Trump nakedly wants what maybe all politicians want, but few have the temerity to ask for: plenty of attention, all of it admiring. He appears to believe in a captive press, of the kind found, for example, in Benito Mussolini’s Italy or Fidel Castro’s Cuba. And he believes in a cult of personality—his own—that should obviate the need for questions. Just acknowledge his tremendousness and shut up. “Don’t believe the biased and phony media quoting people who work for my campaign,” he tweeted in May. “The only quote that matters is a quote from me!”
.. Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, offered a unique interpretation of what journalists do. “I really don’t appreciate campaigns thinking it is the job of the media to go and be these virtual fact checkers,” she said on Sunday, on ABC’s “This Week.” Since when is it not journalists’ job to check facts?
.. after the debate was over, Trump complained that “they” had given him a “defective mic.” He added, “I wonder, was that on purpose?” (That’s a species of excuse he’s used before: in February, after he failed, in one of this phone interviews with CNN, to disavow David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard, he blamed the affair on a “bad earpiece.”)
.. Trump has repeatedly made is that as President he would “loosen” or “open up” libel laws, so that, as he said at a campaign rally in Texas in February, “when the New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when the Washington Post . . . writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.” It’s not clear how he would do this as President or whether he even could, and when he’s been challenged on those points he hasn’t made it any clearer, probably because he has no idea.
.. More frightening, though, is the way that Trump has spoken about the law as an instrument of personal vengeance—his way of getting back at his critics and making them pay. “We’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before,” he said, talking about reporters, at a February rally in Texas.
.. Clinton’s falsehoods belonged more recognizably in the realm of what politicians do so often: she obfuscated, or exaggerated, or was less than transparent in defending her handling of particular matters during her career in public life. She did not tend to lie, as Trump does, about what Politico called matters of “policy substance”—what one could also call demonstrable facts about the world.
.. “A man who is unconscious of himself acts in a blind, instinctive way and is in addition fooled by all the illusions that arise when he sees everything that he is not conscious of in himself coming to meet him from outside as projections upon his neighbors,” Carl Jung wrote in his 1945
The Dangerous Acceptance of Donald Trump
Trump is a declared enemy of the liberal constitutional order of the United States—the order that has made it, in fact, the great and plural country that it already is. He announces his enmity to America by word and action every day. It is articulated in his insistence on the rightness of torture and the acceptable murder of noncombatants.
.. He makes his enmity to American values clear when he suggests that the Presidency holds absolute power, through which he will be able to end opposition—whether by questioning the ownership of newspapers or talking about changing libel laws or threatening to take away F.C.C. licenses. To say “Well, he would not really have the power to accomplish that” is to misunderstand the nature of thin-skinned authoritarians in power. They do not arrive in office and discover, as constitutionalists do, that their capabilities are more limited than they imagined. They arrive, and then make their power as large as they can.
.. Ted Cruz called Trump a pathological liar, the kind who does not know the difference between lies and truth. Whatever the clinical diagnosis, we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies.
.. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.
.. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.
.. The radical progressives decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.
.. The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power. The American Republic stands threatened by the first overtly anti-democratic leader of a large party in its modern history—an authoritarian with no grasp of history, no impulse control, and no apparent barriers on his will to power.
.. Countries don’t really recover from being taken over by unstable authoritarian nationalists of any political bent, left or right—not by Peróns or Castros or Putins or Francos or Lenins or fill in the blanks. The nation may survive, but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal.
Gawker’s Essential Unevenness
simply the manner in which the site operated: the combativeness, the lack of respect, the speed of the writing and editing and publishing, the relative absence of organizational hierarchy instituted by Nick Denton and the editors who worked for him.
.. Why, if it took its work seriously, would it run “some of both the best and worst of 21st century journalism,” as Salon put it, and all under the same name? But the best and the worst were fundamentally linked: the freedom at Gawker is what made the mistakes inextricable from the good, risky work that Gawker took on.
The Alien and Sedition Acts
The most controversial of the new laws permitting strong government control over individual actions was the SEDITION ACT. In essence, this Act prohibited public opposition to the government. Fines and imprisonment could be used against those who “write, print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous and malicious writing” against the government.
Under the terms of this law over 20 Republican newspaper editors were arrested and some were imprisoned. The most dramatic victim of the law was REPRESENTATIVE MATTHEW LYON of Vermont. His letter that criticized President Adams’ “unbounded thirst for ridiculous pomp, foolish adulation, and self avarice” caused him to be imprisoned. While Federalists sent Lyon to prison for his opinions, his constituents reelected him to Congress even from his jail cell.
The Sedition Act clearly violated individual protections under the first amendment of the Constitution; however, the practice of “JUDICIAL REVIEW,” whereby the Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of laws was not yet well developed.