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Page 8A NATION/WORLD East Oregonian Wednesday, July 5, 2017 Trump’s Twitter battle with press may come with a price Family of Charlie Gard via AP This is an undated photo of Chris Gard and Connie Yates with their son Charlie Gard provided by the fami- ly, at Great Ormond Street Hospital, in London. British baby at end of life support draws interest from both Trump, Pope Francis LONDON (AP) — A terminally ill British child has attracted the attention of both the president of the United States and the pope. More than $1.68 million has been raised to help 11-month-old Charlie Gard travel to America for treatment. But little has changed for baby Charlie, who suffers from a rare genetic disease that has left him brain damaged and unable to breathe unaided. The life support he is receiving at a London hospital soon will be turned off over the objections of his parents, who want to take him to the United States for experimental therapy they believe could prolong his life. A succession of judges has backed specialists at Great Ormond Street Hospital who say the treatment won’t help Charlie and may cause him to suffer. Britain’s Supreme Court ruled it’s in the boy’s best interests to be allowed to die with dignity. The Euro- pean Court of Human Rights last week rejected an appeal from Charlie’s parents, Chris Gard and Connie Yates, exhausting their legal options. They have been spending time with Charlie before he is taken off life support. By wading into the case in recent days, President Donald Trump and Pope Francis have given Gard and Yates new hope and shined an international spotlight on “It’s this terrible, terrible situation. It’s a horrible thing to have to decide.” — Claire Fenton-Gylnn, University of Cambridge an ethical debate that pits the rights of parents to decide what’s best for their children against the authorities with responsibility for ensuring that people who can’t speak for themselves receive the most appropriate care. “The world is watching,” reads the headline across the top of charliesfight.org, the website dedicated to Char- lie’s cause. “Two of the most powerful men in the world want to give Charlie Gard his chance.” Great Ormond Street Hospital said Tuesday there were no new updates in Charlie’s care. Trump tweeted Monday that he would be “delighted” to help Charlie, who is suffering from mitochondrial depletion syndrome, which causes progressive muscle weakness. The president’s comment came after Pope Francis issued a statement saying the parents’ rights to treat their son “until the end” should be respected. The Vatican children’s hospital studied whether it was possible for Great Ormond Street to transfer Charlie to Rome. But Bambino Gesu hospital Pres- ident Mariella Enoc said she was informed that the board of the London hospital said Charlie cannot be moved for legal reasons. However, the matter was still being examined Tuesday. “I was contacted by the mother, who is a very deter- mined and decisive person and doesn’t want to be stopped by anything,” Enoc said. “She asked us to try to verify the possibility that this treatment is done. And our doctors and scientists are looking into the possibility.” The fight over keeping Charlie alive is not about money. Charlie’s parents have used a crowdfunding website to raise the money needed to pay for his treatment in the U.S. Instead, it revolves around an ethical debate about what’s best for the child. Under British law, it is normal for courts to intervene when parents and doctors disagree on the treatment of a child — such as cases where a parent’s religious beliefs prohibit blood transfusions. The rights of the child take primacy, rather than the rights of parents to make the call. It is a principle that applies even in cases where parents have an alternative point of view, according to Britain’s Court of Appeal. And Britain’s courts have been consistent in this case. Three courts agreed that the experimental treatment would be futile and may “well cause pain, suffering and distress to Charlie.” The parents then took their case to the European Court of Human Rights, which refused to intervene and endorsed the British judges’ decision. “This was a decision about what is best for this child,” said Claire Fenton-Glynn, an academic at the University of Cambridge who studies children’s rights. “This is an incredibly difficult decision for the court, and it’s not one that the doctors or the court have taken lightly.” “It’s this terrible, terrible situation,” she said. “It’s a horrible thing to have to decide.” In the United States, such disputes are normally nego- tiated between parents and doctors, according to Arthur Caplan, head of the division of bioethics at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York City. A family’s ability to afford endless care usually poses a bigger obstacle than ethical disagreements. Even the Vatican had difficulty with Charlie’s case, as was clear in the conflicting messages that at first came from the Holy See. The pope’s top bioethics official initially suggested that while the parents’ wishes should be respected, they must also be helped to accept the limits of medicine. After an outcry from conservatives, Pope Francis issued a statement of his own, insisting on the need to respect the wishes of