Enemy of the people

I didn’t vote for Sen. John McCain when he ran for president. But I respect him greatly as a man of integrity—now more than ever.

When President Donald Trump tweeted that the “FAKE NEWS media” was not his enemy, “it is the enemy of the American People,” McCain didn’t hesitate to denounce him. “Such talk,” he said on NBC News, is “how dictators get started.”

Then, on Meet the Press, he warned: “When you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press.”

Recent and current examples are rife: Erdogan in Turkey, Chavez in Venezuela, Sisi in Egypt, Mugabe in Zimbabwe and, of course, Trump’s good buddy Vladimir Putin in Russia, where, under Joseph Stalin, being branded an “enemy of the people” was a death sentence.

I’m proud to report that my journalistic brethren aren’t running scared. In fact, Trump’s threatened assault on the First Amendment has only added to their determination to let the American people know everything they need to know about Trump and his administration.

As political columnist Leonard Pitts has said, Trump seems not to realize that he no longer possesses the ability to operate unilaterally and in secret. He’s now a “public servant” who must play by the rules as they are defined in the Constitution and upheld by “so-called” judges. And he has some 324 million bosses who rely on the media to know what he’s doing.

Other Republican senators have joined McCain in speaking truth to the president’s power, among them Lindsay Graham, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. It’s time for others to stand up for the Constitution and freedom of the press.