No, there was no direct tie between the shrill demonization of the media by Donald Trump and the murder of those five journalists at the Capital Gazette. By all accounts, Jarrod Ramos had a personal vendetta with the paper that morphed into a murderous assault.
That said, we still can’t dismiss the context of a deadly media attack in an era where presidential animus toward the media is a daily constant. Especially when we also know that the Capital Gazette received death threats and emails celebrating the shootings following the slaughter. That wasn’t the warped work of Ramos; that was the vile upshot of the media-scapegoating times we live in. When the one with the bully pulpit megaphone labels the media “the enemy of the people,” all bets are off.