Editorial: America's dictator defies courts, mistreats media

Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, South Florida Sun Sentinel on Oct 6, 2026

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President Donald Trump has never met a dictator he didn’t envy — and he is not shy about behaving like one, either.

American journalists were still fighting his White House ban as he gushed over the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping, who rules the world’s largest police state.

No other president in our history has ever banished entire news organizations.

No other president defaced public buildings with huge banners bearing his scowling image, or spent the public’s money to advertise himself on TV during a congressional election, or used his private TV and internet accounts to announce public policy.

No other president ever filed farcical libel suits to intimidate the media. Trump is even suing the board of the Pulitzer Prizes— in a Florida court that his lawyers chose — simply to attack coverage he didn’t like.

The most dangerous aspect of a tyrant’s personality is the inability to bear criticism that inevitably goes with the job.

To hear Trump’s endless whining, no president has ever had such unfair press.

If only he knew something about American history. His is no worse than what Abraham Lincoln suffered in silence. Hostile newspapers depicted him as an ape and called him an imbecile, fool and moron. One scorned his Gettysburg address as “a silly, flat, and dish-watery utterance.”

And that was just in the Northern media.

“If I were to read, much less answer, all the attacks made on me, this shop might as well be closed for any other business,” Lincoln wrote.

It is premature to celebrate the temporary court order restoring press credentials to the three news agencies Trump banned — CNN, MS NOW and Politico.

The judge based it on Fifth Amendment requirements for due process, rather than on the First Amendment’s fundamental guarantee of freedom of the press. That is the real issue.

What did Trump do? He defied it, and blocked CNN from covering a routine event on White House grounds after refusing to let CNN fly on Air Force One with other news outlets.

The arbitrary seizure of press credentials is where dictatorship begins.

This is where it ends: Every morning in Hitler’s Berlin, correspondents and editors went to the propaganda ministry, to be told in writing what to publish and what not to publish.

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