Trump Takes His War With the Media to Gruesome New Level

In the final stretch of the presidential race, Donald Trump has started to showcase the full extent of his disdain for the media.

During a Sunday rally in Lititz, Pennsylvania, the former reality TV star pondered how another potential assassin could make an attempt on his life—and whose lives would have to be taken first before they got to him.

“To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, and I don’t mind that so much because I don’t mind. I don’t mind that,” Trump told a cheering crowd.

Trump: "To get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news and I don't mind that so much. I don't mind that." pic.twitter.com/TFOGN2PTLb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 3, 2024

Trump has spent years deriding and eroding public trust in the media and government institutions, often to the benefit of his own political ambitions, which have skyrocketed as a growing demographic of the public pulls away from legitimate facts and reporting, effectively permitting Trump’s myriad lies and conspiracies to fester unfettered.

A Gallup poll published in October revealed that public trust in Democratic institutions, including the executive office and the legislative branches of government, is practically abysmal, with just 40 and 34 percent of Americans, respectively, believing that they’re trustworthy.

But somehow, the news media got even more demerits, with confidence in the information apparatus hitting its lowest point on record. Just 31 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “fair amount” of faith in the industry’s ability to report news “fully, accurately and fairly.” Last week, Trump personally celebrated his role in creating that sentiment, bragging to a crowd in Allentown, Pennsylvania, that it was, largely, thanks to him.

America’s trust in the media disintegrated in 2016 during his first run for the White House, when Trump routinely platformed the notion that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was receiving more positive media coverage than he was. He also levied attacks on the media to undermine the industry’s coverage of his myriad scandals, including his criminal trials.

That year, confidence in news dropped by eight percentage points—the most in a single year since the metric was first recorded in 1976—and for the first time in U.S. history sank below 40 percent. It was dragged down, predominantly, by Republican respondents, whose faith in the media plummeted from 32 percent in 2015 to just 14 percent in 2016, while surveyed Democrats and registered independents reported relatively minor dents in their confidence.

This year has shown the disheartening effects of that loss of trust: Newspapers and stations alike have laid off thousands of journalists, with dozens of major outlets downsizing or outright folding as the business side of the industry struggles to keep up with the market, the changing technological landscape (i.e., artificial intelligence), and rapidly changing leadership.

But encouraging the death of journalists echoes a more insidious political threat, harkening back to the fascist policies of Adolf Hitler, who squashed Germany’s trust in the press until he was able to turn the news media into a propaganda arm of the Nazi Party, a key component of his ascent to complete and total control of the nation.

And while traditional outlets failed to underscore the depth of Trump’s threat, some of the country’s biggest conservative outlets saw the writing on the wall. On Monday, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator—Drudge Report—topped its site with one headline: “MOVE OVER CHENEY, NOW HE WANTS REPORTERS SHOT!”