Sen. John McCain has become a "pawn for the media" with his complaints about President Donald Trump, despite being treated poorly by the media himself while he was a presidential candidate, former Secret Service agent Dan Bongino said Monday.
"They beat him up when he was the Republican nominee, despite the fact they loved him before that," Bongino told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program. "I wish he would see that he is being used here just to destroy Trump. That is his only role here, that [he] be that Republican voice against Trump."
McCain, in an interview Sunday on NBC News' "Meet the Press," said Trump's attacks on the media is "how dictators get started," as such leaders shut down the free press.
On Friday, McCain dealt a flurry of blows against Trump during a speech in Germany, at one point comparing the current political atmosphere to the years under Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
"This is really disturbing stuff," said Bongino. "This is not a dictatorship. The idea behind a dictatorship, implication, there is someone in power doing something and abusing that power to stop the press from speaking out."
Trump and the media have been back and forth with each other, said Bongino, but "there is nothing being done to stomp on their First Amendment rights."
One of the president's biggest complaints is that "some people in the media are mouthing off about him all the time and using disingenuous stories to paint him in a bad light," he continued. "Nothing has been done to shut them down."
However, if the tables were turned, Bongino said matters would be different.
"If they had a Democratic senator during the Obama administration speaking out religiously and fervently how bad Barack Obama was, the media would do everything they can to brush him aside, and give him five or six sections of airtime to discredit him later," said Bongino.
"This is the opposite when a Republican is in control."
Bongino also spoke out about Trump's executive order on immigration, saying that the president's plan to roll out a new order on immigration is a good idea, as he based his whole campaign on immigration reform.
"This was a sound executive order," Bongino said of Trump's first decree, but it was shut down because of "judicial activism," as federal law says the president has the power to enact a ban.
"We have a problem with judicial activism in this country," he continued. "A lot of conservatives have been on the problem for years. He can't lose this one. This is the bedrock of his entire presidency and campaign so far."
But, he predicted that the left will "melt down," as they are "clawing at their faces, pulling their hair out. They have nothing else. They have been wiped out at federal, state, local level. Lost thousands of seats. They have the courts to impose discretionary rule.
"The left loves the courts. They hate constitutional limited government. The best way around is the court system that imposes their discretion on us."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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