So The President Wants To Shutdown A Military Newspaper

This morning, USAToday ran an article on the topic of President Trump possibly pulling funding from Stars And Stripes, a military newspaper that has existed since the Civil War:

In a heretofore unpublicized recent memo, the Pentagon delivered an order to shutter Stars and Stripes, a newspaper that has been a lifeline and a voice for American troops since the Civil War. The memo orders the publisher of the news organization (which now publishes online as well as in print) to present a plan that “dissolves the Stars and Stripes” by Sept. 15 including “specific timeline for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide.”

Now most people have taken this to be an attack on freedom of the press, an issue where the President has been particularly bad on. Might I remind you, this is the President who invited Nick Sandmann, a man who got news organizations to give him millions because they called him mean names, to the Republican National Convention. (And Nick Sandmann’s lawyer is now defending Kyle Rittenhouse — meaning anyone who criticizes murder might be sued.)

This is the same President who said the following back in February 2016:

We’re going to open up those libel laws. So when The New York Times writes a hit piece which is a total disgrace or when The Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected.

This is the same man who sued The Onion over a satire of him. This is the same man who sued Bill Maher for making fun of his hair on live Television. And people were really expecting this man to be some champion of freedom of the press, these people are just waking up!

This is the same man who is best friends with Bob Murrary, who sued John Oliver (as well as various local newspapers) over reporting because Oliver reported on his corruption.

This is the same man who said that he admired the leader style of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un — North Korea, for those unaware, is a nation where someone once went to prison for misspelling the name of Kim Ill Sung. This is the same man whose supporters chanted “twelve more years” at his convention, and who many of which want to declare himself a monarch (those are the people who I want not to be allowed to vote). This is the same man who asked, among other things, if he could pardon himself of any wrong doing. This is the same man whose supporters introduced the phrase “legitimate quid pro quo” into our vocabulary.

I know I stopped talking about freedom of the press and moved to both him and his supporters support for authoritarianism, but all of this is so connected that it needs to be mentioned together.

I’m just going to be blunt, everyone knows the only reason Trump is even considering this is because most military members are voting for Biden. It has nothing to do with “fake news,” especially considering he keeps promoting sources like Fox News and One America News Network that are known for their inaccuracy.

The President wants to show himself to be nothing but the truest patriot. That’s why he doesn’t want schools to teach the dark side of American History, nor does he want us to take down statues of important men who did morally wrong things. However, the fact that the United States military itself, commonly a Republican stronghold, now has come out against, is simply more than he can take.

It’s the idea that more than one view can exist that truly gets to our President, the idea that somebody could dare disagree with him. That is what truly bothers a man like Donald Trump, and that’s something that will bother his massive ego more than anything else.