For The Record

Not many of his colleagues felt moved to be on the Senate floor to hear it, but Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona delivered a strong rebuke to President Trump Jan. 17 for his attempts to cry “Fake News” and discredit the media anytime a news story that painted him in a bad light appeared.

Invoking the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s line that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” Senator Flake stated that “2017 was a year which saw the truth—objective, empirical, evidence-based truth—more battered and abused than any other in the history of our country, at the hands of the most-powerful figure in our government. It was a year which saw the White House enshrine ‘alternative facts’ into the American lexicon, as justification for what used to be known simply as good old-fashioned falsehoods. It was the year in which an unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press was launched by that same White House, an assault that is as unprecedented as it is unwarranted.”