President Trump’s cultural assault on the First Amendment

[Commentary] There is no shortage of explainers detailing President Donald Trump’s limited ability to mess with the First Amendment. No, he can’t just snap his fingers and “open up” our libel laws so that he can more easily sue news outlets that publish scoops about him. No, he can’t just shut down a large broadcast network whose reporting he doesn’t like. There’s a lot of bluster in the president’s widely disseminated attacks on the press. “But as we approach the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration,” wrote Politico magazine’s Jack Shafer last November, “we discover that the president’s gibbering about the alleged menace posed by the press has been followed by no action.”

At a recent event organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association, President Trump’s anti-media rhetoric — including his frequent invocations of “fake news” — drew something short of outrage and incredulity from a panel of journalists. Peter Baker, who has two decades of experience covering the White House, said, “The people who say this has a broad impact on society and the credibility of the media and so forth and so on, I get their point.” He continued: “I don’t dispute that. In terms of my job, worried about working as a reporter in the White House, it doesn’t have that much impact. I mean, it’s just theater.”