As we reported earlier, Americans seem to be getting fed up with the difficulty President Trump is having forming a cabinet and getting the job done for which we hired him. A full 73 percent of Americans want the Democrats to work with the president. The poll did not specify what percentage of Americans want the REPUBLICANS to work with Trump as well. Not sure how much damage the team of Graham and McCain can do, but they’re certainly not in the boat and rowing.
Senator John McCain felt the need to speak out after Donald Trump gave the press a tongue-lashing for biased reporting and out-and-out lies. Now it’s probably not a stretch to say there were an awful lot of Republicans — and others — in the viewing audience who were cheering the president’s candid assessment. Finally! Someone saying what we’ve been wanting to say for months.
But that’s not how McCain saw it.
Per The Hill, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on Saturday defended the free press following criticism by President Trump, warning that a suppression of an “adversarial” press can lead to a dictatorial regime. When asked about the president’s tweet from Friday that accused the media of being the “enemy of the American people,” McCain took the opportunity to underscore the importance of free press in the modern era.
“A fundamental part of that new world order was a free press. I hate the press, I hate you especially, but the fact is we need you, we need a free press,” McCain told Chuck Todd in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“That’s how dictators get started,” he added later. “They get started by suppressing free press, in other words, a consolidation of power.”
Even Chuck Todd was shocked, asking Senator McCain if he thought Trump’s tweet was setting him on the “Road to Mussolini.”
“I am not saying that President Trump is trying to be a dictator. I am just saying we need to learn the lessons of history,” he said, warning about any attempts to “shut down” the press.
Fair enough. But did anyone hear Trump say he wants to shut down the press? He’d like them to report the facts. He’d like them to stop making up stories. He’d like to shut that part down. But take over the media? Hardly.
Even this strongly-worded message says nothing about shutting down the press.
Perhaps the barbs flung at McCain by Trump during the presidential campaign really left a mark. It sure seems that way.
But one final thing…at the end of the day, Americans don’t really give a crap about crowd size. Or how giant the victory was. We care he won. Period. End of story. But we DO care about fake smears and serious lies about subjects of substance, such as “election hacking” — or Benghazi for that matter.
[Note: This article was written by Michele Hickford]
