Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Trump Supports First Amendment Rights

Brendan Kirby writing at LifeZette, quotes President Trump speaking at last night's rally in West Virginia. Defending First Amendment rights, the President said:
You know, I’d rather have fake news like CNN. I would rather have fake news — it’s true — than have anybody, including liberals, socialists, anything, than have anybody stopped and censored.

We gotta live with it. We gotta get used to it. We gotta live with fake news. There’s too many sources. Every one of us is sort of like a newspaper. You have Twitter. You have whatever you have. Facebook.

You can’t have censorship. You can’t pick one person and say, ‘Well, we don’t like what he’s been saying. He’s out.’ So, we’ll live with fake news. I mean, I hate to say it. But we have no choice. Because that’s by far, the better alternative. We can’t have people saying, ‘censorship.’ Because you know what? It could turn around. It could be them next … We believe in the right of Americans to speak their minds.
Imagine, Bill Maher and Donald Trump in agreement about something! The mind boggles.

This on a day when the most charitable interpretation of the reported Cohen and Manafort legal difficulties suggests the President has been indifferent toward the ethical shortcomings of his minions.