On Wednesday, not long after Arizona Senator Jeff Flake took to the Senate floor to denounce Donald Trump’s media-bashing as “despotic” and “authoritarian,” the president proved him right by releasing his “Highly Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards.” Flake’s earnest speech and Trump’s petty “awards” represent opposing Republican views of the media—but both of them deserve criticism, for different reasons.

Trump’s much-hyped “awards” ended up being nothing but a blog post on the Republican National Committee’s website that listed 10 articles from mainstream outlets allegedly guilty of “unrelenting bias, unfair news coverage, and even downright fake news.” The first item wasn’t news at all, but New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s mistaken prediction on election night in 2016 that the stock market would “never” recover from Trump’s victory. Other items included stories that were misreported but quickly corrected, as when Time magazine falsely reported that Trump removed a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office. What the list mainly demonstrates is that large media organizations sometimes make factual errors, but have a useful process for correcting them.

It’s easy to dismiss the Fake News Awards as just another example of Trump’s clowning. Josh Barro, a senior editor at Business Insider, cautioned that liberals were too quick to frame this silly stunt as an example of an attack on the free press:

If you keep telling people non-terrifying things are terrifying — and the president’s whining about the media is definitely not terrifying — people will stop taking you seriously. https://t.co/sNH6elTKbt — Josh Barro (@jbarro) January 18, 2018

But if the Fake News Awards were faintly ridiculous, Trump’s larger pattern of attacking the media, including repeated calls from the White House for journalists to be fired, is deeply disturbing, for reasons that Flake’s speech helped illuminate. As Flake noted, Trump is a purveyor of numerous falsehoods, both trivial (the size of his inaugural crowds) and serious (birtherism, and the claim that the Russian collusion story is a “hoax”). By attacking the media, calling major news organizations the “enemy of the people,” Trump is pursuing a familiar authoritarian tactic of trying to discredit independent institutions that can hold power in check.

“No longer can we compound attacks on truth with our silent acquiescence,” Flake said. “No longer can we turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to these assaults on our institutions. And Mr. President, an American president who cannot take criticism, who must constantly deflect and distort and distract, who must find someone else to blame, is charting a very dangerous path. And a Congress that fails to act as a check on the president adds to the danger.”