Donald Trump said to the president of Mexico, in effect: You know you’re not going to pay for the wall and I know you’re not going to pay for the wall, and, really, we both know there was never going to be any wall. But will you please pipe down about it? This remarkably revealing conversation once again underscored Trump’s total contempt for his most devoted acolytes – the contempt he first unveiled in his remarks about shooting people on a New York street. This time, we learn – if we didn’t already suspect as much – that their most cherished and emblematic political talisman and the thing that most endeared Trump to them, The Great Wall, was always, in his mind, a crock of you know what – nothing more than a way to harvest votes from the politics of resentment.
Bizarrely, so unswerving is the devotion of the cult of personality known as “The Base” to Trump that this revelation probably won’t change anything for them. But for the rest of us, it is, among other things, a reminder of just how critical the free flow of information is to our way of government. We in America operate in a democracy and that has many meanings and ramifications, but one that can’t be emphasized too strongly is this: Every single person who works for the government, elected or appointed, from the town dog-catcher to the president of the United States, is an employee of us, the people. And for that reason, we are entitled to know what every single one of them is up to. Full stop.
There are exceptions having to do with national security – the date, time and troop strength of the D-Day invasion was not something we all needed to know – but the default position with regard to the words and deeds of government “officials” must be total transparency. What our employees in government are doing and saying is what tells us who to vote for. And knowing who to vote for (or against) and then doing so is the very meaning of democracy.
Certain species of politician are forever telling us they’re going to get rid of waste, fraud, and abuse by running the government like a business, but the difference between for-profit businesses and government entities is instructive. The former are mechanisms for turning money into more money – for making a profit on invested dollars. The people charged with making that happen – management -- are accountable only to the people who employ them – the business’s owners, aka the shareholders. How do the shareholders know if their hired-hand managers are doing their jobs properly? Pretty simple: They look at the bottom line to see if their profit expectations are being met.
We who employ dog catchers and senators and presidents, on the other hand, don’t have such a convenient and obvious metric for deciding if those folks are doing what we want them to do. What do we have? This and only this: Information. And where do we get that information? Hold on to your hats, mainstream media haters: We get it from a free press. That’s why press freedom is protected in the constitution – because it was clearly understood by the framers (and by everyone now who doesn’t dislike and/or distrust the press for telling them facts as opposed to what they want to hear), that information regarding what our employees are doing, documented and conveyed to the citizenry in the press, is essential to the operation of a democracy. In a system of checks and balances, it’s the most important check there is.
Which brings us to the subject of leaks, on its way to becoming the least understood and most over-used perjorative in the language. The clandestine release of national-security-sensitive information to the press – the “leaking” of it – is a bad thing. Such leakage shouldn’t be done by the leaker nor accepted and/or used by its recipient, and most major news organizations are much more sensitive to this than their detractors would like to believe. But the overwhelming majority of so-called leaks are nothing more than information about goings-on in government that have nothing whatever to do with national security but that someone doesn’t want the world to know about because it would be politically embarrassing to them. There is nothing illegal about them. Hence, the tendency to “classify” information – to put under lock and key information the public has a perfect right to by invoking national security and then branding its release – it’s leak – as felonious.
That’s exactly what Attorney General Sessions is up to now. This is, of course, an attempt to persuade the world that the problem isn’t the content of the leaks – the lies, abuses, and general foolishness revealed in them – but the existence of the leaks themselves. Or, to put it another way, the problem isn’t that this government is overrun with stupidity and miscalculation, but that the public is finding out about all of it. Trump understands that perfectly, and that’s why he constantly tries to de-legitimize the media, going so far as to brand it the enemy of the people. Well, “the people” need to get over their childish resentment of the mainstream press and their baseless dismissal of it as hopelessly biased, and understand that in this democracy, it is not their enemy. In a world where politicians will tell you to look at the shiny thing they hold in one hand while they steal your money and your freedom with the other, a free press may be the only friend you have.
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