I am an enemy of the people. For all the “presidential” promise some perceived in Tuesday’s teleprompter-smooth speech to Congress, that didn’t change.
I guess I always was an enemy of the people, even when covering the revolution in Iran so Americans would know what was going on in that critical country, as a mob with machetes chased my camera crew and me, and I was beaten at an Islamic cemetery, and had a colleague killed right next to me. He must have been an enemy of the people, too.
I also apparently was an enemy of the people when I barely made it over a shard-encrusted wall during a firefight between murderous militias in Beirut, while another colleague wasn’t so lucky and died scrawling the names of his children in his own blood. Another enemy of the people, no doubt.
I must have been an enemy of the people when I waded through dioxin-laced mud to report on the legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and when my crew and I had to hotfoot it from gunmen in the Colombian jungle during a raid-gone-bad in the war on drugs.
Obviously I was an enemy of the people when I got death threats from an American arms dealer I tracked down in Libya, and when I lived for a week in a room running with rats and cockroaches during the war to oust tyrant Idi Amin from Uganda, and when I laid for hours in a swamp aside a runway measuring Soviet air power during their invasion of Afghanistan, and when I slept on desert sands with scorpions all around during the Gulf War.
So the American people would know what was going on.
Then there’s Daniel Pearl, beheaded in Pakistan. And James Foley, who lost his head in Syria. And Marie Colvin, blown apart by shells there. More enemies in our midst.
Apparently by the lights of President Donald Trump, we who leave our families and deal with despicable despots and risk our lives to bring America news about its enemies are now the enemies ourselves.
Trump complains that when he attacks journalists, “They always bring up the First Amendment.” How frustrating that must be for someone who can’t stomach criticism but, because of the Constitution, can’t abolish it. The fact is, this is part of the media’s role: to expose anything from a public official’s incurious ignorance to his malicious misrepresentations to his polarizing polemics to his flat-out lies.
Trump doesn’t have a clue. He has the most easily offended ego on Earth, but he doesn’t have a clue.
But oh, he does have weapons to use against the enemy. Like barring his least favorite news organizations (and thus their audiences) from White House briefings. And “opening up our libel laws so we can sue them and win lots of money.” And inhibiting an indispensable tool: the use of “confidential” sources that has exposed everything from the crimes of Watergate to the false premises of the Iraq war. He demands, “They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name.” Ironic, coming from a guy who perpetuated the Obama “birther” myth and pinned it on “an extremely credible source.”
Disliking journalists who aren’t his sycophants is one thing. Discrediting them is another. But as he has with judges, intelligence officials, and political critics of any color, President Trump is doing his best to make the media into an enemy of the people. “A great danger to our country” is how he describes us. “We’re going to do something about it.” That is the language you hear from leaders in dictatorships, not democracies.
If Trump called us the enemy of the people only once, that would be Trump being Trump. But it wasn’t just once. If this thin-skinned president succeeds in stifling a free press, then he is the enemy of the people. Not us.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News.
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