And So It Begins …
Holding The Trump Administration Accountable
As a Never Trump conservative, I have said before that I intend to be a voice that will hold President Trump accountable. I hope that now that he is in the oval office, for better or for worse, other conservatives who voted for him reluctantly will join me in doing the same. I am not a political analyst or policy expert. I am just a concerned citizen, exercising my right to publicly voice my concerns about the direction our government is taking.
The first few days of a President’s term tend to be punctuated by gestures that are intended to set the tone for their administration:
- President Obama signed an executive order on the second day of office restricting White House employees from lobbying the Obama administration after leaving office, sending a message that big money was not going to control Washington under his watch.
- President George W. Bush signed an executive order nine days into his first term establishing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, signalling his administration’s intention to work with faith-based groups — a reassuring gesture to his evangelical supporters.
- President Clinton, on his third day of office, signaled commitment to his pro-choice base by revoking restrictions on abortion and the use of fetal tissue in medical research.
This dynamic of symbolic action is why, when Sean Spencer, the newly-minted White House Press Secretary, spent his first public appearance in his new role chastising the press for the their coverage of the Inauguration, I sat up and took notice.
The coverage of this public and official rebuke of the media from the White House has focused mostly on the question of whose side the facts are on, (for more on that, see Berny Belvedere’s piece “Welcome to the Alt-Fact Administration”). While sorting fact from fiction is obviously important, I think we may be missing the larger point of this story.
Donald Trump has always been a master at using the trivial to distract from the essential. While we are all busy trying figure out who’s lying and who’s not, very few people seem to have noticed that the White House has just set a precedent for holding the press accountable. In fact, Spicer stated the administration’s intention to do exactly that:
There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the responsibility to hold Donald Trump accountable. And I’m here to tell you that it goes two ways. We’re going to hold the press accountable, as well.
Actually, it’s not supposed to go both ways. The press should be held accountable by each other (this is why it’s important to have media coverage by multiple, independent outlets, so that to some extent competing biases can keep each other in check), and by the American people.
This is not to say that the President need be a suffering martyr at the hand of a dishonest media — if the media presents information that is provably false, the White House can and should provide their side of the story. But this is not what we’re seeing here: this is the Trump administration grasping at a triviality and using it as a long-awaited opportunity to continue to criticize and discredit the media, apparently as a cornerstone of its policy. We should be concerned about the facts, but more than that, we should be concerned about the White House presuming to demand that the press answer to the Trump administration.
Exactly what form will this “holding the press accountable” take? What is the line between criticism and censorship? Will we notice when it’s been crossed? Do we even care, as long as it’s “our guy” who’s carrying the big stick? Donald Trump has framed himself as the victim of a dishonest media from day one, and his Republican support, spurred on by the grievances of an increasingly left-leaning media, have been only too happy to cheer him on, seeing him as a scrappy little David against a big, bad Goliath. But let us not forget that he is no longer a private citizen — he is now the holder of the highest office in the country. So now who’s David, and who’s Goliath?
As a conservative, I am far more worried about the dangers of a overly-powerful Executive branch than I am about the dangers of a biased media. The power of the press is indeed formidable; this is all the more reason for the public to have a zero-tolerance stance on White House interference. A government that writes its own news, whether directly or indirectly, is a government that can do whatever it pleases. If you think that “political correctness” is bad now, wait until it’s dictated by a federal government. Media and government do not mix well: it is a clear conflict of interest with potentially catastrophic implications.
Donald Trump, as a businessman, already has a history of making members of the press pay when they present less-than-flattering coverage of him, as when, in 1990, he threatened litigation in order to pressure financial firm Janney Montgomery Scott LLC to fire analyst Marvin Roffman when he offered a negative prediction about the future success of Trump’s newly opened Taj Mahal casino. Will this intolerance for any kind of negative coverage carry forward into his Presidency? It is beginning to look like it.
During and after the election, I sincerely hoped that Trump’s obsession with discrediting the media was merely a campaign tactic that he would leave behind once the Presidency was secured. Yesterday’s press conference is doing nothing to ease my concerns. It appears that the undermining of the press is being made priority number one by the Trump administration. And that should scare everyone who values freedom — Republican, Democrat or anything in between.
