'Revenge': Inside Trump's 'unnerving' plan for 'curtailing freedom of the press'

31 March

After The Atlantic published editor Jeffrey Goldberg's bombshell "Signalgate" article on March 24, many national security experts described Goldberg's revelation as a wake-up call. Goldberg revealed that National Security Director Michael Waltz had wrongly invited him to a group chat on the messaging app Signal in which Trump Administration officials — including Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — discussed a military operation against Houthis in Yemen.

The big story, from a national security standpoint, was a dangerous security breach and the fact that a prominent journalist was wrongly given access to classified information. But President Donald Trump and others in the MAGA movement were quick to demonize Goldberg and The Atlantic, which Trump described as a "failed magazine."

In an article published on March 31, The Guardian's Adam Gabbatt describes the hatred being directed against Goldberg as a glaring example of Trump and the MAGA movement's assault on freedom of the press.

Gabbatt quotes liberal pundit Bill Press as saying, "Revenge is Trump's number one motivation for anything in this second term of office, and he believes he has been treated unfairly by the media. And he is going to strike out against those in the media who he considers his enemies. He's going in the direction of really curtailing the freedom of the press, following the pattern of every autocrat ever on the planet: they need to shut down a free and independent press in order to get away with their unlimited use of power."

Press isn't the only one who is sounding the alarm. Media Matters' Matt Gertz draws a parallel between Trump and far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who is revered in the MAGA movement.

Gertz told The Guardian, "What makes the situation so worrying is that for the last several years, Donald Trump himself and the leading lights of the right-wing media and political movement — from Tucker Carlson to Kevin Roberts at the Heritage Foundation — have cited as their exemplar Viktor Orbán of Hungary. That's what they want to accomplish. And what Orbán did with the press was squeeze different media corporation owners until they agreed to either make their press more palatable to him, or sell their outlets to someone who would. I think that is basically, by their own admission, what the Trump Administration is trying to bring about in this country."

Gertz added, "I think the hope is that we have more guardrails than Hungary did to prevent that from happening. But it’s unnerving that the president of the United States is trying to follow in those footsteps."

Katie Fallow, deputy litigation director for the Knight First Amendment Institute, believes that Trump's vitriolic attacks on the press have implications that go way beyond journalists themselves.

Fallow told The Guardian, "It's a threat to the ability of the of the press to critically cover the president, but perhaps more importantly, the function of the press is to inform the public about the workings of government, and allow the public to decide whether or not it wants to vote for these people again, or whether it approves. And so, it's more than just its effect on the media — its (an) effect on the general public."

Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

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