A step too far, Senator Flake
On January 17th, Senator Flake delivered an impassioned speech about the current ‘condition’ of American democracy, invoking the likes of Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton into his message. In the speech, Flake criticises the President for his repeated and pernicious attacks on the media, referring specifically to a tweet made by Trump last year:
Here is what the Arizona Senator said:
“The enemy of the people,” was what the president of the United States called the free press in 2017. Mr. President, it is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our own president uses words infamously spoken by Josef Stalin to describe his enemies. It bears noting that so fraught with malice was the phrase “enemy of the people,” that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Party that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of “annihilating such individuals” who disagreed with the supreme leader.
It is a neat point; Trump says ‘enemy of the people’, so did Stalin. Ipso facto, they must be cut from the same cloth. Not even close. In fact, this is an incredibly dangerous comparison, even if Senator Flake is making a wider point. In Stalinist Russia, the term ‘enemy of the people’ was an actual criminal charge. Its definition was so obscure that it gave Stalin’s special troikas free license to prosecute absolutely anyone. Such was the severity of Stalin’s rule that between 20–25 million perished. Donald Trump, for all his faults, simply does not equate to this level of human atrocity.
Comparing, in any measure, a democratically elected president to one of the most tyrannical rulers in human history is a painfully transparent headline grab. What makes Flake’s vainglorious speech so risible is that hours earlier, Senator Flake voted in favour of renewing the National Security Agency’s warrantless internet surveillance, thereby granting President Trump more domestic spying powers. If Senator Flake was so concerned about Trump undermining American democracy, why did he vote to give the commander-in-chief such extensive executive powers?
Put a cork in it
Flake’s speech is not the first example of a prominent and outgoing senator making a political grandstand in the twilight of their career. Who remembers the kerfuffle between President Trump and Senator Bob Corker, where the latter accused the President of “debasing” the White House, calling it an adult day-care centre?
To which the President responded, as only the President would:
Can anyone imagine Abraham Lincoln getting into a Twitter beef like this with one of his political adversaries? It would be hard to fathom…
Uh-oh, looks like @therealjeffersondavis doesn’t get what all men r created equal means. So much for the Confederate Army working with us — we had to try!
But Corker soon showed his true colours when he refused to vote in favour of the GOP tax bill last year. That is until, in the final hour, a special provision was added that would reduce the tax on income brought in by real-estate limited liability companies. What a strange coincidence. Senator Corker, by chance, happens to own several LLC companies and made as much as $7 million from them last year. Needless to say, the Bill passed after this provision was added. Fear not, political whoredom is alive and kicking in Washington.
Barks and bites
There is a tendency to conflate Trumpian rhetoric with action, which is understandable when a nuke button is involved. But as Salena Zito of The Atlantic wrote, we need to learn to take Trump seriously but not literally. His attacks on the media, however despicable, is nothing like Stalin’s omnipotent control of the press, who weaponised it into a tool of repression. If we were comparing Stalin to one of today’s world leaders, Vladimir Putin would be a much more suitable pick. Not only does Putin have firm control over state media but this year, he removed all pretence of a democratic state by banning Alexei Navalny, his only rival, from running in this year’s electoral race.
The Guardians of Democracy
Throughout the speech, Flake heaps praise, possibly to an excessive degree, onto the free press, which he describes as the ‘guardians of democracy’. This is absolutely true, but just in the way that a Senator criticises his president, so too must he confront the many problems rife in today’s media. Fake news, like it or not, is a massive problem in the media and even Trump himself has been a victim of it. We also do need not look beyond our own shores to remind ourselves that the British press are not always our democratic guardians:
The Daily Mail’s public shaming of three leading Supreme Court judges almost looked like something out of a Wild West WANTED photo. It should be judges who take matters to trial, not the media. This attack amounted to nothing more than a witch hunt.
All the President’s Men
Presidential attacks on the media are not a new phenomenon. Trump’s tweets directed at the mainstream media bear an eerie resemblance to the more insidious attacks by another US president some fifty years earlier. Nixon actually had his own ‘enemies’ list of journalists, reporters, and columnists who wrote negative stories about the president. After its leak, the list actually became a badge of honour among the journalists who were on it (it was one of Hunter S. Thompson’s biggest regrets to have not made the list). The lengths that Nixon went to in order to quash any negative press against him was extreme. During the Watergate investigation in 1971, a military analyst called Daniel Ellsberg leaked a 7,000-page document on America’s involvement in Vietnam to The New York Times. After learning of the leaker’s identity, Nixon told Henry Kissinger, to throw “that son-of-a-bitch” into jail. He later had one of his ‘plumbers’ break into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to find incriminating information about Ellsberg.
Here, the Trump-Nixon comparison is more justified. Trump is currently undergoing an investigation of his own and the shine of Mueller’s spotlight is shining ever brighter on the President and his cabinet . Do not be surprised if the frequency of Trump’s media attacks rise as the Mueller probe lurches its way towards the President. But unfortunately for Trump, these attempts to undermine the media will only serve to galvanise them, much in the same way that Nixon roused Bernstein and Woodward in 1972. Trump is playing a blindfolded game of piñata with a bee hive and soon, the bees are going to sting.