It is hard to believe that we are only 5 weeks into the Trump presidency - how those words stick in one's craw! - but aside from the almost daily extraordinary behaviour, outbursts, tweets and actions, today a new dimension. Banning certain media from a press briefing. A small step towards becoming a tin-pot dictator? This is seriously dangerous!
"By the measure of his spokesman Sean Spicer, Donald Trump is tracking towards dictatorship – how else to explain Spicer barring "enemy" reporters from a White House media briefing, just weeks after he said open media access was "what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship".
The unprecedented exclusion of CNN and The New York Times, among others, marked an escalation in Trump's war on the media and on a particular government agency that has provided sensational leaks on his presidency – the FBI.
On a day when the White House press office was corralling reporters on the basis of who were friends and who were not, Trump resorted to Twitter to slam the FBI and to issue what seemed like a presidential order for the agency to silence the media's secret sources in its ranks.
Fired off in two bites, Trump's tweeted reprimand read: "The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security 'leakers' that have permeated our government for a long time. They can't even find the leakers within the FBI itself."
"By the measure of his spokesman Sean Spicer, Donald Trump is tracking towards dictatorship – how else to explain Spicer barring "enemy" reporters from a White House media briefing, just weeks after he said open media access was "what makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship".
The unprecedented exclusion of CNN and The New York Times, among others, marked an escalation in Trump's war on the media and on a particular government agency that has provided sensational leaks on his presidency – the FBI.
On a day when the White House press office was corralling reporters on the basis of who were friends and who were not, Trump resorted to Twitter to slam the FBI and to issue what seemed like a presidential order for the agency to silence the media's secret sources in its ranks.
Fired off in two bites, Trump's tweeted reprimand read: "The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security 'leakers' that have permeated our government for a long time. They can't even find the leakers within the FBI itself."
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