Is the press the enemy of the people?

In the overwrought battle for the soul of the country which the press and the Trump administration have convinced their respected partisan foot soldiers is being waged, defense of “the people” is the common shibboleth around which each side rallies.

For Trump and his acolytes, “America First” is an all-encompassing justification; it bestows upon those who march under its banner a kind of sanctity, which at one and the same time empowers a broad array of actions and absolves the overzealous of the sins they commit in the course of their campaign.

For the press, the self-appointed vanguard of democracy, the commandment to speak truth to power sanctions a great deal of belligerence, so long as it is done in the name of informing the populace, while conveniently allowing those who question the methods of journalists to be positioned as ill-intentioned perverters of truth.

In both cases, actions taken in defense of the “people” is an indulgence, a twist on another political shibboleth: the idea that a policy or action is justified if even one poor downtrodden soul is benefited by it.

But the martyrdom complex under which Trump officials and journalists alike labor contributes to a wildly distorted sense of the relationship between empowered individuals and the polity as a whole.