To know anything about Donald Trump’s rhetorical style is to know how much he loves the word “rigged.” To hear the former president tell it, just about everything in American society — from elections to the judicial system to the Emmys — has been “rigged” by nefarious forces he never identifies.
With this in mind, it hardly came as a surprise that the Republican described his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris as “rigged” — both before and after the event.
But as a report in The New Republic noted, the GOP nominee didn’t stop there.
Donald Trump really did not like getting live fact-checked by ABC News during Tuesday night’s debate, so much so he wants the network shut down. … “They ought to take away their license for the way they did that,” said Trump, in a clear threat to ABC News.
For those who missed Tuesday night’s debate, Trump, true to form, lied uncontrollably about matters large and small. In a small handful of instances, ABC News moderators Linsey Davis and David Muir felt compelled to let the public know the truth.
This infuriated many Republicans — evidently, the former president was supposed to lie with impunity, even if that left viewers deceived about important issues — including the party’s nominee.
There is, however, a qualitative difference between whining about fact-checking and publicly raising the idea of using governmental power to strip a major American outlet of its broadcasting license.
If this sounds at all familiar, it’s not your imagination. Earlier this year, after Trump won the Iowa caucuses, he expected news organizations to air his celebratory remarks live and in their entirety. When NBC and CNN chose not to do so, the Republican declared, “[F]rankly, they should have their licenses or whatever they have taken away.”
He made similar comments during his White House tenure, writing via social media in 2017, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!”
After leaving office, such rhetoric became even more common. Last year, for example, the former president suggested that Comcast — MSNBC’s and NBC News’ parent company — should be investigated for “Country Threatening Treason” because he disapproved of the networks’ coverage of the Trump/Russia scandal. A month later, as my colleague Ja’han Jones noted, the Republican also publicly questioned CBS News’ right to access public airwaves after it ran an interview with Biden that Trump didn’t like.
A month after that, Trump wrote a related missive, arguing that he wants the government to “come down hard” on MSNBC (my employer), whose reporting he described as “illegal.” It was against this backdrop that the Republican told a national television audience that ABC’s license should be targeted because he didn’t like the network’s anchors telling the public accurate information. There’s been some public conversation of late about Trump’s authoritarian-style vision — and for good reason. The former president is threatening perceived foes with prison sentences, endorsing a “strongman” leadership style, bragging about his support from dictators, raising the prospect of a temporary American “dictatorship,” talking about “terminating” parts of the Constitution that stand in the way of his ambitions, arguing that his rivals shouldn’t be “allowed” to run against him, targeting immigrants with Hitler-style rhetoric while promising to create militarized mass deportations and detention camps, and promising pardons to politically aligned criminals. Trump’s plan to crack down on the free press is a key and radical part of the same agenda. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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