MSNBC’s Jen Psaki said Donald Trump is instilling a “culture of fear” in media and politics before even returning to the White House — and he’s learning that it works.
She cited the $15 million ABC News recently agreed to pay to Trump’s presidential library in order to settle a defamation lawsuit that many legal experts said the network could have won. Many critics of the decision viewed it as an act of cowardice, or obedience, from the news organization.
“If you’re Trump and his team, what does that teach you? It teaches you that tactics like this can work, and that you should keep at them,” Psaki, a former White House press secretary for President Joe Biden, said on her show Monday.
She noted that Trump, “as if on cue,” expanded his threats of legal action against the media after the ABC News settlement.
At a news conference in Florida on Monday, Trump said he planned to sue the Des Moines Register over a poll that predicted he would lose Iowa by 4 points. (He ended up winning by a substantial margin.) Trump claimed the poll amounted to “election interference.”
Psaki laid out her concerns with this emerging “pattern.”
“Trump and his team decide they don’t like something, they employ threats and pressure and intimidation to change the thing they don’t like, and it works. And that means they’re incentivized to do it again,” she said.
“It’s important to remember that what this pattern could lead to is a country where journalists don’t feel comfortable speaking truth to power, where elected officials don’t hold people accountable,” she added.
Her guest, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), said he didn’t want to be too alarmist, but “I think this is a red alert moment.”
“There are not just two things in this world: democracies and dictatorships,” he said. “There are all sorts of countries in this world that occupy a gray zone.”
He pointed to countries like Hungary and Serbia, which he said hold elections, but “it is virtually impossible for the political opposition to win, because the press is either owned by the regime or, when the press is not owned by the regime, it is intimidated into submission.”
That could be the direction the U.S. is headed for if the press stops telling the real story and holding Trump accountable, Murphy said.
