Critically acclaimed television writer and former journalist David Simon predicted journalists would be violently assaulted due to the rhetoric from President Donald Trump.
Speaking with Rolling Stone magazine, David spoke of his former colleagues at the Annapolis Capital Gazette who were gunned down in June.
Simon said he had "noticed that the President of the United States went immediately back to saying that journalists were really bad people."
"I’m unequivocal that he’s creating a culture and a climate in which it is inevitable that more and more people will walk into newsrooms and do violence to working journalists," Simon noted.
"Are you [Trump] encouraging this by suggesting that these people are enemies of the American experiment. That they are society’s villains. And he’s doing that explicitly," Simon continued. "I don’t understand why people are not holding Trump to account for the deaths of these people. I knew two of them. They were committed to journalism for all the reasons that people aspire to that career."
"Trump’s willing to trade on American fundamentals in a way that no other national leader has attempted since Huey Long. It’s populism wedded to totalitarianism," he concluded. "Very few people have been so devoid of ethic to go there."
Simon was the creator of "The Wire" and "Treme" after having worked at the Baltimore Sun for over a dozen years.
You can read the whole interview here.
