His demonization of the news media won’t fall on deaf ears.
.. “Hey Bret, what do you think? Do you think the pen is mightier than the sword, or that the AR is mightier than the pen?”.. Perhaps the reason Trump voters are so frequently the subject of caricature,” I wrote, “is that they so frequently conform to type.”.. Which brings me to the July 20 meeting between Trump and two senior leaders of The Times, publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editorial page editor James Bennet... he warned the president that “his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous,” and that characterizations of the news media as “the enemy of the people” are “contributing to a rise in threats against journalists and will lead to violence.”.. Sulzberger’s warning had no effect... By now, it almost passes without comment that the president of the United States not only violates the ground rules of his own meetings with the press, but also misrepresents the substance of the conversation... in a follow-on tweet, that the media were “very unpatriotic” for revealing “internal deliberations of our government” that could put people’s lives at risk. That’s almost funny considering that no media organ has revealed more such deliberations, with less regard for consequences, than his beloved WikiLeaks... What can’t be ignored is presidential behavior that might best be described as incitement. Maybe Trump supposes that the worst he’s doing is inciting the people who come to his rallies to give reporters like CNN’s Jim Acosta the finger. And maybe he thinks that most journalists, with their relentless hostility to his personality and policies, richly deserve public scorn.
Yet for every 1,000 or so Trump supporters whose contempt for the press rises only as far as their middle fingers, a few will be people like my caller. Of that few, how many are ready to take the next fatal step? In the age of the active shooter, the number isn’t zero.
.. Should that happen — when that happens — and journalists are dead because some nut thinks he’s doing the president’s bidding against the fifth column that is the media, what will Trump’s supporters say?
.. neither is he the child who played with a loaded gun and knew not what he did.
.. Donald Trump’s more sophisticated defenders have long since mastered the art of pretending that the only thing that matters with his presidency is what it does, not what he says. But not all of the president’s defenders are quite as sophisticated. Some of them didn’t get the memo about taking Trump seriously but not literally. A few hear the phrase “enemy of the people” and are prepared to take the words to their logical conclusion.
.. We are approaching a day when blood on the newsroom floor will be blood on the president’s hands.
Comment:
y Trump is seeing how hard it can be to land the ‘ultimate’ deal between Israel and the Palestinians
“There is no reason there’s not peace between Israel and the Palestinians — none whatsoever,” Trump said in April.
.. The Abbas video is similar to others produced by Israel and shown to U.S. officials in the past, U.S. and Israeli officials said. But this one appeared aimed at discrediting Abbas personally and triggering an “emotional response” from Trump on the eve of his meeting with the aging Palestinian leader, said a senior U.S. official briefed on the meeting.
.. Trump is inexperienced even if he’s not naive, veterans of past peace efforts said. He is now having a “health-care moment,” in which he realizes that something that looked doable on paper turns out to be far more complicated than he first imagined, said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator.
“Who knew it would be so hard and complicated?” Levy joked.
.. “Netanyahu’s game plan is not new — he attempts to shift the focus onto diversions and distractions that he hopes will make the Palestinians look bad and will keep the pressure off him when it comes to offering something on the substance of a peace deal,” Levy said. Hence the Israeli focus on incitement and Palestinian payments to the families of prisoners accused of violence against Israelis, he said.
Palestinian officials claim that many of the arrests are the result of opposition to illegal occupation and that they have a duty to support the families of those jailed.