If you need anymore proof that Donald Trump has broken Fox News’ Chris Wallace, I submit this for your consideration.
Earlier in the week, Wallace appeared at the Newseum, which is basically a big back slap machine for journalists in the nation’s capital. He gave a speech “honoring the First Amendment” and then decided to go to full MSNBC levels of hyperbole with it.
“I believe President Trump is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history,” Wallace said in a speechWednesday honoring the First Amendment.
If that’s what Wallace thinks mainstream media journalists do, I’ve got some news for him.
This is so ridiculously stupid that it’s hard to know where to begin to pick it apart. Abraham Lincoln literally suspended habeas corpus and jailed journalists that opposed him. We can certainly look in hindsight and under the situation at the time, but still, there’s no question that’s a far more “direct and sustained” assault on the press than Trump sending mean tweets. It’s not just Lincoln though. Woodrow Wilson had journalists put it internment camps and passed the Espionage Act of 1917 in order to charge people with a crime who opposed him. There are other examples throughout our history.
But you don’t even have to go back ten years to make the point. Barack Obama surveilled journalists using the Espionage Act and tried to name one of Wallace’s former colleagues a co-conspirator so he could be charged with a crime. Even in regards to access, Wallace was barred from a series of interviews dealing with Obamacare back in 2009. Wallace himself has experienced worse attacks from a previous administration than anything Trump has done.
And what exactly has Trump done? The answer is absolutely nothing. No prosecutions and no spying, even though there have certainly been some actions by journalists in the past three years that cross the line legally in regards to classified materials and illegal leaks. The most Trump has mustered is bashing on a press that absolutely loathes him and spends every waking minute trying to destroy him. That’s hardly an unexpected reaction, nor a tangible action on his part and it certainly doesn’t live up to the actual actions of many past Presidents.
But Wallace has lost his mind. There’s nothing objective about his reporting these days, nor how he conducts interviews. Keep that in mind when he talks to James Comey and Peter Strzok this weekend. I fully expect him to thank them for their service while they hug it out at this point.