by Jon Sopel
It was exasperation with the way his press secretary, Sean Spicer, was performing at his daily news conferences in the Briefing Room that led to an early intervention from the President. After Spicer’s initial appearance in the Briefing Room and then his subsequent encounters, he very quickly became a figure of parody, lampooned mercilessly on shows such as Saturday Night Live – where the character of Spicer was played brilliantly – and witheringly – by, wait for it, a woman. A woman! Melissa McCarthy as Spicer was genius. A genius piece of casting; a genius piece of acting. Trump hated that almost as much as he hated the way he was portrayed by Alec Baldwin. And the President came to a conclusion: if your press secretary isn’t cutting it, do it yourself.
So one morning, when the White House was just confirming the name of its pick to be labour secretary, it was also announced that his name would be unveiled in a presidential news conference. That was highly unusual. A presidential news conference to name the labour secretary? No way. There was more to this than met the eye. What had purported to be a news conference held in the East Room, with its crystal chandeliers, gold damask curtains and parquet floor, in fact turned out to be a cage fight, with Donald Trump using his mixed martial arts skills to kick, punch and smack round the chops anyone who irritated him. As it happens, that turned out to be pretty much everyone.
If this was a news conference designed largely to show the utter contempt in which he held the media, it was very effective. We were out of control. We were fake news. ‘The press has become so dishonest that if we don’t talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people. Tremendous disservice,’ Trump said. ‘We have to talk to find out what’s going on, because the press honestly is out of control. The level of dishonesty is out of control.
‘I turn on the TV, open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos. Chaos,’ he said. ‘Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.’ I was ‘another beauty’ for being from the BBC. At a news conference where he repeatedly accused the media of dishonesty he told reporters that his election victory had been the biggest in terms of electoral college votes since Ronald Reagan. At which point a reporter stands up and says Barack Obama won by a wider margin. So the President counters: ‘I was talking about Republican victories.’ So the reporter fires back – but George H.W. Bush had a far bigger victory. And the President, completely unruffled at having delivered fake news himself, just blamed others and said that was what he had been told.
This in a microcosm became the template for the relationship. Broadly speaking the President would make the accusations of ‘fake news’ – not because something that had been written or broadcast was untrue, but because it was something he didn’t like and didn’t fit with his narrative; though he would utter repeated falsehoods that could be demonstrated to be untrue.
There is such a thing as objective truth and there are such things as verifiable facts. And very often it seemed the President traded in neither. There are those who say the President knows exactly what he is doing, and is deliberately trying to confuse and sow doubt. Others who insist that it is part of his psychological make-up – when he says it, he believes it to be true – and woe betide anyone who says the emperor has no clothes. What is his own reality, what is delusion is beyond my pay grade to pronounce on. But it must be particularly uncomfortable for the staff who have to go out and defend or explain entirely manufactured statistics, and claims that are not in any way tethered to reality.
There has been some amazingly good, detailed, thorough, no-stone-left-unturned journalism in the Trump era; stunning reports where newspapers have clearly committed massive resources to an investigation that would take months to come to fruition. Stories where the journalists concerned would wonder pre-publication whether this will be the one. This will be the one to bring down a president. This will be their Pulitzer prize-winning, name forever carved on journalistic escutcheon, Woodward and Bernstein moment. And then with fanfare and a thud the story lands – and is gone again in a matter of hours.
The New York Times unveiled an absolute blockbuster of an investigation into the Trump family’s complex tax arrangements. When published in the newspaper it covered 18 pages. The detail was phenomenal, making it clear that Donald Trump inherited far more money and far earlier than he had ever acknowledged. The report suggested he was a millionaire aged eight – and by the time he graduated from college he was receiving $1 million a year from his father. The Times alleged that the way these gifts were structured was improper and potentially illegal.
Again, in normal political times these revelations could have been expected to lead the news for weeks, bringing demands for congressional investigations, and shrill demands for the President to come clean about his finances, sparking a flurry of follow-ups from rival publications desperate to get on. I won’t say this story didn’t cause a ripple in the pond – it did – but it didn’t really cause waves. It came. And it went. And Donald Trump was left with barely a mark on him. Again.
Part of this can be explained by the fact that Donald Trump came to Washington as a political outsider, which means that he is given far more latitude than would be afforded a ‘conventional’ politician who had risen up through the ranks of either Congress or a governor’s mansion. Bit of a dodgy track record with women? ‘Sure, we knew that. He was a wealthy playboy.’ Cut a few corners with his taxes? ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’ Says things that are politically incorrect? ‘Good on him – wish I could get away with that.’ These are views I heard again and again as I travelled around the United States during his election campaign.
