President Donald J. Trump's otherwise flawless first-term legacy risks being tainted by the findings of a new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Despite Trump's repeated promises to crack down on "fake news" reporters and pundits, the United States in 2020 failed to overtake China as the world's leading jailer of journalists.
According to the CPJ report, China imprisoned 47 journalists in 2020, down from 49 in 2019. For the second year in a row, the communist nation sent more journalists to prison than any other nation.
The United States, meanwhile, failed to send a single journalist to jail—in 2020 and in every other year since Trump took office in 2017. China, by comparison, managed to imprison nearly 200 journalists over that same period.
Trump couldn't even kick Jim Acosta out of the White House press corps, or prevent the CNN correspondent from publishing a book about how it's a "dangerous time to tell the truth in America."
The findings make clear that Trump, who has controversially (though not inaccurately) described American journalists as "enemies of the people," has failed to make good on a central premise of his historic 2016 victory.
Pundits appear to be unfairly discounting this broken promise as a driving force behind Trump's (alleged) defeat in 2020. A disappointing stain on an otherwise heroic legacy, one that may have just cost him a spot on Mount Rushmore.