The Aspiring Autocrat President* Is Making Big Moves This Week

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

11 May 19

He made trouble down in the Florida Panhandle and started shoving the free press out the door of the White House.

n today's episode of Who Wants To Be An Autocrat?, the aspiring autocrat president* goes down to the Florida Panhandle and tells one of his funny jokes. From ABC News:

“You have hundreds and hundreds of people and you have two or three border security people that are brave and great — And don't forget, we don't let them and we can't let them use weapons. We can't. Other countries do. We can't. I would never do that. But how do you stop these people?" the president said.s the president posed that question — a rally attendee in the crowd shouted: “shoot them.” The president paused and instead of condemning the remark he said: “That’s only in the panhandle, can you get away with that statement." The crowd erupted in cheers and laughter — after another brief pause, Trump repeated: “Only in the panhandle.”

As Judd Legum pointed out on the electric Twitter machine, he used to joke about running for president, too, until he did it.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, a lot of people lost their being-lied-to-by-SarahHuck privileges. These included Dana Milbank and everybody assigned by the Washington Post. Now, here in the shebeen, we've had our differences with Milbank, God knows, but this is a truly aggressive move toward Putinland.

White House implemented a new standard that designated as unqualified almost the entire White House press corps, including all seven of The Post’s White House correspondents. White House officials then chose which journalists would be granted “exceptions.” It did this over objections from news organizations and the White House Correspondents’ Association. The Post requested exceptions for its seven White House reporters and for me, saying that this access is essential to our work (in my case, I often write “sketches” describing the White House scene). The White House press office granted exceptions to the other seven, but not to me. I strongly suspect it’s because I’m a Trump critic. The move is perfectly in line with Trump’s banning of certain news organizations, including The Post, from his campaign events and his threats to revoke White House credentials of journalists he doesn’t like.

In the Other Gig, I often argue that professional sports teams are within their rights to close off access to their employees, just as I am within my rights to criticize and/or mock them for having done so. (However, if they shut down the access, they have to shut it down to everybody. I respect the women in the field too much to go back to those bad old days.) They are private enterprises, after all.

This is not an excuse that applies to the president*, his house, or the presidency in general, no matter how hard El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago tries to monetize all of it. Perhaps he can get some tips from Hungary's authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban when the "Alternative to Democracy" guy stops by to call. You can't read about what happened in Hungary without hearing deafening echoes in what's happening here in ways large and small. You don't have to be a big Dana Milbank fan to hear it, either.