Paula Routly: Vermont Prepares for Trump's Second Term

From left: “Trump Elvis,” by Marc Nadel, January 13, 2016; “Fear on the Farm” by Sean Metcalf, February 15, 2017; “Trumpatized?” by Harry Bliss, May 24, 2017 Credit: File

I’ll never forget Donald Trump’s one and only campaign rally in Burlington, at the Flynn on January 7, 2016. It was two months before Vermonters would cast their votes in the presidential primary. Bernie Sanders was running against Hillary Clinton, and Trump was competing against a whole cast of characters, from Ted Cruz to Chris Christie, for the Republican nomination.

The local “Trumpnado,” as some coined it, was unexpected. At least it caught the Seven Days news team off guard. Our reporters had just returned from the paper’s annual holiday break, and everyone was hard at work on other stories.

There was an argument to be made for skipping the event. Organizers had issued 20,000 tickets for a venue with fewer than 2,000 seats, and they weren’t exactly welcoming journalists; by then Trump’s disdain for the press was well known.

Most importantly: At the time it didn’t look like Trump stood a chance.

Thankfully we were able to scramble the jets and dispatch a team of photographers and reporters to document the historic appearance. Our full-time video journalist, Eva Sollberger, made a compelling and thorough “Stuck in Vermont” episode about it. Marc Nadel drew one of the greatest cover illustrations we have ever published, of the “Trump Elvis.”

I volunteered to stand in the line of people that stretched four and a half city blocks — to the corner of Maple Street and South Winooski Avenue — to get a better sense of who they were. Not all were Trumpers from New York’s North Country, as it turned out. I found Ben & Jerry’s cofounder Ben Cohen in the queue; he was curious, too. I wrote up a short report to accompany a photo essay that ran in the paper; a slideshow and a more detailed dispatch on the event ran online.

A little over a year later, Trump was president and back on the cover of Seven Days. From day one, he gave us plenty to write about. His distinctive profile cast an ominous shadow in the illustration for our February 15, 2017, story: “Fear on the Farm: How Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Could Decimate Vermont’s Dairy Industry.”

Three months later, prompted by his firing of FBI director James Comey, we followed up with “Trumpatized? Prominent Vermonters Reveal Their White House Worries.” The headline on the cover, worded a little differently, read: “How Freaked Out Should We Be?”

Here we are again.

In anticipation of Trump’s second term, this week’s cover story explores how his next round of promises and policies could impact the Green Mountain State. “Hanging in the Balance” seeks answers to many of the questions some Vermonters are asking about migrant labor, health care and abortion rights, safe-injection sites, Lake Champlain cleanup, public schools, LGBTQ rights, tip work, and tariffs.

In theory, Trump’s past record should make it easier to predict what he’ll do this time. But he’s got new axes to grind.

One is American journalism. Both Trump and his FBI director appointee, Kash Patel, have trashed the “lamestream” media and expressed a desire to punish its practitioners. Trump famously called the press “the enemy of the people.” Patel once said, “We are going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens.”

Just two weeks after the election, Trump urged followers in Congress to kill a bill, known as the PRESS Act and supported by members of both parties, that would give reporters federal protection from having to divulge their confidential sources.

Longer term, journalists are worried that the U.S. Supreme Court could reconsider New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 case that protects press freedom by making it harder for public officials to prove libel. Without that fundamental safeguard, the threat of costly lawsuits could have a chilling effect on free speech and vigorous reporting.

That’s the real enemy of the people.