Trump Nips Media Hand That Feeds Him

To those who admire Donald Trump's pushback campaign against political correctness, please note of how quickly his own inner thought cop leaps forth when his own fragile ego is poked.

"I'm going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money," Trump said in a rally rant last weekend, without bothering to offer any examples of what he was talking about.

"We're going to open up those libel laws. So that when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they're totally protected."

In other words, Trump promises to pursue those who dare to use the First Amendment for what it was intended to protect: your right to criticize the powerful.

Ah, yes, scratch anyone deeply enough and you will find a censor, especially if -- like Trump -- that someone has made bullying a central feature of his brand.

Even for Trump, his assault against press freedom was breathtakingly detached from reality. A public figure, which Trump is, already has the right to sue and "win big" when someone has published false or malicious statements about him. But someone who sues also is required to offer such niceties as facts and evidence, two obligations that Trump seldom allows to get in the way of a good rant.

In journalism school, we were schooled thoroughly in New York Times v. Sullivan, among other press law. That landmark Supreme Court case established "actual malice" as a standard before public officials could claim defamation or libel. The case was brought to push back against lawsuits filed by Southern governments to chill news coverage of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights protesters.

That civil rights connection took on new significance a couple of days after Trump's tirade as he hemmed and hawed his way through an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper. Trump tried to sound as if he had never heard of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, who had just endorsed the billionaire developer's presidential campaign.

Ah, here come those pesky, inconvenient facts again. CNN video of Trump in 1991 and a report by The New York Times in 2000 showed Trump rejecting Duke as "not company I wish to keep."

But that was then. In the days before Super Tuesday, Trump suddenly developed amnesia about any knowledge not only of Trump but also the Klan.

"I don't know any -- honestly I don't know David Duke," replied Trump, and "... I just don't know anything about him."

Why lie? Trump later blamed a lousy earpiece for his fib. Yet he looked and sounded as though he heard the question quite clearly but simply did not want to answer it. Sure, he might upset pragmatic Republican establishment voters, but he was not about to disappoint his base.

Considering how much white nationalist support he has attracted, he may be right. Various reports (Evan Osnos' excellent article "The Fearful and the Frustrated" in the Aug. 31 New Yorker was notably thorough) indicate Trump's promises to ban Muslims and deport 11 million undocumented immigrants, among his other excesses, has attracted the dwindling multitudes of white supremacy like cats to catnip.

Trump's attack against press freedom ironically bites the media hand that has fed him and his surprisingly successful campaign. He has uncovered a cauldron of boiling resentments, particularly among the same class of struggling working-class white Americans who complained in the 1960s that there was no civil rights group to speak for them.

Instead they turned to the Democratic presidential campaign of Alabama's former segregationist governor George Wallace, which bears striking similarities to today's populist uprising led by Trump.

In similar fashion, candidate Trump sounds less concerned with denouncing bigotry than with using it. He wouldn't be the first. Democracy requires tolerance for a wide variety of views, including the goofy.

But I no longer wonder how civilized democracies crumble into tyranny and chaos. Trump has shown us the first steps: Feed people what they want to hear, not what they need to know.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)