“The FAKE NEWS media is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”

President Trump tweeted this declaration less than a month after his inauguration. Attacks on the media have been a hallmark of his presidential campaign and style of governance. This represents a dangerous and dramatic turning point. Twentieth-century dictators—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—all denounced their critics, especially the press, as “enemies of the people.” Their goal was to delegitimize the work of the press—effectively calling it “fake news,” thereby creating confusion in the public’s mind about what’s real and what isn’t, what can be trusted and what can’t be.

This also appears to be Trump’s goal. In Enemy of the People, Marvin Kalb, an award-winning American journalist, writes with passion about his concerns for the future of American democracy. Can it withstand Trump’s unrelenting attacks on the press?

As Kalb shows, the press has been a bulwark of American democracy. He writes about Edward R. Murrow’s courageous broadcasts that turned the cold light of reality on Senator Joseph McCarthy’s “Red Scare” threats in the early 1950s. He also vividly reminds us of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s reporting during the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Without a fearless, robust press, democracy is in peril. Kalb’s book is an eye-opening indictment of President Trump’s eff orts to debase and dehumanize the American media—and put the future of America’s democracy in question.

Marvin Kalb is senior adviser to the Pulitzer Center, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings, Murrow Professor emeritus at Harvard, and former network correspondent at CBS and NBC News. He is the author, most recently, of The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956―Khrushchev, Stalin’s Ghost, and a Young American in Russia and Imperial Gamble: Putin, Ukraine, and the New Cold War.