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.