Why Trump’s furious condemnation of ‘The Apprentice’ film matters

It’s unlikely that Donald Trump has seen “The Apprentice,” a movie that chronicles his early rise, but he evidently doesn’t care for it. The Hill reported:

The 150-word missivepublished shortly before 1 a.m. ET, covered some predictable ground, including the Republican expressing hope that the film will “bomb.”

But there was one sentence in the online piece that stood out for me: “So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want.”

It’s not surprising that Trump would whine incessantly about a movie he almost certainly hasn’t seen, but note the phrasing in his message: The GOP candidate lamented the fact that these filmmakers are “allowed” to say “whatever they want.”

It’s as if some people believe it’s a free country with a First Amendment. What nerve.

The line came almost seven years to the day after Trump declared during an Oval Office event that he considered it “disgusting” that the nation’s free press can “write whatever it wants.”

In recent days, of course, the former president hasn’t just lashed out at those responsible for “The Apprentice” movie. He also has launched a bizarre campaign against CBS and “60 Minutes,” accusing the outlet and the news program of a “scandal” that does not exist.

Trump has nevertheless repeatedly called for CBS to lose its broadcast license — an appeal that doesn’t actually make sense — a point he seemed especially excited about over the weekend. On Friday night, for example, the Republican said “60 Minutes” should be “taken off the air,” and a day later, he suggested during a Newsmax interview that the government should somehow pull CBS from the airwaves.

And did I mention that Trump said in reference to The New York Times: “Wait until you see what I’m going to do with them”? Because that happened last weektoo.

So let’s circle back to our earlier coverage and take stock. The Republican nominee for the nation’s highest office is threatening perceived foes with prison sentencesendorsing a “strongman” leadership stylebragging about his support from dictatorsraising the prospect of a temporary American “dictatorship,” and talking about “terminating” parts of the Constitution that stand in the way of his ambitions.

Trump is also arguing that his rivals shouldn’t be “allowed” to run against himtargeting immigrants with Hitler-style rhetoric while promising to create militarized mass deportations and detention campsspeaking with greater frequency about deporting people who entered the United States legallypromising pardons to politically aligned criminalsraising the specter of military tribunals for his perceived domestic political foes, and talking about expanding the use of the U.S. military on American soil.

But specifically when it comes to the First Amendment, Trump recently insisted that those who criticize judges and Supreme Court justices that he likes “should be put in jail,” pushed for CBS to be pulled from the nation’s airwaves, made veiled threats against the nation’s largest newspaper, and asserted in writing that it’s awful to see filmmakers being “allowed” to say “whatever they want.”

It’s almost as if the former president were running on an authoritarian-style platform.

In early 2017, the then-president delivered a speech in which he boasted“I love the First Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”

It was ridiculous at the time. It’s vastly worse now.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”