Donald Trump has declined a request from Annapolis, Maryland Mayor Gavin Buckley to lower American flags in honor of the fatal shooting of five employees of The Capital Gazette newspaper last week.
Maryland state flags were lowered to half-staff from Friday to Monday but Buckley put in a request to the White house to also lower the American flags, in order to keep national attention on the attack.
“Obviously, I’m disappointed, you know? … Is there a cutoff for tragedy?” Buckley said on Monday. “This was an attack on the press. It was an attack on freedom of speech. It’s just as important as any other tragedy.”
Seems like it isn’t as important to Trump, who did lower flags for other recent mass shootings. Perhaps it has to do with his feelings towards the press? According to Politico, earlier this year, Trump tweeted, “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @CNN, @NBCNews and many more) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people. SICK!” The post was deleted shortly after. He revised his tweet 16 minutes later to include more news organizations in his category of so-called fake news: ABC and CBS. “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” the amended tweet said.
Attacking media appears to be one of the constants in the Trump universe, and he deems “good” media outlets as those who support him and “bad” ones as media outlets who do not. As Dean, Banquet, top editor at the New York Times says, Trump media attacks are “out of control”.
Since last week’s shooting, Capital Gazette employees have continued to produce a paper and took time to write a letter indicating to Trump that they “won’t forget being called an enemy of the people.”
“No, we won’t forget that. Because exposing evil, shining light on wrongs and fighting injustice is what we do,” Gazette staff wrote.
Good for you Capital Gazette. We won’t forget either.
