The coronavirus really is an “enemy of the people” — of all the people, whether Republicans or Democrats, supporters or opponents of President Trump, politicians or journalists. Yet instead of uniting the entire country to combat this terrible pandemic, Trump and his followers seem intent on rehashing their grievances against the “fake news media.”
In truth, most of the media have done a tremendous job of reporting in a difficult, life-threatening environment. Even White House reporters are running a risk by showing up for work rather than staying home with their families like the rest of us. That’s to say nothing of journalists who have run an even greater risk of infection by reporting on the virus from dangerous hot spots such as Wuhan, China; Lombardy, Italy; and Queens, N.Y.
The only journalists who have failed during this crisis have been Trump’s own supporters in the right-wing media industrial complex. Many of them joined him in playing down the severity of the virus and then called for restarting the economy prematurely — a plan that Trump embraced last week before wisely rejecting it on Sunday. The disinformation from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and their ilk is likely to get people killed. If Trump would tell his media followers to cease and desist, that would be a real public service. But, of course, that’s not what the president is doing.
Even as people are dying (more than 2,400 Americans had died of the novel coronavirus by Sunday night), Trump is nursing imaginary grievances against the mainstream press. He tweeted on Sunday that “the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY” because “the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc. are so high, ‘Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers’ according to the @nytimes.” He then made up a quote that he attributed to some unnamed “lunatic”: “Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him.”
The reality-TV star turned president is telling the media: Forget the coronavirus. Focus on what really matters — my TV ratings! His level of self-absorption is literally cartoonish. The president is best captured in a scathing, dead-on drawing by the Canadian cartoonist Michael de Adder, which has Trump saying to a patient on a ventilator: “You think you’re having a bad day. You should see the way I’m being treated by the media.”
Trump does not confine his grievances to Twitter. On Sunday, he once again raged against a perfectly proper question from a White House reporter. PBS correspondent Yamiche Alcindor asked about Trump’s bewildering comment last week that governors are requesting more ventilators than they need: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.” Trump cut her off to deny saying what he had said and to label her question as “threatening” and not “nice” — even though she had merely quoted his own words back to him.
This is a transparent attempt by Trump to deflect responsibility for his many failures by redirecting the ire of his supporters against the “fake news media.” Naturally, his reprehensible strategy is being emulated by all the mini-Trumps who now populate the GOP.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) of Florida may be the nation’s worst governor, because he refuses to shut down the state even as its case numbers across the state are exploding. (On Monday, he belatedly issued a stay-at-home order, only for southeast Florida.) To avoid tough questioning about his benighted policy, DeSantis barred a Miami Herald/Tampa Bay Times reporter from his news conference on Saturday.
Perhaps the most appalling attack on the press was launched by DeSantis’s fellow Florida Republican, Sen. Marco Rubio. He tweeted on Sunday: “Some in our media can’t contain their glee & delight in reporting that the U.S. has more #CoronaVirus cases than #China. Beyond being grotesque, its bad journalism.”
What Rubio is saying is horrendously, hideously offensive. It is, to borrow his own word, grotesque. There is no one — no one — who is happy that Trump has bungled the coronavirus response so badly that the United States now has more cases than any other country in the world. Rubio could not offer a single example of “glee & delight,” because there isn’t one.
I know this will come as a surprise to the senator, but journalists are people, too. We have families and friends, jobs and retirement accounts we worry about. Many of us know someone who has gotten ill. Some journalists, such as my Post colleague David Von Drehle, have contracted the disease themselves. Some — such as CBS News producer Maria Mercader and NBC News technician Larry Edgeworth — have died from it. To suggest that journalists are celebrating this tragedy is the ugliest of cheap shots. Rubio is fast becoming as offensive and unfeeling as the president he once denounced as a “con man.”
I would humbly suggest to the Republican Party in the time of the coronavirus: Focus on the real enemy. It’s not the media.
Read more: