In a lively interview with the Libertarian magazine Reason, Glenn Greenwald excoriated most journalists’ reporting on Trump and inveighed against the censorious role being demanded of social media platforms. Greenwald contrasted Obama’s record of having launched three times as many Espionage Act prosecutions as all of his predecessors with the claims that Trump was a menace to press freedom for tweeting mean things about journalists and calling the lying media outlets “fake news.” Ironically, the only actual action that Trump took against press freedom — the continuing prosecution of Julian Assange — has not brought massive outcry from practitioners of the world’s second-oldest (and also its oldest) profession: journalism.
Greenwald was brutal with those seeking to rehabilitate the monsters Bush and Obama: “George Bush and Dick Cheney started new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama started new wars in Libya and Yemen. What new wars did Donald Trump start? He escalated bombing campaigns, which he inherited, in a pretty grotesque way. But he didn’t start any new wars.
“When you look at things like the destruction of Iraq or the implementation of a torture regime—what has Donald Trump done that even remotely compares in terms of moral evil to any of that? Nothing. And yet we’re supposed to treat George Bush and Barack Obama like morally upstanding statesmen and Donald Trump like the literal reincarnation of Hitler.”
