Sarah Huckabee Sanders is back. After leaving her gig as White House press secretary, she’s now settling in as a Fox News contributor, where this week she “contributed” scathing criticisms of the media. In her estimation, journalists by and large are part of some kind of nefarious conspiracy against President Donald Trump that they’ve launched over “hating” Trump’s surprise 2016 election victory. As part of this conspiracy, Huckabee Sanders claimed, mainstream media sources often just make things up. There is no evidence of this.
Still, in the time leading up to a rally Trump held this week in New Mexico, Huckabee Sanders asserted in conversation about the media with Sean Hannity:
‘The agenda of obstruction that they have against this president is completely out of control. They try to destroy the president because they hate that he won in 2016 and then they hated that he was able to start delivering on all the things that he said he was going to, including a conservative court. Because they can’t beat him now they’re going after everyone around him, everyone associated with him, and they’re even making stuff up. It’s completely out of control. And at some point they have to start holding people accountable. I think the president is right to start calling for something to be done.’
Watch:
The latest context for conservative outrage that the mainstream media dares print things is a recent piece from The New York Times chronicling a new sexual misconduct allegation involving now U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and backing up the allegations that were already out there too through means like pointing to numerous witnesses who were never interviewed by authorities, despite the Senate GOP eventually agreeing in part to an FBI investigation into the allegations during Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. That investigation turned out to be a sham, fit for preparing for a show trial and little else.
In the wake of the story, as Huckabee Sanders notes, there’ve been two sides in the responses. Trump has been railing for days about the “something” he wants to see done, going so far that he’s insisted that everyone involved in publishing the Kavanaugh story should resign.
He wrote:
‘I call for the Resignation of everybody at The New York Times involved in the Kavanaugh SMEAR story, and while you’re at it, the Russian Witch Hunt Hoax, which is just as phony! They’ve taken the Old Grey Lady and broken her down, destroyed her virtue and ruined her reputation. She can never recover, and will never return to Greatness, under current Management. The Times is DEAD, long live The New York Times!’
Imagine any other president taking to social media to proclaim the “death” of a major media organization. This is the kind of thing that unfolds in dictatorships, not countries set up in theory like the United States — so where are we going really?
Some, including Democratic presidential primary candidates like Kamala Harris and Julián Castro, have called for Kavanaugh to be impeached in the wake of all of this. That would, like in the case of the impeachment of a president, apparently require two-thirds of both houses of Congress to be in favor of the move.
Featured Image via screenshot
