by Mark Austin
Trump made a calculation. He would try not only to sidetrack the mainstream media, but he would, at every opportunity, seek to discredit it. It is the reason why ‘fake news’ has become his most oft-repeated mantra. And not only in the campaign, but since he entered the White House, too.
Major Garrett, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News, believes Trump is simply exploiting a disillusionment with the traditional media that had set in long before he became president: ‘The mainstream media has had a credibility problem for some time now. Politicians and ordinary people have ceased to believe it in the same way that they used to… Donald Trump is driving that through more powerfully than any other president in recent American history.’
Trump’s weapon of choice is Twitter. He’s good at it, and it has become my morning wake-up call in Washington. You can rely on it. Pretty much every day, at around 7 a.m., the Trump stream of consciousness starts flowing.
He uses Twitter to rage, to vent his obsessions, to proclaim the success of existing policies and to hint at new ones, foreign and domestic, that he may or may not follow through on.
Make no mistake, there is method in the madness. He and his team are clever in the way they use social media. Trump uses it to test an idea, to distract from an issue that is not playing well for him, and to set his own narrative for the news day ahead. And, broadly speaking, it works.
But it only works because the media allows it to. A relatively small number of Americans use Twitter on a regular basis. Therefore, what Trump is actually doing is using his Twitter feed to reach journalists who he knows will relay the Trumpian thought for the day to their readers, viewers or listeners.
And the more inflammatory the thought, the greater the certainty it will dominate the day’s news agenda. Trump is using the news media he so despises, and the media is indulging a president they have contempt for.
The press must take some of the blame here. By allowing themselves to be complicit in this media madness, they are letting Trump off the hook. By lapping up his Twitter pronouncements, they do not expose the President of the United States to any meaningful cross-examination. It is an exchange consisting of bad-tempered contempt and criticism. The Twitter feed is replacing the press conference, and this is bad for journalism and certainly bad for democracy.
The problem is that studiously repeating and amplifying every Trump tweet simply confers more power on him and it allows him to control the news cycle so effortlessly. It is the stuff of the expert PR manipulator, the marketing guru or the persistent sales person and the media is often complicit in his clever use of it.
Donald Trump is by no means the first president to have an adversarial relationship with the media. The difference with Trump is that he seems not to believe in the fundamental role that a free press plays in democracy, and he actually threatens that role by spending a fair proportion of his time working to delegitimize the media.
It is one thing to despise the press. There are many reasons why Trump would want to do that. It has, for one, become unmerciful in its criticism of him. But it is quite another thing to work actively to undermine it to the extent that it is no longer believed.
President Obama often had a tricky relationship with the media, but in his final news conference he said this:
I have enjoyed working with all of you. That does not, of course, mean that I’ve enjoyed every story that you have filed, but that’s the point of this relationship. You’re not supposed to be sycophants, you’re supposed to be sceptics, you’re supposed to ask me tough questions. You’re not supposed to be complimentary, but you’re supposed to cast a critical eye on folks who hold enormous power and make sure that we are accountable to the people who sent us here And you have done that.
And George W. Bush was equally understanding, saying: ‘I consider the media to be indispensable to democracy. We need an independent media to hold people like me to account. Power can be very addictive and it can be corrosive, and it’s important for the media to call to account people who abuse their power.’
Now, compare those quotes to any number of Trump’s tweets on this issue. For instance, this one:
‘The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!’
These are inflammatory words, and I am not sure that Donald Trump realizes the impact of what he tweets. In fact, shortly afterwards, staff at CNN received death threats from a man who said he would come to the CNN HQ and ‘gun’ them all down. The implications of a president demonizing journalists are frightening.
Jeff Flake, a Republican senator, pointed out in a speech from the Senate floor that it was Stalin who first used the phrase ‘enemy of the people’. And there is a serious point to be made here. The president’s ‘fake news’ onslaught is for domestic consumption. But it is also heard around the world, and it will comfort autocrats and dictators who do not tolerate any free speech, criticism or independent media. They will point to the United States, the supposed bulwark of democracy, and say ‘journalists are bad people, untruthful and unreliable. It’s fake news. The president says so.’ How convenient for despots that is.
