Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have taken to improvising on the fly, floating conflicting justifications for war and predictions about its duration. The Iranians were close to developing missiles that could reach the U.S. (They weren\u2019t.) They were weeks away from building a nuclear weapon. (They weren\u2019t.) Israel forced America\u2019s hand. (Marco Rubio.) \u201cNo, I might have forced their hand.\u201d (Trump.) It\u2019s all about regime change. (Trump.) It\u2019s not about regime change. (Trump, later.) When confronted with these contradictions and falsehoods, all the President\u2019s men followed his lead: they blamed the media.<\/p>\n
With increasing frequency, Trump berates reporters (particularly female reporters). He sues media outlets for sport. Resolve is in short supply. The owner of the Washington Post, the newspaper of Watergate, has done irreparable violence to his property merely to stay in Trump\u2019s good graces.<\/p>\n
But, while the President has little regard for the freedom of the press, he craves its ceaseless attention. His need has the quality of addiction. In Washington these days, there is hardly a reporter who does not have the President\u2019s cellphone number. It is said that the best time to call is late at night while he is watching himself on TV and shitposting in his pajamas. He loves to muse aloud, then watch as those musings register in foreign capitals, and in the markets. Lately, he has been willing to say anything. The war will be over soon. Or maybe not. Whatever. Each pseudo-scoop is as ephemeral as a mayfly. But who can resist? When asked about the possibility of sending his infantry into Iran, he answers in the language of golf: \u201cI don\u2019t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground.\u201d At other moments, he simply changes the subject to, say, his taste in interior decoration\u2014\u201cIf you look behind me, see the nice gold curtains.\u201d Are you not entertained?<\/p>\n
His advisers, of course, know what to do. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who has cracked down on actual reporting at the Pentagon and has filled his pressroom with \u201cinfluencers\u201d and propagandists, spoke in his usual tone of rage recently when he lambasted CNN\u2019s coverage of the war as \u201cfake news.\u201d He would be pleased, he said, when the Trump-friendly Ellison family, which has already swallowed up CBS News, finally takes possession of CNN, too.<\/p>\n
Brendan Carr, who runs the Federal Communications Commission for Trump, eagerly joined the fray by threatening to revoke the licenses of television networks that are, in his view, \u201crunning hoaxes and news distortions.\u201d Trump pronounced himself \u201cthrilled\u201d with Carr\u2019s outburst. On Truth Social, he accused \u201cHighly Unpatriotic \u2018News\u2019 Organizations\u201d of airing \u201cLIES.\u201d Perhaps, he wrote, he will prosecute unruly journalists on \u201cCharges for TREASON.\u201d<\/p>\n
Carr\u2019s threats to pull network licenses have no legal weight; the more immediate danger is that media owners, who are all too aware of the economic pressures they face, will quietly cut back on critical coverage of the Trump Presidency in general, and the war in particular. They will fear landing outside the boundary of what is deemed patriotic. The historian Garry Wills, in an essay on Phillip Knightley\u2019s 1975 book about wartime journalism, \u201cThe First Casualty,\u201d wrote, \u201cA liberal democracy submits to propaganda more readily than a totalitarian state. Self\u2010censorship is always more effective than bureaucratic censorship.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cruellest irony is that the President who addresses the Iranian people in the language of liberation, urging them to throw off the yoke of a regime that has brutalized them for decades, is the same man who threatens American journalists with treason charges and tries to strong-arm broadcasters into subservience. Having torn up a nuclear agreement in his first term and gone to war with no coherent goal in his second, Trump now directs his fire at the one thing he cannot afford to leave standing: the truth. What\u2019s at stake is democracy\u2019s oldest promise\u2014that the people may call on their government to answer for what it does in their name.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now, as war has engulfed both the region and the global economy, Trump and his sycophantic advisers have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2618,34,503,2620,2619],"class_list":{"0":"post-29467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-iran","8":"tag-comment","9":"tag-iran","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-splitscreenimagerightfullbleed","12":"tag-the-lede"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116266689362755820","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}