CNN Has Given up Trying to Be a Real News Outlet, Muslim Host Declares It's the Media's Job to Stop President Trump

The survival of America’s constitutional republic requires “resistance” against President Donald Trump from the judiciary and news media, argued Fareed Zakaria on Wednesday.



As per usual, Zakaria's introductory GPS monologue amounted to a reading of his weekly column at The Washington Post.



Zakaria called on courts and the news media to protect America’s constitutional democracy from what he described as the “danger” of Donald Trump’s presidency.



On the subject of impeachment, Zakaria lamented Republican congressional majorities, claiming that Trump faces “little resistance” from GOP legislators.



Zakaria accuses Trump of attempting to undermine structural, moral, and precedential checks on presidential power. Framing the president as dictatorial, he accused Trump of seeking to “weaken all sources of resistance.”



Presenting himself as part of a cadre of news media figures in defense of the republic, Zakaria called on his news media colleagues to obstruct Trump's agenda:



"There are only two forces left that can place some constraints on Trump — the courts and the media — and [Donald Trump] has relentlessly attacked both. Every time a court has ruled against one of his executive orders, the president has ridiculed the decision or demeaned the judges involved. To their enormous credit, the courts have not been deterred from standing up to the president.



That leaves the media. Trump has gone at them (us) like no president before, smearing news organizations, attacking individual journalists and threatening to strip legal protections guaranteed to a free press. We will survive, but we must recognize the stakes.



The media should cover the administration’s policies fairly. But they must also never let the public forget that many of the attitudes and actions of this president are gross violations of the customs and practices of the modern American system — that they are aberrations and cannot become the new norms. That way, after Trump, the country will not start the next presidency with tattered standards and sunken expectations. The task is quite simply to keep alive the spirit of American democracy."