And now that he is their president, his supporters don’t expect anything different. As I say, that is part of it. The other part of it is the assiduous way he has sought to sow doubt about the trustworthiness of the media. Go to a Trump rally – and he loves nothing more than being on the road, reconnecting with his fanbase – and one of the staples of these events is the attack on the media. We will be standing on a raised platform towards the back of the auditorium, and you just know that, sooner or later, the President will have the audience turn towards us – and he will go on one of his favourite riffs: that there is no group of people more dishonest; that we are ‘fake news’; that we are the enemies of the people; that we are liars who shouldn’t be believed. And the atmosphere is ugly. We are jeered and booed, insulted and spat at.
No matter what the weather and what the circumstances, the attacks continue. No matter that some have expressed concern that this is inciting violence. Even after five staff working for one of America’s oldest newspapers – four of them journalists – were gunned down in the offices of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, and the President ordered flags to be lowered to half-mast at the White House, at his next rally he carried on his verbal onslaught about journalists and journalism. It was the same after a Saudi journalist working for the Washington Post was butchered in his country’s consulate in Istanbul. The President condemned his murder in unequivocal terms, and said it was particularly awful that it was a journalist – but then at his next rally went on the attack about fake news.
And the President has been absolutely consistent and relentless in his attacks. He has refused to attend the White House Correspondents Association annual black-tie dinner. He thought it would be hypocritical. His Twitter account has a more or less daily blast at the shortcomings of the media – the only exception being Fox News, which holds a particular place of affection and respect in the President’s heart. For every one interview a rival network gets with him, Fox probably gets ten. The Rupert Murdoch-owned network is his go-to choice.
One of the persistent questions that arise about virtually every aspect of the Trump presidency – and forgive me if I come back to a question I have already posed elsewhere in these pages – is how much of what he does is driven by instinct, how much is deliberate strategy; how much is impulse and how much is this a chess grandmaster planning several move
s ahead. On most things you feel that the President has a sixth sense, just an incredible political gut sense of which way the wind is blowing. He’s a man who likes to throw things up in the air and see how they land. And, yes, dealing with the consequences of things that go wrong. Some of his biggest decisions – like the sacking of the FBI director, James Comey – backfired massively. Some of his greatest gambles – like meeting Kim Jong-un – were made when it was impossible to know what the consequences would be.
But in his attacks on the media there seems to be deliberate strategy. One of the people who has interviewed him a couple of times since he became president – and is not from Fox – is Lesley Stahl. She is a presenter of the best news programme on American television, 60 Minutes. She recounted a conversation she had with Trump when no cameras were present. ‘At one point, he started to attack the press,’ Stahl told an audience. ‘There were no cameras in there.’
‘I said, “You know, this is getting tired. Why are you doing it over and over? It’s boring and it’s time to end that. You know, you’ve won … why do you keep hammering at this?”’ Stahl recalled.
‘And he said: “You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”’
There you have it in a nutshell. This is a president who wants the American people to believe what he says, and disregard the rest. He said it best himself when he was at the White House with a group of veterans, and he told them: ‘What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.’ In other words, reality is what I say it is.
And is it having an effect? Hell, yes. Polling by the CBS Network over the summer of 2018 found that 91 per cent of people who identified themselves as ‘strong Trump supporters’ trusted him to provide accurate information; only 11 per cent said the same about the news media. If this doesn’t send a shiver down the spines of media moguls and editorial directors, it ought to. This isn’t just one poll, I should add – all polls are reporting similar findings. There was a Gallup Poll that came out which was also striking. When people were asked why they didn’t trust the media, about 45 per cent referred to things like inaccuracy, bias, ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ – in other words, the language used by Donald Trump had passed into the mainstream. What the public was parroting were Trump talking points.
With the media under sustained onslaught from the President, mistrusted by growing sections of the public; technological change transforming what we consume and how we consume it; old-fashioned newspaper circulation in terminal decline, broadcast news bulletins watched by fewer young people and increasingly becoming the preserve of the elderly – is this the worst time ever to be a journalist? Has there been a more desperate era to be in this business? If you have shares in a news organisation, is it time to diversify your portfolio?
Nope. Journalism is thriving in the Trump era. The appetite for news about the goings-on of this administration has been off the scale. Outlets that were flagging before Donald Trump moved into the White House are now booming; newspapers that were struggling are starting to turn in big profits. And, dare I say it, I suspect had Hillary Clinton won the presidency – or one of the other Republican hopefuls – I wouldn’t have been commissioned by this fine and discerning publisher to write one book, let alone three. (Like London buses, there’s another one coming along after this.)
CNN – an absolute punchbag for Donald Trump – has been reporting record profits. The ‘failing’ New York Times is piling on digital subscribers – yes, partly because the product has got a lot better, but also because the more the President attacks the famous title, the more people feel they need to subscribe. And, of course, Twitter, which was in danger of being totally eclipsed by other social media platforms prior to the 2016 election, has been given a new lease of life by the 45th president and his hyperactive thumbs. I went to a baseball game at the fabulously old-school Wrigley Field in Chicago, and as I sat watching the Cubs with a senior executive from one of the country’s major media groups, he was bemoaning the fact that his company had not cashed in as well as other news organisations on the fascination and fixation with Trump. He wanted to know who I thought were the sharpest White House correspondents with the best contacts books and who they should sign.
