“This is the final battle.” We hear the President’s ominous voiceover, as the video shows him striding resolutely down a scary-looking corridor. “Final battle?” Against whom? Iran? Russia? The Houthis? What did I miss?
The President’s extraordinary, taxpayer-funded dirge was broadcast just as football fans in the Midwest watched the traditionally hapless Cleveland Browns notch a 21-18 come from behind win against the Carolina Panthers. The fact the win against Carolina was the Browns’ home opener made the improbable victory especially sweet.
In a world where anything is possible, Trump used apocryphal language to conjure the boogeymen of the boomer generation, communists, Marxists, and fascists, all evil operators seeking to inflict pain and suffering on the American people. But wait. This time it isn’t terrorists or murderers who are the targets of the President’s wrath, it is the news media.
“We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country,” he vows. “We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all.” The Evil doers being targeted by this President are the ones wielding microphones and reporter’s notebooks.
On this politically quiet Sunday afternoon, as the East Coast hunkered down to weather a nasty nor-easter, the President’s unhinged attack was shocking, even for Donald Trump.
It came as he smolders over the fiasco his ongoing feud with certain news media made of his long-planned summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. For reasons unknown, but probably having to do with something he saw on television in the lead up to the state visit, President Trump expelled CNN, MSNOW and Politico from the White House. Inevitably, the White House press corps including ABC, CBS, NBC and importantly FOX rallied to their ejected brethren, vowing to boycott all pool coverage including Xi’s red-carpet extravaganza.
As I wrote at the time, “President Trump’s ban on WH media was as badly timed as it was unconstitutional. He wanted maximum exposure of his grand summit with the Chinese leader. He ended up playing in the dark to an audience of nobody.”
My sense is that the President heard the mainstream media’s victory lap over the dearth of coverage and had enough. Rather than recite the achievements of the summit, he extended and escalated the battle against the media, ignoring or slow-walking various court orders to lift the ban and get back to work. On Friday he barred CNN reporters from boarding Air Force One which was headed to Knoxville for a high-profile football game, Tennessee against Texas.
The president treated the friendly crowd in the packed stadium with a low altitude fly over in the big, beautiful jet. On board the magnificent aircraft were ideologically appropriate reporters from Real America’s Voice and the My Pillow guy’s LindellTV. Happily, nothing of consequence happened on board.
He ended the week on Truth Social with,
“FAKE NEWS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN THE WHITE HOUSE. IT HAS GONE ON FAR TOO LONG AT A TREMENDOUS COST TO OUR COUNTRY.”
No president has made himself more available to the press than Donald Trump. That is the good news. The bad news is he cannot dictate the content of the news that is being reported. That is not the “final battle,” but it is worth fighting.