S.E. Cupp: Trump the pirate demands tribute from the media

Over the course of the last few months, a “No Kings” movement has coalesced to oppose the authoritarian policies of President Trump. Organized protests across all 50 states, coinciding with Trump’s military parade, were meant to draw attention to Trump’s anti-democratic and increasingly monarchical consolidation of power.

In areas of business and politics, it’s undeniable that he acts like a wannabe king, feeling little affinity for pesky intrusions that typically define a republic, like laws, the Constitution or a separation of powers.

He’s also shown an unsettling affection for dictators, from Russia’s Vladimir Putin to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

But while Trump’s penchant for kings and dictators is clear, his hostile threats toward the media makes him more like a pirate.

Trump’s marauding of the American media landscape began years ago, when, while campaigning in 2016, he threatened to “open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

The purpose was obviously to silence journalists, whose job it is to hold powerful people accountable. But it was also to terrorize them, and inflict maximum pain.

When discussing a failed 2006 $5 billion lawsuit he filed against Tim O’Brien and his book publishers for suggesting Trump wasn’t actually a billionaire, he said of the loss, “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more. I did it to make (O’Brien’s) life miserable, which I’m happy about.”

In 2022, he again sued CNN, this time for $475 million over its use of “The Big Lie” to describe Trump’s baseless allegations of election fraud. It was also dismissed.

Since then there have been others, including a defamation suit against the Pulitzer Prize board in 2022, but more recently a crush of threats and suits has sent a wave of fear and panic across the media, as they are intended to do.

And sadly the media is, in most cases, capitulating.

Then there was his suit against CBS News for editing an interview it conducted with Harris. CBS, caught in the middle of a lucrative pending merger between parent company Paramount Global and Skydance Media, also settled to the tune of $16 million.

Former “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft weighed in this week, calling it a “shakedown,” and likening it to paying “tribute to the king.”

And that’s exactly what it is. It’s a ransom meant to appease the pirates in the Trump administration.

In the early 1800s, a young America was forced to confront this very phenomenon. Pirates off the Barbary Coast of Africa had been collecting tribute to allow our merchant ships to sail safely to port. When ransom wasn’t paid, the pirates captured ships, tortured American sailors and either killed them or converted them against their will to Islam.

The question for then President Thomas Jefferson was clear, but difficult: “Whether their peace or war will be cheapest?”

Ultimately it was a war he persuaded America to fight in order for “our commerce to be free and uninsulted” but also so that other nations didn’t underestimate our power. We won, and the United States never paid off pirates again.

We can’t keep paying Pirate Trump. As long as we keep buying our safe passage through the dangerous waters of covering him, he’ll keep looting and pillaging our journalistic institutions, ensuring they remain under threat.

Because the hard truth is, safe passage is just an illusion when pirates are in the area.