The problem comes when that shifts a few degrees north. When reporting fairly becomes secondary to delivering an anti-Trump message that will act as clickbait, that will sell a few more newspapers or push up viewing figures – in other words, monetising either the pro-or anti-Trump sentiment. In a deeply polarised America it often seems that the broadcast media has decided it has to take sides too. The American media landscape has changed since Donald Trump became president. At the Palace of Westminster you always know where you are by the colour of the carpet beneath you – red, you’re in the House of Lords; green, you’re in the Commons. Switch to Fox and you know you’re in Trump country; turn over to MSNBC or CNN and you are on the other side of the divide. Some will argue that it was always like that, but under Trump it has become much more exaggerated. And the short period either side of the midterm elections of 2018 epitomised it perfectly.
In the run-up to the elections, news emerged that a ‘caravan’ was forming of immigrants from Central America who planned to march hundreds of miles to the US border. This ragtag bunch of women, children and young men contained some who would seek to enter for asylum, and no doubt many who would enter the country illegally. The President seized on this as an opportunity to burnish his credentials as someone who would be tough on immigration. It was an ‘invasion’, he declared, and everywhere he went he spoke about this invasion. He deployed the army – thousands of soldiers were sent to the border. America was on a war footing. A bigger force than was then present in Syria and Afghanistan combined would defend the territorial integrity of the US against this ‘caravan’ hundreds of miles away.
I was at an airport early one morning, and was watching the headlines on Fox. ‘According to reports 100 members of ISIS are part of the caravan in Guatemala.’ What? A neat 100. Not 99 or 101. And reports from whom? With what attempts to verify this claim? They’d flown from Raqqa to Guatemala, we were asked to believe. The network would also report that many of the marchers were riddled with disease, which they would bring into the US, and that the caravan was funded by George Soros – the ultimate bogeyman for the right. It was nonsense and fear mongering, with a light dusting of anti-Semitism. No evidence was ever offered for any of this. And the moment that the midterms were over, the President dropped all mention of this moment of national peril. It was hard to resist the conclusion that thousands of troops were deployed not to save the nation but to shore up the Republican vote.
The run-up to the midterms also saw a home-grown terrorist sending pipe bombs to a number of prominent Democrats – the Obamas, the Clintons, the actor Robert de Niro (who’s been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump), George Soros (obviously) and Joe Biden. You would think something like this would just bring condemnation without equivocation from across the political board. Not in divided America. Some Fox commentators thought it was a Democrat plot: how convenient to have prominent Democrats attacked just before the elections, to win them sympathy. Even the President spoke about ‘the bomb thing’ as though it was something other than what it seemed. Eventually the man arrested in Florida was shown to be a fanatical Trump supporter who was a regular at Trump rallies. Another conspiracy had sprung a rather big leak.
The other thing that happened just days before the midterm elections was the murder of eleven Jewish worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh by a heavily armed white supremacist. The Shabbat killings just added to this profound sense of unease about the direction in which America was heading. But on Monday morning on MSNBC, one of the main presenters of the breakfast show, Mika Brzezinski, opened the peak hour with a long peroration about how the President was an inveterate liar. There was no attempt to report facts. It was an
entirely one-sided monologue. So I switched channels and turned over to CNN, and they had as their lead item a down-the-line interview with the Rabbi from the Pittsburgh synagogue.
In those circumstances I play a stupid game as a former news anchor – and try to second guess or imagine what my first question would be. It was obvious, to me. It would have been a version of how are you doing/how is the community coping/has the reality sunk in? Not very original – but you just want to open up the conversation. Instead, that morning the news presenter started with ‘Who do you blame?’ The obvious riposte to that is ‘the gunman’. But that’s not what lay behind the question. That wasn’t the headline the CNN guy was after – he wanted the rabbi to blame the President; to say that his divisive rhetoric had brought this surge in hate crimes. It was the tenor of all discussion throughout the day on CNN.
Did the President have the right to feel that he wasn’t getting a fair shake in the wake of this? Probably. And then came the midterms themselves and, the day afterwards, another extraordinary presidential news conference. But before we come to that, let me just deal with something terribly prosaic: how journalists like me are able to enter the White House.
I still find it amazing that we have such access to the centre of power. Actually, access is the wrong word; maybe proximity is better. You can’t just wander into the Oval Office, but you are free to open the blue sliding door that separates the Briefing Room from the White House proper to speak to the team in ‘lower press’ – and it’s amazing who you can bump into. I spent a decade working in the lobby at Westminster, and it would be just unthinkable to be able to wander in and out of the famous black door at 10 Downing Street with impunity.