Donald Trump poses “extreme dangers” to the United States and the world, journalist and co-founding editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald says in a new interview published at Slate.
But to stop the GOP presidential nominee from getting elected, “U.S. media and U.S. elites” must take a lesson from the recent Brexit debacle, he warns—and bending over backwards to link Trump to Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t the right approach.
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“U.K. elites were uniform, uniform, in their contempt for the Brexit case, other than the right-wing Murdochian tabloids,” Greenwald told Slate contributor Isaac Chotiner by phone.
“They all sat on Twitter all day long, from the left to the right, and all reinforced each other about how smart and how sophisticated they were in scorning and [being snide] about [U.K. Independent party] and Boris Johnson and all of the Brexit leaders, and they were convinced that they had made their case,” he said. “Everyone they were talking to—which is themselves—agreed with them. It was constant reinforcement, and anyone who raised even a peep of dissent or questioned the claims they were making was instantly castigated as somebody who was endangering the future of the U.K. because they were endorsing—or at least impeding—the effort to stop Brexit. This is what’s happening now.”
He continued:
He cautioned pundits and the political elite against harboring a limited perspective about Trump supporters and their beliefs:
Filmmaker Michael Moore floated a similar argument last week, when he (apologetically) predicted that Trump will beat Hillary Clinton in November.
“I live in Michigan,” he said in an interview. “Let me tell you, it’s going to be the Brexit strategy.”
“I think one of the things I’ve been concerned about this week is…that we’re sitting in our bubble having a good laugh at this shitshow, as you say, of a [Republican National Convention], but the truth is that this plays to a lot of people that he has to win to become the next president,” Moore explained at the time. “The population of schools has been wrecked, and the news media is just insipid and stupid and doesn’t give the people the facts about what’s going on.”
Meanwhile, Greenwald denounced hysteria around Trump’s relationship with Russia in general and specifically the billionaire’s call on Wednesday for Russia to find Clinton’s “missing” emails. “[T]he history of linking your political opponents to Russia is a really dangerous and ugly one in the U.S.,” Greenwald said.
This echoes a charge leveled Wednesday by editors of The Nation, who wrote that “[i]n their zeal to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president—a goal we share—representative voices of the liberal establishment have joined with the forces of neoconservatism to engage in what can only be described as McCarthyist rhetoric.”
Chotiner’s interview with Greenwald also tackled the timing and source of the DNC leak; Edward Snowden’s life in Russia; and Trump’s recent statements about NATO.