WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump’s rage at the media had boiled over. This time, he demanded action.“Network news has become so partisan, distorted and fake that licenses must be challenged and, if appropriate, revoked,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Oct. 11. “Not fair to public!”He sounded like an autocrat, scarcely different than repressive leaders from Turkey to Venezuela. Advocates for press freedom sounded the alarm. And then nothing happened. Again.Trump does not have the power to revoke broadcast licenses to punish people for critical speech. Nobody at the Federal Communications Commission took any action to try. The story about Trump’s extraordinary breach of democratic norms vanished in 48 hours, replaced by other Trump stories.The pattern has been repeated itself throughout Trump’s presidency.Showing the instincts of an authoritarian, the president expresses a desire to do something profoundly contrary to the norms of democratic societies. Then he is constrained by democratic institutions.He talks like a strongman. He is, in practice, a weak man. “The political science view is that Trump is a very weak president. He is saying these things in public because he cannot make anyone do what he wants in private,” said Brendan Nyhan, a Dartmouth College professor of government and co-director of Bright Line Watch, a project monitoring the state of U.S. democracy under Trump.Trump has not even been able to exercise absolute power over his own hand-picked officials. A series of stories in U.S. news outlets suggest his aides and appointees have often treated him more like their eccentric grandpa than their boss, responding to demands issued out of fury or spite by declining to take action until he simply forgets what he has told them to do.His unusual combination of authoritarian words and invisible followup has posed an interpretation challenge to the U.S. media and public. As some observers have dismisse ...
|
