Tom Tiffany blocks reporters, taking a page from Donald Trump

The Republican candidate for governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, has been a reliable ally of President Donald Trump in Congress. He objected to the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, voted repeatedly against reining in Trump’s war in Iran, supported the massive healthcare cuts that are hitting rural Wisconsin particularly hard, and cast the deciding vote in the House for a measure that, had it not stalled in the Senate, would have banned all AI regulation by the states for the next 10 years.

But recently Tiffany has softened his tone, distancing himself from some of Trump’s most unpopular positions. Just this month he conceded that Biden won the 2020 presidential election and said it’s time to wind down the war in Iran. He also claims he wants to “preserve Medicaid for our most vulnerable” and is campaigning on preventing AI data centers from eating up Wisconsin’s farmland.

A recent text to voters from the Tiffany campaign strikes a friendly, moderate tone, declaring “it’s time to fix problems.”

“When I’m governor, we’ll raise academic standards. We’ll make health care more transparent, stop Wall Street from buying our homes, and lower property taxes. Kids who can read, prices you can see, and a home you can own. That’s a Wisconsin that works for everyone, and that’s the commonsense governor I’ll be.”

But this week, the mask slipped. 

On Thursday, Tiffany’s campaign blocked two reporters from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel from covering a campaign event. Taking a page from Trump, who yanked White House press credentials from CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW this week because he doesn’t like their reporting, Tiffany and his campaign staff called the Journal-Sentinel’s coverage “slanted” and said only journalists who produce what the campaign deems “balanced” coverage will be allowed to report on his candidacy. 

Tiffany’s effort to keep out journalists whose reporting he doesn’t like violates the same constitutional principle protecting the free press that a federal judge cited when he ordered the White House to restore press passes to the three news outlets Trump banned.

When he was asked about Trump’s White House press ban earlier this week, Tiffany claimed to be a believer in an “open, free press” and said he was not planning to restrict journalists’ access. But, as Henry Redman reports, his campaign not only blocked Journal-Sentinel  reporters Mary Spicuzza and David Clarey from covering Tiffany’s event Thursday, it followed up with a personal attack on Spicuzza from the campaign’s official  social media account, calling her a “liberal activist” and doubling down on the Trump-like threat to ban journalists whose stories Tiffany doesn’t consider “balanced.”

Those stories likely include Spicuzza’s report this week on campaign finance records showing that three billionaires are responsible for about two-thirds of the campaign cash Tiffany has raised so far. 

Spicuzza’s serious, factual journalism raises real questions about whose interests Tiffany would represent as governor — the millions of ordinary Wisconsinites whose problems he says he wants to solve, or his three ultra-rich donors, Diane Hendricks and Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein — two of whom live in Illinois —who have given him close to $10 million. Richard Uihlein’s Restoration of America PAC has separately spent another $11.3 million to boost Tiffany, Spicuzza and her colleague Eva Wen report. All that money has given Tiffany a massive financial advantage in the governor’s race, they point out.

By banning journalists and ducking multiple debates, Tiffany reinforces the impression that he prefers to remain in a bubble with like-minded Republicans and high-dollar donors, instead of making himself available to the public and the reporters whose job it is to shine a light on public officials and keep voters informed. That does not bode well for a potential Tiffany administration.

In addition to Tiffany’s Trump-like aversion to criticism and his attacks on a widely respected reporter, his coziness with the conspiracy-minded fringe elements of the Republican party are cause for concern. 

This week, Examiner reporters Redman and Baylor Spears published an investigative report on Tiffany supporter Leonard Boltz, the pilot who crashed while flying Tiffany in a private plane earlier this month. Boltz, the chair of the Langlade County Republican Party and a retired major in the U.S. Air Force, has spent a lot of time flying Tiffany around the state in his small, private plane during the current campaign season. He is also deeply involved in promulgating election-related conspiracy theories and, Spears and Redman report, has said that if Tiffany loses in November it will be because of “cheating” by Democrats. 

Unlike Tiffany, Boltz does not present as a friendly, folksy rural Wisconsinite. Nor has he backed away from the more paranoid edges of MAGA world. In a video of a speech he gave to the Langlade Republican Party in June, linked in Redman and Spears’ story,  he paces and rants, spewing dark warnings about cheating Democrats whom he says are engaged in rampant voter fraud. He gave that speech in front of a poster proclaiming the heroism of Harry Wait, the Racine County election conspiracy theorist who was convicted of breaking the law by impersonating Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Racine Mayor Cory Mason to request absentee ballots in their names. Boltz, like Wait, wanted to drive Vos out of office for not doing enough to overturn the 2020 election results. 

It’s sobering to contemplate the possibility of a governor of Wisconsin who is close to the most out-there conspiracy theorists in the state party and who has championed their preposterous claims. 

It’s even more concerning if that governor considers himself above scrutiny by the press. When Spears and Redman traveled to a Tiffany campaign event this week to try to get a comment from Tiffany for their story about Boltz, a campaign staffer intervened physically to block the question and adopted an aggressive posture that appeared to be designed to intimidate them. 

That’s not an atmosphere consistent with press freedom, democracy, or a healthy Wisconsin.