Trump would never quash the free press

As if the media’s coverage of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this weekend wasn’t painful enough, now we have to listen to TV personalities agonize over nerd prom’s hypothetical demise.

The latest in-sync meltdowns stemmed from a joke made by the dinner’s headliner comedian Colin Jost. “Colin Jost had a pretty apt joke tonight when he said this may be the final White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” CNN’s Jim Acosta told Vanity Fair at the NBCUniversal afterparty. “I think people have to think seriously about what’s going on right now.”

Nothing says “afterparty fun” like grave assertions about the future of the American media.

While other people might have just, you know, taken the joke and moved on with their lives, MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace was just as distressed as Acosta. “Because at this exact time next year, depending what happens in November seven months from now, we can’t say for certain that there would even be a White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or even a free press, or even a White House press corps,” she stressed.

For most of Americans, the absence of a free press isn’t too hard to imagine. We’ve had almost four years of practice.

Minus the hard-hitting pieces from White House go-to Drew Barrymore, the rest of the crack scribes in the mainstream media seem to have taken a vacation.

To be fair it is hard to find the time to fact-check Joe Biden’s tales of cannibals when you are busy asking him his favorite flavor of ice cream or admiring his cool sunglasses.

Still, why does Nicole Wallace believe that a Trump presidency will lead to the elimination of a free press? The answer is simple — she doesn’t. Neither does her fellow MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, who warned his audience in February 2020 of a similarly melodramatic scenario. “Would Donald Trump not do whatever he could do if he could get away with it? Seriously,” Joe Scarborough ranted in a fiery monologue. “If he could arrest every journalist he didn’t like, if he could arrest us tomorrow… If you say he wouldn’t, you’re just lying to yourself.”

Lying to himself seems to be Joe’s specialty. The poor guy can’t get arrested, no matter how much he might want to. Someone should ask Joe if he discovered Trump hates journalists before he and Mika visited Mar-a-Lago? Or after they had Trump on their show forty-one times in the
2016 primaries?

The truth is that Trump loves the free press. He can call them the enemy of the people but his actions speak louder than his words — or his Truths.

There was no shortage of less than flattering stories in Trump’s four years. And yet, he didn’t throw anyone in a gulag for their negative reporting during his term as president. In fact, one of Trump’s most annoying habits was his tendency to grant interviews to partisan actors who clearly hated his guts.

For better or worse, no one gave the industry made up of self-important democracy defenders more juice than the Orange Man.

Nevertheless, expect to hear a lot more fear-mongering from the sky is falling crowd. Joe Biden has spent the last four years shutting out the very journalists who sacrificed their last shreds of credibility to ensure his 2020 victory. The only thing these wannabe victims know how to do now is dangle their hypothetical imprisonments in front of a Trump-deranged audience and hope for the best.