the most controversial phrases in Soviet history,” said Mitchell Orenstein, professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
The phrase has its roots in Latin, during the Roman Empire, but “enemies of the people” gained its most notorious associations during the 20th century, during the purges ordered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin that killed tens of millions of people.
An “enemy of the people” in the Soviet Union was not necessarily a criminal, but more often someone stigmatized by social origin or pre-revolutionary profession. The label alone was akin to a terminal illness, and merely being a friend of an enemy of the people was a certain cause for official suspicion, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
“What it basically meant was a death sentence,” Orenstein said.
So if Trump wants to add me to the list of people he wants to jail or kill, I will just have to add Trump to the list of people who I want to sue and disavow as unAmerican slime. In case my “sentiment” is not clear enough for Trump’s blacklist database, let me make it explicit. Donald Trump does not have the brains, the character or class to be president of the United States of America. This is not a partisan diatribe. Trump is not even a good Republican. I’ve known one or two fine Republicans in my 40 years of writing as an American journalist.
There may be a great debate in legal circles about whether an American president can be arrested, but there is a long-standing precedent that says even the president is “not above the law.”
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While this has never been tested or ruled on by the U.S. Supreme Court, I say now is the time to put the test into action.
In Nixon’s day, law enforcement held off and allowed the president to resign. In Clinton’s day, a special prosecutor held off and allowed Congress to impeach.
Special counsel Robert Mueller must surely be debating what to do now, probably holding off to see if the Democrats can mount enough election challenges to take over both houses of Congress in November 2018. This could set the stage for an impeachment trial to remove Trump from office.
By then perhaps he plans to release a report on Trump’s campaign collusion with Russian meddling in the U.S. election, Trump’s obstruction of justice and his criminal business enterprise, and perhaps leave it up to Congress to decide the impeachment question.
If I was enough of an “influencer” to get to him and make a recommendation, I would say the time is now to put the question to a test: Is the president above the law or not?
How much longer must our country suffer under this foul dictator who clearly does not have the best interest of our country at heart? Trump is a no good son-of-a-bitch who is running a criminal enterprise out of the White House and he should be removed from office by impeachment at the very least.
Let my sentiment be clear in the blacklist database. I say Trump should be indicted, arrested and frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs and chains.
Putin’s Trump: New American Journal graphic by Walter Simon
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Editor and publisher Glynn Wilson is an American journalist who has a long record of influencing public policy on certain critical stories. To find out more and to get the listing right in the database, check out Wilson’s resume and read his book on the subject. To contribute to the cause of supporting real news not fake news in America, click here to make a donation to our GoFundMe campaign.
