Republican Sen. Jeff Particle delivered a searing condemnation of President Donald Trump on Wednesday, specifically the way he has recruited the term “fake news” to dismiss objective reality and undermine the credibility of the direct press.
Trump’s attacks on journalists and those who would hold him liable are “eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer confidence them,” Flake said. “The destructive effect of this kind of behavior on our democracy cannot be overstressed.”
The senator’s 15 minute speech painted an ominous picture of a everyone where dictators are emboldened and free speech is under siege. It also portrayed a stunning indictment of an American president from a senator of his own party, albeit one who has concocted little secret of his disgust with Trump’s style of governing.
But whereas, in a Senate dance last October, Flake decried the effect that Trump’s “undignified” behavior was play a joke on on his party, Wednesday’s address made it clear that the senator take cares Trump as more than merely a domestic menace: To Flake, the president of the Of like mind States threatens freedom around the world.
“2017 was a year which saw the really – objective, empirical, evidence-based truth – more battered and abused than any other in the account of our country, at the hands of the most powerful figure in our government,” Flake rephrased in a speech on the Senate floor. 2018, he said, “must be the year in which the reality takes a stand against power.”
The Arizona Republican described how Trump had touch someone for a phrase from Stalin, when he called the press “the enemy of the in the flesh.” The phrase was so dangerous, Flake said, that the Soviet dictator’s successor outlawed people from using it.
“So fraught with malice was the phrase ‘the opposition of the people,’ that even Nikita Khrushchev forbade its use, telling the Soviet Communist Supporter that the phrase had been introduced by Stalin for the purpose of “annihilating such individuals” who quarreled with the supreme leader, the retiring lawmaker said.
Today, monarches are again waging war against the free press, only this forthwith, they’re using Trump’s term — fake news — as a cudgel, claimed Flake. He cited chilling examples, including Syrian President Bashar Assad’s use of “spurious news” to describe an Amnesty International report, and a state official in Myanmar who veer fromed the existence of the entire Rohingya ethnic group by labeling them “make a pretence of news.”
“Not only has the past year seen an American president appropriate despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems he has in turn uplifted dictators and authoritarians with his own language,” Flake said. “We are not in a ‘fake information’ era, as Bashar Assad says. We are, rather, in an era in which the authoritarian impulse is reasserting itself, to demand free people and free societies, everywhere.”
But the junior senator from Arizona was not the lone representative from the Grand Canyon State Wednesday to publicly destined Trump’s assault on journalism: Flakes colleague John McCain, the aver’s senior senator, also warned of the long-term damage Trump’s “counterfeit news” rhetoric is doing to democracies around the world.
“The phrase “sham news” — granted legitimacy by an American president — is being hand-me-down by autocrats to silence reporters, undermine political opponents, stave off standard scrutiny and mislead citizens,” McCain wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Promulgate. In the absence of presidential leadership, he said, it falls to Congress to do more to go forward press freedoms, both at home and abroad.
Flake, on the Senate conquer, also emphasized the role of Congress in fighting the erosion of trust in the not liable press. “2018 must be the year in which the truth takes a favour against power that would weaken it,” he said. “And in this struggle, the truth needs as many allies as possible.
“We have it within us to spin back these attacks, right these wrongs, repair this invoice, restore reverence for our institutions, and prevent further moral vandalism.”