EDITORIAL: We Cannot Trust Republicans to Defend a Free Press
The views of the Editorial Board do not reflect the views of the Caravel’s newsroom or Georgetown University.
Journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi national and permanent resident of the United States, was murdered inside the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul on October 2. Rather than challenge Saudi Arabia’s brazen human rights violation, President Donald Trump, referencing plans to sell the country advanced weaponry, equivocated, "I don't want to lose all of that investment being made into our country. I don't want to lose a million jobs, I don't want to lose $110 billion dollars in terms of investment."
Trump has done little since to defend the rights of the journalists who, at great personal risk, speak truth to power and uncover the secrets that the tyrants of the world would rather keep hidden. We are not surprised.
Trump’s reluctance to champion the First Amendment is but the latest in a chain of debasements and self-inflicted wounds on American moral leadership perpetrated by a president that values his own popularity more than the fundamental laws underpinning the free society that enables his daily vitriol.
Too few members of the president’s own party have sought to restrain his worst instincts or risked their own political positions to defy a man that has repeatedly called the American press “the enemy of the people,” turned a blind eye to the repression of journalists abroad, and praised violence against members of the press.
“Any guy who can do a body slam is my kind of guy!”
Representative Greg Gianforte (R-MT At-Large), who is narrowly favored to win re-election today, infamously body-slammed the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, breaking his glasses, after Jacobs questioned Gianforte’s position on the Affordable Care Act. While campaigning for Gianforte in Montana on October 18, Trump said, “Any guy who can do a body slam is my kind of guy!” Jacobs expressed “shock and dismay” that “the president is mocking [him] when [he has] been the victim of a crime.” We too are shocked and dismayed at a president that so openly celebrates violence.
The Guardian
In a spate of failed postal bombings, Cesar Sayoc, a Florida resident and vocal supporter of the president, targeted more than ten notable critics of Trump, including former-Director of the CIA John Brennan. The bomb intended for Brennan was directed to CNN in advance of a planned appearance. Blaming the press for its own persecution, Trump said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on October 24, “The media also has a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative—and oftentimes false—attacks and stories.”
Just 26 miles from the dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., a lone gunman with a longstanding vendetta against the Capital Gazette killed five and injured two at the newspaper’s offices on June 28. Expressing deep concern over Trump’s statements and deteriorating trust in journalists, Freedom House wrote, “Never in the 38 years that Freedom House has been monitoring global press freedom has the United States figured as much in the public debate about the topic as in 2016 and the first months of 2017.” The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that the U.S. has seen as many journalists murdered in 2018 as Mexico and is tied as the world’s third-deadliest country for reporters, behind Afghanistan and Syria. This unacceptable reality is rooted in the president’s attacks on the media.
Where once the Republican Party defended the need to place limits on government power by supporting a free and robust press, U.S. Naval War College Professor Tom Nichols, a now-former Republican, writes that “the Republican Party now exists for one reason, and one reason only: for the exercise of raw political power.”
During a January 27, 2017, dinner with then-FBI Director James Comey, Trump asked for his “loyalty.” Comey, at that time a Republican, offered his “honesty” instead; just weeks later, Trump fired him. There are too few Republicans who have held firm against Trump, too few who have espoused “a higher loyalty” to our Constitution. That is why we cannot trust Republicans in Congress to check the power of the president.
To censure the president for his statements and hold the Republican Party accountable for its complicity, we, the Editorial Board of the Caravel, urge Americans to vote today. This is the only way to ensure that the American press, among the world’s freest and most vibrant, continues to expose tyrants wherever they may be found.
We agree with the president’s remarkably self-unaware statement following mail bomb attacks on his opponents, “There is one way to settle our disagreements: it’s called peacefully—at the ballot box.”