"Enemies of the People" Respond to Trump's Election: “Without Information, No Democracy”
By Phineas Rueckert and Guillaume Vénétitay
November 8th, 2024
On November 3, 2024, Republican US presidential candidate Donald Trump stood in front of a crowd of supporters in Lititz, Pennsylvania and threatened the press.
“I have this piece of glass here,” he said, referring to a protective glass in front of the lectern, “but all we really have over here [on the other side of the stage] is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much.”
Two days later, Trump – who in the lead-up to the 2024 US election verbally attacked the press more than 100 times – was elected president of the United States.
Donald Trump on stage after speaking at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, on November 4th, 2024. (Credit : © CHARLY TRIBALLEAU / AFP)
Trump’s first mandate (2017-2021) and his 2024 presidential campaign coincided with an increase of violence against the press in the United States. Journalists from American and foreign media outlets were beaten, detained, thrown down stairs, body slammed, stormed, yelled at, and punched. Their equipment was ransacked. They were subpoenaed and called “enemy of the people.”
All of this creates an environment where reporters are increasingly unable to serve as the fourth estate by holding truth to power, more than half a dozen international journalists living in countries where freedom of expression is threatened told Forbidden Stories. Many of them feared that Trump’s election would send a bad signal to their governments – notably that the repression of journalists and impunity for crimes committed against them will be permitted.
A “free card” for attacks against the press
“What they have in common is disdain for a free and independent media,” Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, an Indian journalist, said of populist leaders like Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. “Not only are the two intolerant of criticism but also willing to misuse the government machinery in their countries – including by weaponising law-enforcing agencies – to target their political opponents.”
In India, critical journalists including Thakurta were spied on using Pegasus spyware, Forbidden Stories found in the 2021 Pegasus Project. These types of sophisticated spyware tools were also used in Hungary, where journalists are regularly denigrated by far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban (the first world leader to congratulate Trump on his victory) and funding for independent media has been diverted to state-run PR organs.
Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative journalist, worried that under a second Trump mandate, Orban would be given a “free card” to “do whatever he wants with the media and NGOs.”
This is something that Laurent Richard, Forbidden Stories’s executive director, now fears could happen in the United States. “The return to power of the man who refers to journalists as ‘enemies of the people’ promises the darkest hours for those who attempt to investigate in the name of the public interest,” Richard said. “The pattern is simple. Without journalists free to work independently and safely, there can be no information. And without information, no democracy.”
Attack machines
To Maria Eugenia Duffard, an Argentinian political journalist, populist leaders like Javier Milei – who has been called a “machine for attacking journalists” – thrive on ad-hominem attacks against the press, often using social media platforms which have been increasingly unregulated.
Any semblance of criticism can lead to a wave of personalized trolling, she explained. “It’s not even about reporting cases of corruption or investigations,” she said. “Simple criticisms, opinions, or interpretations of information that differ from that of the government is reason enough for a fierce attack on social networks, often with the president’s own personal account, who addresses journalists and many media in very pejorative and violent language.”
Duffard added that the repeated elections of populists around the world, including Trump, necessitated a radical rethinking of the role of the press, which “no longer fulfills the role it used to play.”
In the United States, tech billionaire Elon Musk, who became a close advisor to Trump and celebrated Trump’s victory in his Floridian palace at Mar-A-Lago, bought the social media platform Twitter – which has since been renamed X – and turned it into a “global disinformation lab,” Richard, at Forbidden Stories, explained.
Nelson Ruada, a journalist at El Salvador’s El Faro newspaper, worried that in this new information ecosystem, journalists no longer have the influence they once did. “There has been extensive negative coverage of Trump that has mattered zero,” he said. “The voter doesn’t care. People informed themselves via other media, such as podcasts, YouTube, etc.”
This has led to a situation where public interest stories are replaced with propaganda. Under a second Trump mandate, the results of this shift would lead to serious human consequences, journalists feared.
“Living in a country directly affected by US elections, watching the results unfold felt, in many ways, dystopian,” Joann Manabat, a journalist at Rappler, a digital media in the Philippines that was the victim of sustained legal attacks under former populist leader Rodrigo Duterte, said. “It also felt like a setback, as the impact of American policies ripples beyond its borders, shaping the fate of many,” Manabat, who is a member of Forbidden Stories’ SafeBox Network, which allows journalists to protect sensitive information, added.
To Shrouq Al Aila, co-founder of the Palestinian Ain Media in Gaza, whose husband was killed in an Israeli strike, a new Trump mandate “translates to less oversight, fewer calls for humanitarian production, and almost no accountability for those committing such crimes.”
“As journalists in Gaza, we not only face the daily fear of bombing, siege and the loss of our loved ones, but also the heartbreaking reality that these stories that we risk our lives to tell may not find a responsive, empathic global audience,” she said. “Trump’s election reinforces the marginalization of our voices, making our fight to be heard and to survive more difficult this year than ever. To sum it up in one word: I’m terrified.”
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