After years of being prosecuted for his crimes and misdemeanors, Donald Trump is once again setting foot in the White House to serve as the 47th President of the United States, and you better believe that he’s going to spend most of his four years settling scores and getting payback from his enemies, especially the media outlets who have been at the forefront of the campaign to expose his lies. In fact, Trump is already using hostile language to address one of these websites and indirectly asking it to apologize to him.
I feel like the convicted, twice-impeached commander-in-chief is always going on and on about how amazing he is, and how wrong everybody else is for even doubting his words. If his pathological lies are called out, Trump is quick to dismiss the opposition by labeling them as “fake news” and using rhetoric that makes his MAGA followers feel like they’re living in a chapter out of George Orwell’s 1984. Now before, in 2016, the president-elect couldn’t outright do anything to jeopardize the media that was against him, but given everything that’s transpired over the past couple of years, and with nightmare scenarios like Project 2025 unfolding right in front of our eyes, anything is fair game.
Trump isn’t in office yet, but he already expects the media to apologize to him and acknowledge that he won in “record fashion.” This was part of a random rant he shared with his following on Truth, which you can check out below.
“Will the failing New York Times apologize to its readers for getting years of ‘Trump’ coverage so wrong?” he wrote. “They write such phony ‘junk,’ knowing full well how incorrect it is, only meaning to demean. Magot Hagerman, a third-rate writer and fourth-rate intellect, writes story after story, always terrible, and yet I almost never speak to her.”
You can imagine Trump was losing it by the end because he characteristically went ALL CAPS to drive his message home. “They do no fact-checking, because facts don’t matter to them. I don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in the NYT for years, AND YET I WON, IN RECORD FASHION, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN DECADES. WHERE IS THE APOLOGY?”
Margaret Sullivan, the former public editor at The New York Times, recently addressed Trump’s new rant on The Daily Blast.
“In some ways, it’s nothing new,” she said. “He’s always been very manipulative about the press and he does not understand that the press is there to help citizens hold him accountable. This never entered his mind, or if it has, he’s quickly dismissed it. But yes, he does seem to think that because he won the election and again, of course, it has to be put in these superlative and false terms, that therefore, the Times should apologize to him for anything that isn’t what he terms ‘a good story.’ And a good story, of course, is a story that flatters him and makes him look great. We know and your sophisticated listenership here knows that that is not what The New York Times should be doing in any way. He has this thing about ‘I have a huge mandate here’ and everybody needs to get in line and bow. That is worrisome for sure.”
We couldn’t have put it better ourselves. The rest of the interview is just as enlightening, with Margaret also discussing the controversial Trump aide Natalie Harp, a very ardent right-wing enthusiast who follows the president around like a gatekeeper and prints out messages for him to read. The New York Times recently ran a story on how this dynamic works (which is probably what caused Trump to rage on his Truth page) and the idea is both amusing and disturbing.
“I was entertained in the story by the fact that she was described as a human printer,” Sullivan said. “Because she is said to follow around his golf cart with a portable printer so that when he gets adulation in the form of text messages or whatever they may be, social media posts, that she can print them out and hand them to him because he likes to see them in hard copy. But that is a little bit beside the point because you are right, and this is something I’m very concerned about too, that everything we saw during the first Trump administration in which he was very difficult for the press to deal with, can become much worse.”
I don’t think it’s a question of whether it’ll get worse, but how much. The years have unfortunately been wasted on Trump, and in place of wisdom and experience, he has become even more unhinged, authoritarian, and extreme. The Right pushes its agenda by fawning over the First Amendment; let’s see how they will treat it in this upcoming administration.