What would Thomas Jefferson think?
“Nothing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself, becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” Thomas Jefferson, June 11, 1807 and Donald Trump Feb. 18, 2017
It’s become clear that President Trump gets perturbed when people don’t agree with everything he says.
He ran his entire presidential campaign on the “dishonest” media, with its obsession with those things most people call “facts.”
In case you haven’t heard, he’s now the president. And he’s still at war with the media.
No wonder he made sure to take his roadshow to Melbourne, Florida on Feb. 18, and, within minutes, he brandished a quote from Thomas Jefferson to restate his malevolence for the media.
Jefferson did make a strong statement about newspapers being that “polluted vehicle.”
But Trump, who’s been known to stretch the truth until it frays, should have stopped with that quote.
He didn’t.
“June 14, my birthday, 1807,” he added.
Nope.
Jefferson wrote that statement in a letter dated June 11, 1807, which, is not Trump’s birthday.
But more, Trump used Jefferson’s quote as proof that one of our Founding Fathers had the same disdain for the media he has.
He’d ignored several quotes by Jefferson that affirmed his sincere respect for opinions he agreed with, and those he didn’t.
“And were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the later,” Jefferson wrote in 1787.
Jefferson might be appalled by Trump’s frequent attempts to blame any media outlet for finding flaws in his statements.
When he, or one of his hired mouthpieces, talk about those non-existent terror attacks in Bowling Green, Ky., or in Atlanta, or most hilariously Sweden, he gleefully fires off tweets calling those media reports, and the reporters who file them – “Fake News.”
Or, if a reporter challenges him for proof of his oft-mentioned “massive Electoral College victory,” while positing the truth that his victory hadn’t really been massive compared to those of other presidents, Trump replies, “I’ve read it somewhere.”
That way, he can blame somebody else for filling his head with the lie.
The next time you get caught robbing a bank, tell the judge that it was the teller’s fault for giving you the money.
Let’s see how that works.
Back in the 1950s, it was Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy, who scared up support by finding non-existent communists who’d infiltrated the U.S. State Department.
He infused his fiction with attacks on the media for not seeing what he, alone, had seen.
That soon wore thin.
Legendary CBS newsman Edward R, Murrow took McCarthy to task by issuing a sober analysis that, in part, said, “We will not walk in fear, one from another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men.” And then he added the part that is more appropriate today, than ever, “Not from men who feared to write, to speak to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.”
Murrow was right, of course.
When Trump tweets, “The so-called angry crowds in home districts of some Republicans are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists,” he’s doesn’t seem to understand that the growing crowds at town hall meetings across the country are merely performing their civic duties.
Trump thinks he’s above it all.
He’s not.
First, they’re not “so-called” angry crowds.
They are angry.
And, for the most part, they’re angry because of him.
Perhaps he should dig a little deeper into his Thomas Jefferson quotes.
Amongst the many things Jefferson wrote, Trump can easily find the passage that applies to himself.
There, in a letter to John Melish, Jefferson wrote on Jan. 13, 1812, was one sentence that should be a warning to this new president.
“By oft repeating an untruth, men come to believe it themselves.
Here, here!
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net