The British News Organisations 'Obeying in Advance' to Donald Trump

The coverage of this week's Trump state visit is a worrying sign of what will happen if a Trump-like figure is ever elected on this side of the Atlantic

The pace at which the United States is descending into authoritarianism under Donald Trump is terrifying.

The scale of that descent has been well-documented, from his attacks on the judiciary to his targeting of ethnic minority communities and his militarisation of major urban areas.

However, it is his recent ability to get US media organisations to bend to his will that has in some ways been the most alarming.

Over recent weeks the President has successfully and proudly engineered the sacking of multiple journalists, commentators and comedians who have been critical of him.

That this can happen in a country whose own constitution explicitly protects free speech should be alarming enough.

Yet the fact that he has been able to do so quite so easily and with such little pushback from the media organisations concerned, suggests that matters are only likely to get much worse.

Now at this stage you might be telling yourself how lucky you are to live in the United Kingdom, rather than in the United States and that what is happening over there could never happen over here. “Not my circus, not my clowns.”

However, the unbelievably compliant UK media coverage of Trump’s visit to the UK this week suggests that such thoughts are likely to be hugely misplaced.