By
Robert Reich
Donald
Trump is such a consummate liar that in coming days and years our democracy
will depend more than ever on the independent press – finding the truth,
reporting it, and holding Trump accountable for his lies.
But
Trump’s strategy is to denigrate and disparage the press in the public’s mind –
seeking to convince the public that the press is engaged in a conspiracy
against him. And he wants to use his tweets, rallies, and videos to make
himself the only credible source of public information about what is happening
and what he’s doing.
It
is the two-step strategy of despots. And it’s already started. It was
officially launched the first full day of the Trump administration.
Step 1: Disparage the press and
lie about them
At
a televised speech at the CIA, Trump declared himself to be in a “running war”
with the news media, and described reporters as “the most dishonest human
beings on earth.”
Trump
then issued a stream of lies about what the press had reported.
Some
were seemingly small. For example, Trump claimed that the crowd for his
swearing-in stretched down the National Mall to the Washington Monument and
totaled more than 1 million people, and he accused the media of reporting
falsely underreporting the number. “It’s a lie,” he said. “We caught [the
media]. We caught them in a beauty.”
Trump
is wrong. Even independent observers reported that attendance was sparse, far
smaller than the outpouring of people who attended the first Obama
inauguration.
More
importantly, Trump told CIA employees that agency has been losing the battle
against the Islamic State and other terror groups. This assertion runs counter
to every intelligence report that has been publicly issued over the last six
months.
Trump insisted that he has always valued the CIA. “They sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community,” Trump said, continuing to criticize the press for its “dishonest” reporting.
In
fact, Trump has repeatedly vilified the CIA and the entire intelligence
community for what he claimed were politically charged conclusions about
Russia’s intervention in the 2016 election in order to help Trump.
At
a Jan. 11 news conference, Trump even accused intelligence officials of being
behind a “Nazi-like smear campaign” against him.
And
in his tweets he put quotation marks around the word “intelligence” in
referring to the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
The
weekend before his inauguration he even attacked CIA Director John Brennan (who
resigned at the conclusion of President Obama’s term), suggesting he was “the
leaker of Fake News.”
In
his talk at the CIA Trump also claimed, as he’s done before, that the United
States bungled its exit from Iraq by not taking Iraq’s oil.
“If we kept the oil, we wouldn’t have had ISIS in the first place,” Trump said, asserting that this is how the Islamic State terrorist group made its money.
Rubbish.
As has been well established and as the media has fully reported, taking Iraq’s
oil would have violated international law (both the 1949 Geneva Convention and
the 1907 Hague Convention).
Step 2: Threaten to
circumvent the press and take the “truth” directly to the people.
At
Trump press secretary Sean Spicer’s first televised news conference, Spicer
castigated the press for its “dishonest” and “shameful” reporting, and took no
questions.
Then
Spicer issued a dire warning: “The American people deserve better,” he said.
As long as [Trump] serves as the messenger for this incredible movement,
he will take his message directly to the American people.”
We’re
not talking Roosevelt-like “fireside chats” here.
Trump’s
tweets have already been firestorms of invective directed at critics, some of
whom have been threatened by Trump followers stirred up by the tweets.
And
CEOs pray their companies aren’t targets, because stock prices of the companies
he’s already vilified have dropped immediately after his diatribes.
Trump
and his advisors – Steven Bannon, formerly of “Breitbart News” as well as
Spicer and others – understand that if a significant portion of the public
trusts Trump’s own words more than they do the media’s,
Trump
can get away with saying – and doing – whatever he wants.
When
that happens, our democracy ends.
ROBERT
B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of
California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing
Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for
which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries
of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books, including the best
sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and
"Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "Saving
Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect
magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, INEQUALITY FOR
ALL.