It’s not the news that’s fake, Donald...

Yesterday, in all caps, the man who occupies the White House tweeted out seven words: “FAKE NEWS…THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.” I’ve been trying to ignore this person as much as possible in recent days but I can’t allow that pronouncement to go unchallenged.

First off, Mr. Tweeter-in-Chief, I was a journalist for 13 years. In all that time, I never wrote anything that was fake, phony, fictitious, inflammatory or knowingly untrue. I was a reporter and editor for a long time and I did it for very little money because I loved the work and I was good at it…two character traits you could use yourself.

Second, Donald (may I call you Donald, because I can’t call you Mr. President?), I worked with and have known a lot of other journalists at four different newspapers and not a single one of them was an enemy of the people. They were some of the best people I have ever known and many of them are still my friends today – more than 30 years after I left the profession.

And finally, sir, I want to talk about my friend John.

John – we’ll just call him John and leave it at that – was an excellent reporter and sports writer, one of the best ever in the business in the opinion of many, including myself. He worked very hard and he did his job with skill and grace and without complaint. The stories he wrote were about real events and real people doing real things out here in the real world. There was nothing fake about my friend John and he was – most assuredly – not an enemy of the people.

My friend John is dead now, Donald. He was shot and killed inside the newspaper office where he worked by a man with a gun who may or may not have been emboldened by the hateful rhetoric that falls from your lips and bounces off your Twitter fingers with frightening consistency.

“FAKE NEWS…THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.”     

It matters not whether your years-long attack on the news media inspired this man to kill my friend John and four of his co-workers, because John is still dead and he’s not coming back. You, meanwhile, are still out there feeding raw, red meat to the sycophantic, low-information, poorly educated lemmings who support you without condition by blaming your own failures, inadequacies, character flaws and criminal tendencies on the journalists who have the audacity to look for them, find them and report them back to the rest of us nearly every day.

I don’t know if my friend John ever met you or had any occasion to write about you, but if he had, I feel certain he would have treated you with dignity and respect. At least he would have treated the office you hold that way. He didn’t have to invent fake news because to John, the real news was interesting enough to keep him reporting it for more than 30 years.

On June 28, I was watching TV when a crawler went across the screen about a shooting at a newspaper office in Annapolis, Maryland. I immediately ran to my office and sent a Facebook message to my friend John. It read, simply, “Hey man, are you OK?” He wasn’t, of course, and there was never a reply.

I’m saving that message right where it sits to remind me of what was lost that day, and I’m hoping with all the hope I can muster than no other journalist is ever the victim of such violence – and that their friends don’t have to feel what John’s friends and family still feel to this day – because the man who was elected president of the United States keeps telling his base that the news is fake and the media is the enemy of the people.

You see, Donald, it’s not the news that’s fake. It’s your counterfeit personality, your supposed beliefs that seem to change by the hour, marked by your lack of empathy and compassion, your mountain of lies, your con man antics before you became president and your narcissistic delusion of grandeur that followed your election and continues unabated today.

It's your presidency that's fake, Donald. The seed was planted with your ride down the escalator, reached full bloom when you lied about the crowd at your inauguration on Day 1 and will no doubt continue until -- one way or another -- you are forced to vacate the office you currently hold and the bitter weed that is the phony presidency of Donald J. Trump dries up and blows away.   

And finally, it’s not the news media who is the true enemy of the people, Donald. BREAKING NEWS: IT’S YOU.