Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) on Sunday pushed back against President Donald Trump’s attacks on the press as “the enemy of the American people.”
“There’s an important distinction to draw between bad stories or crappy coverage and the right that citizens have to argue about that and complain about that and trying to weaponize distrust,” Sasse said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
He said without differing opinions in journalism, people can end up in “echo chambers and silos of people that already believe only what they believe.” Sasse called it “a recipe for a new kind of tribalism.”
“It’s not helpful to call the press the enemy of the American people,” Sasse said. “The First Amendment is the beating heart of the American experiment and you don’t get to separate the freedoms that are in there.”
Over the past four days, Trump attacked “Morning Joe” hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough, NBC News executives and CNN. On Sunday he tweeted a video of himself attacking a figure with CNN’s logo superimposed on their face.
“We differ about really big and important things in this country, and then we come together around the First Amendment,” Sasse said. “I mean, this is the 4th of July weekend.”
