In his 2019 book A Warning, Miles Taylor wirtes some oddly prescient writings…
Trump is not bothered by an administration strewn with vacancies. In fact, he says, it’s good to have “acting” officials in the top slots. “My ‘actings’ are doing really great,” he told reporters. “I sort of like ‘acting’. It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like ‘acting’. So we have a few that are ‘acting.’ We have a great, great cabinet.” Translation: Acting officials are less inclined to ask questions and more inclined to do what they are told. This best explains the slow but systematic purge of the Steady State. With the guardrails disappearing, the road ahead looked all the more ominous.
A Warning, p49-50
Two years later, after more of the same, Trump held a rally Jan 6 2021. “Be there”, “be wild” was a cue for the most loyal and fanatical followers to subvert the electors in progress at the capital. Indeed this had been an ominous sign.
The president adopted a more incendiary view of the media, “the enemy of the people”, a term routinely used by the Soviet Union when imprisoning or torturing journalists who told the truth about the totalitarian state. After Trump first used the phrase, the United States Senate unanimously (as in every Democrat and Republican in the chamber) passed a resolution rebuking it. “Resolved, that the Senate affirms that the press is not the enemy of the people,” it read, “reaffirms the vital and indispensable role the free press serves,” and “condemns the attacks on the intitution of the free press and views efforts to systematically undermine the credibility of the press ans an attack on the democratic institutions of the United States.”
Donald Trump’s media hate is infections. By the spring of 2018 more than half of all Republican voters polled said they agreed with the president that the media was the enemy of the people, while only 37 percent believed the free press was “an important part of democracy.” These attitudes will have long-term repercussions on our ability to return to the truth, perhaps even violent ones. A few months following the aformentioned poll, pipe bombs were sent to thirteen media outlets and personalities. All of them were figures President Trump had attacked by name, a chilling example of how his words can jump the tracks from careless rhetoric to real-world danger.
A Warning, p200-201
Indeed, years later (2023) Trump continued this in his threats to defund Comcast and NBC, including child company MSNBC.