‘Fake news’ v faker-in-chief: Why Trump’s media war is backfiring

President Donald J. Trump booted CNN, MSNOW and Politico out of the White House because he is furious with how he is covered. Trump’s attacks against the Constitution are unprecedented . The media companies have taken him to court , arguing: “Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.“

The four major television networks – including Fox News – have withdrawn their cameras from the White House. The president who loves to be on the air for hours a day now sits in the Oval Office with no big media cameras on him.

How did we get to this crisis over freedom of the press? Trump wields with abandon an idiom that is centuries old – all to flaunt his massive executive power as president. When asked about limits to his power, he said: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

To speak with a forked tongue is “to tell lies or say one thing and mean something else” and to “make empty or false promises”. It conjures up serpents, with their forked tongues.

Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn , was characterised as a serpent . The stunning new biography, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump , by Kai Bird and Susan Goldberg, shows Cohn’s immense sculpting and shaping of Trump as he built his real estate empire in New York. As Carlos Lozada of The New York Times has observed , “One of the core parallels or similarities or lessons … between these two men [is] that sort of ultimate self-confidence, paired with ultimate disdain for rules and traditions and norms.”

Freedom of the press under the first amendment is a sacred norm of the republic. Trump has sued, so far unsuccessfully, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for defamation. He has threatened to have the regulatory agencies in his executive branch take away the broadcast licence of CBS and ABC because of how they report on him. He has defunded America’s public media, PBS and NPR.

But what makes Trump vulnerable to the most critical coverage of any president, ever, including Richard Nixon, is that he speaks with a forked tongue on almost all major issues of the day. He hates being confronted by reporters who question the truth and legitimacy and contradictions of what he says.

Trump declared on his social media soap box, Truth Social: “AI taking over the World , destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA – UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE – IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure.”

Most AI leaders are genuinely fearful that artificial intelligence could cause or trigger an existential event threatening all of civilisation.

The scale of this challenge is not unprecedented. In 1947, Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists wrote to the president Harry S.