Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Michigan on Friday. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
Donald Trump is amplifying attacks on the media in the final days of the campaign, broadly threatening retaliation against the industry for coverage critical of him.
“To make America great you really have to get the news shaped up,” Trump told Fox News Saturday morning.
During a rally in North Carolina later that day, Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”
During the Fox News interview, Trump attacked several outlets. He called ABC News “corrupt,” renewing his gripe that the network’s David Muir during a September debate had correctly noted that that FBI data shows violent crime declining, contradicting Trump’s erroneous claims that it was “through the roof.”
Trump called journalists covering the event “monsters,” and “horrible, horrible, dishonest people.”
Trump isn’t just going after the media with words. On Thursday, the former president sued CBS News for $10 billion, alleging that the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris “amounts to a brazen attempt to interfere in the 2024 US Presidential Election.” The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of Texas where the sole judge is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee known for partisan pro-GOP rulings. Even so, the suit has little chance of success. TV networks routinely edit interviews (including those featuring Trump, who backed out of appearing on “60 Minutes” last month.) My colleague Pema Levy wrote more about this lawsuit and its chances for success here.
Trump’s suit is “without merit” a CBS spokesperson said last week. “The interview was not doctored; and 60 Minutes did not hide any part of the vice president’s answer to the question at issue…60 Minutes fairly presented the interview to inform the viewing audience, and not to mislead it.”
Trump has also said that CBS should lose its license to broadcast news due to the Harris interview. That’s one of many such threats. CNN recently noted that Trump in the last two years has called for every major American TV news network, including Fox News, to be punished for coverage he deemed unfair. Trump has also vowed that if he wins back the White House, he plans to seize greater control of independent regulatory agencies, including the FCC.
As president, Trump tried to punish media outlets that criticized him. His administration tried to block AT&T acquisition of CNN’s parent company and to deny a cloud computing contract for Amazon, which was founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
Trump has also threatened to jail journalists who report information he contends has national security implications. (Trump himself, of course, has been indicted for illegally retaining highly sensitive national security documents he removed from the White House.) In 2022, NPR recently noted, Trump repeatedly said the prospect of prison rape would cause reporters to disclose sources. “When this person realizes that he is going to be the bride of another prisoner shortly, he will say, ‘I’d very much like to tell you exactly who that was,'” Trump said at a Texas event.
All these statements amount to an ongoing threat that, if elected, Trump will use his power to curb speech critical of him. That’s a direct challenge to the First Amendment, and hence not likely to fully succeed, even among increasingly partisan judges.
But Trump could still made life difficult for media outlets, and his threats already appear to have had a chilling effect. Amid attacks from Trump and his allies over his philanthropic efforts to help register voters in 2020, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg has tried to extract himself from politics, including by limiting what the company deems political content on its platforms. The Washington Post editorial page’s scuttling of an endorsement of Harris has been widely read as an attempt by Bezos to avoid angering Trump, though Bezos disputes that. The Los Angeles Times also drew fire for declining to endorse a candidate this year.
The Post‘s move didn’t appease Trump. The former president ripped the paper during his Fox call-in Saturday, even suggesting the 250,000 lost subscriptions and high-profile resignations the paper suffered due to the non-endorsement was connected to his gripes with the paper. Why is the Post facing these problems? According to Trump, it’s “because they don’t have credibility.”
