How 'would-be autocrat' Trump will ramp up revenge campaign against media critics

02 December 2024

After Vice President Kamala Harris narrowly lost the United States' 2024 presidential election, MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski drew a lot of criticism for meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Although Scarborough and Brzezinski have been scathing critics of Trump, they said they went to Mar-a-Lago to reopen communications with him.

Some defenders of the "Morning Joe" hosts have said that their Mar-a-Lago visit was understandable in light of Trump and his followers' threats to retaliate against critics in the media — that they were trying to protect themselves.

Far-right MAGA conspiracy theorist Kash Patel, Trump's pick for FBI director, has even called for criminal prosecutions of journalists who debunked the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Patel has falsely claimed, without evidence, that Trump defeated now-President Joe Biden in 2020.

In an article published by the New Yorker on November 30, journalist David Remnick warns that Trump is getting ready to ramp up his battle against critics in the media.

"Media lawyers now fear that Trump will ramp up the deployment of subpoenas, specious lawsuits, court orders, and search warrants to seize reporters' notes, devices, and source materials," Remnick explains. "They are gravely concerned that reporters and media institutions will be punished for leaking government secrets. The current Justice Department guidelines mandating extra procedural measures for subpoenas directed at journalists are just that: guidelines. They are likely to be shredded."

Remnick continues, "Nearly every state provides journalists with at least a qualified privilege to withhold the identity of confidential sources. But there is no federal privilege, and Trump has opposed a bipartisan congressional bill that would create one, the so-called PRESS Act…. Retribution is in the air."

Remnick notes that Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for a second Trump Administration, "calls for ending federal funding to NPR and PBS." And he adds that "a longer-range worry is that the Supreme Court may weaken or even overturn the 1964 landmark decision New York Times v. Sullivan."

"Sullivan limits the ability of public officials to sue journalists for defamation, finding that the Constitution guarantees that, at a minimum, journalists can write freely and critically about public officials, as long as they don't publish statements that they know to be false, or probably so," Remnick explains. "(President Richard) Nixon regarded Sullivan as 'virtually a license to lie.' Trump shares the sentiment."

"All these threats and potential actions are hardly the stuff of legal arcana or the frenzied obsessions of self-involved Podsnapian journalists," Remnick argues. "They are the arsenal of a would-be autocrat who seeks to intimidate his critics, protect himself from scrutiny, and go on wearing away at the liberal democratic order."

Read David Remnick's full article for The New Yorker at this link (subscription required).

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