It has long been my policy that I do not endorse candidates for office and there are two main reasons for that policy.
First, I have one vote like everyone else, so my vote really shouldn’t carry any weight beyond the ballot box, and it also means that I can cover elected officials without fear or favor or being accused of ignoring a story and showing bias because I am a confirmed supporter of a politician that might find themselves in hot water. Plus, only the Augusta Press editorial board makes endorsements on behalf of the newspaper.📰
That said, I am neither a MAGA or anti-MAGA.
I do understand why President Donald Trump has the attitude that he displays against the press. After all, the majority of the mainstream media cheered on the lawfare perpetuated against Trump to try and keep him out of the race. We all saw that.
However, now that he is back in power, while I support many of his initiatives, there are things I am seeing that concern me.
Virtually everything a president does either follows a precedent or creates one; so I am not necessarily concerned with what Trump might do but that he might open the door for successors to do in the future.
It was almost assured that Trump would allow for retaliation against someone like New York prosecutor Letitia James for crimes she may have committed not related to her fervent prosecution of him. Not only did James try to take away Trump’s businesses and accumulated wealth, but she wanted to take away his freedom and jail him for doing nothing other than running for office.
We all know what they say about living in a glass house.
It is also my belief that people who are willing to write an elected official a blank check are every bit as dangerous as the crazies who are torching Teslas because of their Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Some people are so avid in their support that they don’t mind bending the Constitution to serve Trump’s agenda. This is how the Romans lost their republic and became an empire ruled by emperors whose only term limit was death.
The last time I looked, the 22nd Amendment is very clear on presidential term limits; therefore, I cannot support any move to give Trump a third term. Period.
Let me make it clear that I do not think Trump is the modern embodiment of Adolf Hitler. That man was a mass murderer and making Hitler references when discussing Trump is like comparing Mother Teresa to Charles Manson because they both were, in their own way, spiritual leaders.
However, Trump does show, in my opinion, a bit of a despotic side with some of his pronouncements, like claiming America is going to take over Greenland, no matter what the Greenlanders think about it and that Canada will bend to the will of Trump and become the 51st state.
Sorry Donald, you don’t defeat the Chinese by acting like them.
Threatening to violate an independent country’s sovereignty, with force if necessary, because they have coveted raw materials are the words of a despot.
Despots usually have one thing in common, and that is that they use an “emergency” situation to legally consolidate power and ultimately obtain absolute power by sleight of hand; in modern times this is true from Mussolini to Putin.
Looking through history, most totalitarianism in government starts with an emergency of some kind that requires immediate attention to avoid a potential national security disaster.
Coup d’états have become passe in the civilized world.
Mussolini had the economy, Hitler had the Reichstag fire, and there are forces in the United States government that seem to want to use the immigration crisis to allow Trump a third term, but even scarier to me is that it has been floated that Trump could use the “emergency” to suspend habeas corpus.
This is the sort of thing that tarnished both Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt’s reputations as great men.
Roosevelt’s campaign slogan to remain in power was, “You don’t change horses in midstream.” While Roosevelt never became a dictator, he not only suspended habeas corpus but also nullified the citizenship of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.
Those people would not be made whole by the government, in the form of an apology and some reparations, until the Reagan era.
With every totalitarian government I have studied, after the emergency comes the taming of the press. Sometimes it is done by winning over skeptical news outlets, but the most popular method is to find a way to ban media that won’t toe the line by labeling them “supporters of terror” or being guilty of “incitement” of some kind.
It took Vladmir Putin a good decade, but he has done an artful job of silencing the opposition press in Russia. I don’t know, but the fear of walking into an elevator with its safety cord severed would make me rethink my career options.
In 2022, Novaya Gazeta, one of Russia’s oldest independent newspapers suspended operations until the war in Ukraine is over. This decision came after the paper received a second warning for alleged violations of the country’s foreign agent law from Roskomnadzor, Russia’s federal media censor, which has the power to shut the paper down and arrest its reporters.
Again, I am sympathetic to Trump when it comes to the way many in the media have outright lied about him, twisted his words and conspired to promote his opponents while denigrating everything that Trump does. If he plays golf five times in a week, they say he is neglecting his job, if he only plays three rounds, then they devote an entire broadcast hour to how “Trump battles a health crisis!”
It is true that many press organizations ran with every Russia collusion and “bimbo eruption” story they could get their hands on and then spent maybe ten seconds of a retraction, if they bothered with one at all. But, with that problem, Trump’s recourse is to sue for libel, not change centuries of press protocol.
A hostile media does not give Trump the legal ability to violate press freedom, and that is exactly what his administration is attempting.
One of the funniest SNL skits I have seen since the shows 1980s heyday had the press secretary in the setting of the press room in the White House. All of the reporters had chairs except one, the CNN reporter was sitting in a cage, dressed in a diaper and moaning, “We’re not fake news!”
Then sketch comedy comes to life when Trump actually bans The Associated Press from the press room altogether, sending a distinct message to all other news organizations.
Now, the Trump administration is attempting to criminalize accepting and publishing “leaked” material.
Without leaks, the American public would have never learned of the Pentagon Papers and many scandals from Iran-contra to Monicagate likely would have been squelched by lack of a source.
This is precisely why we journalists go to the lengths that we do to protect our sources.
However, Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi disagrees.
“This conduct is illegal and wrong, and it must stop,” Bondi wrote. “Therefore, I have concluded that it is necessary to rescind Merrick Garland’s policies precluding the Department of Justice from seeking records and compelling testimony from members of the news media in order to identify and punish the source of improper leaks.”
This is banana republic kind of stuff.
I remember the last time I fought for press freedom was when I was deposed in a legal matter by the famed, late Augusta attorney and former State Senator Ed Tarver.
During that deposition, Tarver tried every trick in the book to get me to disclose my sources. I have to give it to Ed, he was a genius at asking questions that would lead him to the answer he wanted; but he couldn’t break me down.
In fact, he smiled knowingly when I started reciting case law like either I knew what I was talking about or I wanted him to have to spend hours looking through those cases to prove me wrong.
In the end, Ed gave up because the Constitution was on my side.
If Trump were a younger man, I would say that I am concerned that he is setting the stage to become an authoritarian leader; but considering his age, I don’t think that is in the cards. We also have a Supreme Court that would likely prevent Trump from suspending habeas corpus and would side with the press over press freedom.
However, totalitarianism generally comes about over time as rights are slowly eroded or people allow the rights of others to be diminished without the thought that a change in the power structure might make them next in the line for the proverbial firing squad.
Scott Hudson is the Senior Investigative Reporter, Editorial Page Editor and weekly columnist for The Augusta Press. Reach him at scott@theaugustapress.com
