Following the tragic shooting at the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland yesterday that left five dead, many people took to Twitter to lay blame on President Trump’s violent rhetoric aimed at the media over the years. One such person was David Simon, creator of shows like The Wire, Treme, and The Deuce, who was personal friends with at least two of the victims. Simon spent the first half of his career as a journalist at the Baltimore Sun before pivoting to television, and his personal connection to this tragedy inspired some choice words for Trump, Marco Rubio, and any of their followers foolish enough to get in his way.
“The US President chose to declare to citizens of the republic that journalists of a free press were ‘enemies of the people,’” Simon wrote in multiple responses throughout the evening, drawing the obvious line between this kind of dangerous language and the mentally unstable shooters ready to hear it. The specific “enemies of the people” quote he refers to is not a new one for Trump, but the president did repeat it at a rally in South Carolina Monday night, pointing to the reporters at the back of the room, referring to them as “the opposing networks.” Regardless of these facts, trolls and Trump supporters continued to reply to Simon as if the president’s attacks on the media weren’t a matter of public record. Simon responded to nearly all of them swiftly, viscously, and with a number of “fuck you’s.”
But Trump wasn’t the only target of David Simon’s ire last night. Marco Rubio echoed Trump’s anti-media rhetoric in a series of tweets early Thursday morning and then doubled down on it later with a tweet decrying the use of the “F word” in the coverage of the shooting, as if that’s the most important thing happening right now. Simon had no patience for the senator’s bullshit, saying he was “unfit to be a citizen of the republic” and kindly asked him to “crawl through broken glass to hell.”
As we reported last weekend, Simon only recently returned to Twitter after a two-week suspension for the—let’s call it “colorful”—language he used against the Trump supporters and trolls who regularly message him. It remains to be seen if this most recent tirade will result in another timeout. As for the Capital Gazette, they show no signs of letting this violent attack impede their journalistic duty. Yes, they put out the damn paper:
[via Deadline]
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