David A. Andelman

There is an existential danger to the republic in the Big Lie that Donald Trump spoke in front of the Memorial Wall at the Central Intelligence Agency on the first full day of his presidency, and that his press secretary elaborated on only hours later from the podium in the White House press room. “I have a running war with the media,” the new president said. “They are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”

Trump, the consummate marketer, understands that if you repeat a lie long enough, eventually people — even those far outside his inner circle or most fervent supporters — will believe it. The concept began even before Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels embraced it as a core tenet of the Third Reich: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Already one of the themes of the Trump presidency is that all journalists are liars, the press is unrelievedly corrupt, and the media is in no sense to be trusted as a check on the power of the presidency. When that sinks deeply into the American psyche, it could persist far beyond even his four-year term and will be far more difficult to eradicate.

The consequences are pernicious, indeed potentially lethal. They go far beyond the undoubtedly toxic influences of fake news, the failure or inability of the American people to distinguish between truth and lies, and the astonishing willingness of the Trump administration to embrace “alternative facts” as an acceptable standard. Moreover, with the demonization of most national news media and the canonization of a sliver of fierce loyalists, they risk creating the two-tiered system of propaganda that is the hallmark of autocracies.

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In Russia, China and many other countries, a free or opposition press has been attacked and sometimes suppressed entirely, while government-controlled media outlets are elevated to pedestals. This in turn has translated into repeated cases of journalists being physically attacked and even murdered with impunity, and the right to lock up journalists has gone unquestioned. Last year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 259 journalists were imprisoned worldwide and 48 were killed.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told a Society of the Silurians lunch last month how doxing — posting her home address and phone number, on white-supremacist websites — led to vicious, anti-Semitic letters delivered to her home. “I have an 11-year-old who is very inquisitive and very aware, and who felt very traumatized by this,” Haberman said. “Because what Trump doesn't think about is how an 11-year-old thinks when his parent is being attacked.”

Where this is headed is not yet clear. What is clear is Trump's unrelieved commitment, unprecedented in American history, to spreading the idea of a corrupt, lying U.S. press.His drumbeat of hatred directed at the media, which has been embraced and magnified by his aides, is intensifying an already toxic environment of mistrust. Between June 2015 when he declared his candidacy and last Dec. 6, Trump tweeted 613 insults directed at reporters or media outlets, according to a New York Times tabulation.

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"He has, in effect, created an environment that is fostering incivility across the web and particularly against journalists who he has specifically targeted in his tweets and press conferences," Michelle Ferrier, a former journalist and founder of TrollBusters, a digital tool to combat online harassment, told CPJ.

For more than two centuries, since Edmund Burke opened Britain’s House of Commons to members of the press in 1787, the core of American democracy — enshrined in the First Amendment of the Constitution — has been the concept Burke called the Fourth Estate: the press as the one institution independent of the three branches of government that serves as a check or monitor on their activities.

Trump placed his hand on two Bibles to swear his allegiance to that Constitution. Hopefully he will embrace all its principles going forward.

David A. Andelman, a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors, is editor-emeritus of World Policy Journal and author of A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today. Follow him on Twitter @DavidAndelman.

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