Masha Gessen: Putin Enabled Attacks on Journalists by Engaging in Same Rhetoric Trump Is Using

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TRUMP: "I hate some of these people. But I would never kill them. I hate them. No, these people, honestly, I’ll be honest, I’ll be honest, I would never kill them. I would never do that. Let’s see. No, I wouldn’t."
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REID: "He’s obviously joking there."
GESSEN: "Funny."
REID: "And nobody is accusing Donald Trump of wanting to kill journalists. But the fact that when confronted with the idea that Vladimir Putin kills journalists, his instinct is to make light of it and say, well, I wouldn’t do it either. What do you think of that?"
GESSEN: "Do I think that Donald Trump is going to have journalists killed? I mean, part of what has happened in Russia over the last 17 years was that Vladimir Putin has established a state monopoly on the media. He has started by blacklisting journalists, by threatening journalists, staging a kidnapping of a journalists. Journalists have become off-limits, or they have been placed outside the law. It’s sort of permanently open season on people, on journalists who are in that position. I don’t think Putin has to personally order every single attack on journalists. Journalists get poisoned, shot, beaten up, sometimes beaten to death. Sometimes journalists get stabbed. I don’t think every single one of those attacks on an opposition journalist has been ordered personally by Putin. But every single one of them has been enabled by Putin. And the way that he enables them is by engaging in very much the same sort of rhetoric that Trump is now sort of wading into, calling journalists enemies of the state, talking about how much he hates them, and also normalizing the idea of killing, even, the way that Donald Trump did in his interview with Bill O’Reilly."