When Trump goes global

[Commentary] The hope of the Arab Spring has been realized: Now that anyone can publish anything from anywhere, it is impossible for even the most determined despot to jail every journalist and critic. But even as the most ruthless dictators are realizing the world has changed, they are quickly learning a new method for dismissing dissent and turning the guerrilla media techniques back on the guerrillas. Their instructor: Donald J. Trump, president of the United States.

He was trained by his mentor, the McCarthy hearings lawyer Roy Cohn, to relentlessly discredit his enemies, by NBC in the reality television art of manipulating the truth into a lie and reselling it as the truth, and by the New York Post and Twitter in coining a viral phrase. In 2016 he emerged as the perfect pioneer for not just discrediting inconvenient voices, but leaving them paralyzed with rage and confusion.

[Ravi Somaiya has been a correspondent for HBO’s Vice News Tonight and covered the media and breaking news for The New York Times.]