Now that Trump can’t constantly bash his rival candidate, Hillary Clinton, he has chosen a new adversary; the media. Donald Trump has repeatedly bashed the media for spreading ‘fake news’ since his presidency, and has urged the people of the United States to question major news broadcasters like the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, and CNN. Trump seems to use hatred and bashing as a practice of power, familiar to most dictators in history. Trump is no dictator, but he knows how to create an enemy to rally a crowd.
During his rally in Florida on Saturday, Trump was questioned after he suggested that there was a terror attack in Sweden. The rest of the world, including Sweden, seemed confused after Trump made such comments, which only serving purpose seemed to be that Trump wanted to remind people how he vowed to protect the US borders. Trump explained his baffling comments by blaming FOX News for broadcasting a story on ‘concerning immigrants & Sweden.’ However, there is no proof of any terror attacks over the weekend in Sweden. Swedish officials even replied to a series of Trump’s tweets by saying, ‘we look forward to informing the US administration about Swedish immigration and integration policies.’ Sweden has let in 200,000 refugees as migrants have fled their war-torn counties since the summer of 2015. This would be the third time that Trump and his administration has been accused of referencing fabricated terror attacks.
Trump wants us all to hate the media, so we essentially end up hating the facts. He wants to attack the facts, similar to Vladimir Putin, and turn the people against his real enemy; the truth. In his own press conferences, Trump lies and distorts facts into fabrications. Like how he claims his own inauguration ‘went all the way back down to the Washington Monument’. However, photographic proof tells the people of America otherwise. The fact is that fewer people attended the inauguration that did the Women’s March protest the following day. Not to mention the attendance for his inauguration was sufficiently lower to Obama’s.
Trump especially wants us all to think that the media spits lies after the scandal with his campaign’s ties to Russia becomes more factual. He treats the media like fools for asking questions about Russia, despite the journalistic evidence that is being dug up by multiple resources – some of which even broke the contrasting story on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. So, there lies proof of fair play by mainstream media.
Trump wants to be the ultimate mediator of what the people believe is true, and what they are allowed to believe as false. His strategy and tactic may work for a dictator, or Vladimir Putin, but seem to be failing to work for Americans. Russia’s media completely dismantled piece by piece, and now serves as Putin’s most powerful weapon. The concept that ‘whoever owns the media has the right to control what it says’, is drafted from a former KGB officer and head of the KGB’s successor agency; Vladimir Putin.
It’s hard to forecast if Donald Trump wants to follow in Putin’s control over media in a similar strategy, but given Trump and Putin’s close relations and proof of communications – one can only imagine. Does Donald Trump really have the brains to pull off dismantling the media as Vladimir Putin did? Likely not, given Russia’s media is much further away from the First Amendment than America’s. Trump just wants to gain praise and power from Americans by hoping that they will resent the media, and listen to him. Journalism may not be the most favoured occupation for the public, but it is more powerful today than ever before. Trump is trying to manipulate his people into becoming clickbait, because it is the only way that his fabricated messages and complicated terms seem to come out as rational.
