Trump Brands the Free Press 'Enemy of the American People'

The Tweet

On the afternoon of February 17, 2017 — less than a month into his presidency — Donald Trump posted to Twitter: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” He had actually posted and then quickly deleted a slightly different version minutes earlier that omitted ABC and CBS and included the word “SICK!” at the end. Even for a man who had spent his entire campaign attacking journalists, this was a dramatic escalation: the President of the United States was formally designating the free press as an enemy of the nation.

The tweet came one day after a combative, rambling 77-minute press conference in which Trump berated reporters as purveyors of “very fake news” and dismissed mounting questions about his associates’ contacts with Russia as a “ruse.” It also arrived the same day his campaign team circulated a survey urging supporters to “do your part to fight back against the media’s attacks and deceptions” — a fundraising tactic that made clear the anti-press rhetoric was not impulsive but strategic.

A Phrase with a Body Count

The term “enemy of the people” is not some throwaway insult. It carries the weight of millions of dead. The phrase was deployed during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror to justify executions. Vladimir Lenin invoked it to target political opponents after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Joseph Stalin then weaponized it to devastating effect during the Great Purge of 1936-1938, when anyone branded an “enemy of the people” could be summarily imprisoned, exiled to the Gulag, or executed. Mao Zedong adopted similar language in China to persecute dissidents. In every case, the label served the same purpose: to dehumanize critics of the regime and place them outside the protection of the law.

Trump did not stumble into this phrase by accident. He chose a term with well-documented authoritarian origins and aimed it at the institutions that hold presidents accountable.

”How Dictators Get Started”

The reaction was swift and, in at least one case, came from within Trump’s own party. Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on February 19 and issued a stark warning. “If you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press,” McCain said. “And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.”

McCain went further, noting that “when you look at history, the first thing that dictators do is shut down the press.” He was careful to say he was not calling Trump a dictator — but the fact that a senior Republican senator felt compelled to publicly explain the relationship between press freedom and democracy spoke volumes about how far outside democratic norms Trump had already moved.

The Pattern Takes Shape

This was not an isolated outburst. It was the opening salvo of a sustained campaign against the free press that would define Trump’s presidency. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Trump would go on to use the phrase “enemy of the people” to describe the press hundreds of times, conditioning his supporters to view journalists not as watchdogs performing a constitutional function but as traitors undermining the country. The language worked exactly as it has always worked for authoritarians: it gave his base permission to despise the very institutions reporting on his corruption, and it laid the groundwork for dismissing any unfavorable coverage as an attack by a hostile force rather than the product of legitimate journalism.

Twenty-nine days in, and the President of the United States was already borrowing from the dictator’s playbook.