the parents to “accompany and treat” their son. Caplan said Charlie’s situation is a reminder that medicine and technology can’t fix everything, even in wealthy countries. WASHINGTON (AP) — Whether by whim or design, President Donald Trump keeps adding fuel to his incendiary Twitter battle against the media. The press is an easy target for the Republican president, and one his supporters love to hate. But the escalating conflict has diverted attention not just from Trump’s failures but his claimed successes as well. Trump tweeted Monday that “at some point the Fake News will be forced to discuss our great jobs numbers, strong economy, success with ISIS, the border & so much else!” It’s his own campaign against the press, though, that keeps changing the subject from that more substantive policy debate Trump claims to crave. And it has hindered Trump’s ability to push his agenda through Congress, where Republicans complain about the president’s lack of focus as his health- care plan is struggling, work on next year’s budget is stuck and talk of a big infrastructure deal is fading. Trump’s latest bash was a repur- posed old video he tweeted on the weekend of him fake-pummeling a wrestling promoter whose face had been replaced by the CNN logo. It was unprecedented, even for Trump: a sitting president, in effect promoting physical assault of a media stand-in. Media watchdogs quickly called him out. Unrepentant, Trump argued over the weekend that his outsized Twitter presence was part of a calculated redef- inition of the presidency. “My use of social media is not Presidential - it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL,” he tweeted. Trump spent the weekend at his private golf club in New Jersey. None of his top advisers traveled with him and his activities were closely held. There was no telling how much of his anti-press drumbeat was a calculated strategy to divert attention from his policy struggles vs. a capricious reac- tion to criticism. But Trump was clearly being egged on by his supporters, including his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., a frequent attack dog for his father. The younger Trump on Monday contrasted the more accepting way the media have treated a New York production of “Julius Caesar,” in which a Trumpian Caesar dies in a bloody group stabbing, with the outcry over the wrestling clip. “CNN & dems calling Trump AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster President Donald Trump arrives to speak during the Celebrate Freedom event at the Kennedy Center in Washington on Saturday. assassination play ‘artistic expression’ but WWF joke meme is ‘a call for violence’? Hilarious reinforcement of FNN,” the younger Trump tweeted Monday, using an acronym for what the president has begun to refer to as the “Fake News Network.” When a CNN reporter tweeted, “Isn’t pro wrestling fake?” Trump Jr. responded: “Yes, just like your coverage.” Senior White House counselor Kellyanne Conway also piled on, tweeting that lately the “role of the media has been to retract false stories & fire liars” and that “patriotic vets died” so the press can “talk nonsense.” Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer said that while presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Richard Nixon and George W. Bush have long distrusted and made derogatory statements about the press, Trump’s sustained and personal attacks are something entirely new. “We haven’t really seen a president who seems totally consumed, which he’s been since the election, with the press as his adversary,” Zelizer said, describing the wrestling tweet as unprecedented. While Trump’s electoral base may be urging him on, Zelizer said, the president risks alienating many Amer- icans who have real problems. They may get a rise out of Trump knocking the unpopular press every once in a while, he said, but “when you’re focusing on ‘Morning Joe’ instead of health care, it could alienate voters” and make them think the presi- dent is not engaged in issues that affect them. “This does have consequences,” he said. Likewise, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said that by provoking a running battle with the press, Trump has “minimized accountability for his failures but he’s also not getting credit for his successes when he distracts us.” Jamieson blamed Trump for stoking the battle, but also chided the press for giving it undue attention. People care about jobs, defeating terrorism, preventing election hacks and the like, she said. “Trump’s shenanigans in his rela- tions with the press” would be very low on the list if the public were given priorities to choose from, she said. “If everything was fine all around the world, we would have the luxury of these sorts of distractions by the president and the press,” she said. “In the current world, we do not have that luxury.” It remains unclear exactly how the wrestling video found its way onto Trump’s Twitter feed. Social media director Dan Scavino and the White House press office did not respond to emailed questions. A version of the video had previously appeared on Reddit, though a member of the presi- dent’s team appeared to add sound and convert the file from its original format. It’s not the first time that a meme has found its way from an obscure online channel to Trump’s Twitter feed.
