Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said Thursday on MSNBC’s “The Weeknight” that President Donald Trump was using “dangerous” authoritarian tactics by attacking the press.
Van Hollen said, “The President of United States, the Secretary of Defense, has essentially declared that anybody who has a different explanation or different narrative is somehow a traitor to our country, which is just a way of saying to all the folks in our professional Intelligence Community that if you tell the truth, you’re going to be punished. That’s very dangerous.”
He added, “This is exactly what Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth and others are doing. They don’t want to tell the truth. They don’t like it when the press tells the truth. So what they do is attack the truth tellers. That’s very dangerous in a couple of ways. Number one, that is, of course, what authoritarians do to try to undermine the free press and those who are willing to tell the truth. But it also sending this terrible message, as I said, to people in the Intelligence Community, that if they dare present the facts to their countries or, or even the facts to other people, their higher ups, that they will get slapped down. This is how you get bad intelligence that leads to very bad decisions.”
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