This is not theoretical, either. Flake made the point that the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad brushed off an Amnesty International report as a forgery. ‘We are living in a fake news era,’ Assad said. The president of the Philippines has also complained of being ‘demonized’ by ‘fake news’; and, said Flake, a state official in Myanmar recently said, ‘There is no such thing as Rohingya. It is fake news,’ referring to the persecuted minority in that country.
And a president – especially one who, on a daily basis, accuses others of dissembling – probably shouldn’t be a habitual purveyor of untruths himself. But that is Trump. All presidents speak untruths at some time or another, I am sure of it. But Trump is of a different order of mendacity. And it eats away at democracy.
As Jeff Flake said: ‘The impulses underlying the dissemination of such untruths are not benign. They have the effect of eroding trust in our vital institutions and conditioning the public to no longer trust them. The destructive effect of this kind of behaviour on our democracy cannot be overstated.’
There are clear signs that Trump’s attacks on the media are playing well with his support base, who have taken to holding aloft ‘Fake News’ placards in front of the cameras at Trump rallies. I saw them myself at an event for the Trump-backed candidate for the Senate, Roy Moore, in Alabama. The rally was addressed by Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, who also picked out certain journalists in the room and ridiculed them in front of his baying followers. It was unsettling and dangerous. Many is the time I have been interviewing Trump supporters around the country, and they precede any comments they make with the accusation that we will misrepresent what they say because we are all ‘fake news’ anyway.
That a hypersensitive American president should seek to diminish and discredit one of the fundamental freedoms enshrined by the nation’s founders is pretty remarkable; but it is utterly astonishing that millions of his conservative supporters across the county are so blithely complicit in and tolerant of such behaviour.
It is possible to see a scenario where if Trump’s presidency starts to look like it is doomed, if his poll numbers plummet further and he finds it even more difficult to get legislation through, he will have a readymade scapegoat… the media.
But the irony in all this is that Trump is, broadly speaking, good for business. Ratings are up across the news networks and 24-hour channels. CNN trumpeted a ‘ratings milestone’ in 2017, earning its highest viewing figures on record; it was also the most-watched year for Fox News, the Trump-supporting network owned by Rupert Murdoch. And MSNBC saw the biggest gains in viewership of all the cable news networks. The New York Times also benefited from its best revenue growth in many years.
The prize in Washington was to get the first interview with President Trump for a British broadcaster. We tried on sev
eral occasions, as I am sure did the BBC and ITN. But the White House never really seemed interested in challenging interviews, and certainly not with non-American networks. In the end – despite months of effort – I was scooped by Piers Morgan. Now that is not a sentence I ever imagined writing and it actually brings me considerable pain to do so. But that is what happened.
A few weeks before heading to the States I was playing golf with Morgan and he said the interview was already in the bag. ‘Not in doubt,’ he said, as I stood hunched over a crucial putt. ‘Only a matter of when.’ It was annoying but Morgan and the president are old friends from when Piers took part in and, inexplicably, won a celebrity version of Trump’s reality TV show, The Apprentice. Piers basically curried favour on Twitter as only he can, and his fawning posts came up trumps, so to speak. I found the grace within me to congratulate him by text. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he replied. ‘I told you I’d get it hahaha. I’ll get the next one too. Just to annoy you.’ Nice. And he quite probably will. There was certainly nothing in the first one to unduly trouble Mr Trump!
The truth is, the Trump train is still intact, still on the tracks and may remain so for some time. A senior British diplomat in Washington is certainly of the opinion that there is an increasingly clear route to two terms of Trump: ‘If the economy keeps roaring along and the Democrats don’t get their act together, it is more likely than not that this Trump presidency could last eight years,’ he told me. ‘I think we need to be planning for that.’
The point is this… Over the first year, there has been media focus on the president’s temperament, judgement and character, all of which do not make him an ideal president. But that is an incomplete picture of the Trump presidency, and it is in some ways a distraction from what he is getting done. It is unfair to Trump not to consider his achievements, and they are considerable.
They relate mainly to the economy, which since he has been in office has been firing on all cylinders. Growth is well up on the average for the eight years that Obama was in office. The stock market is coming off record highs, but the economic fundamentals remain very strong and unemployment is down to a sixteen-year low. Manufacturers are more optimistic than they have been for many years. Many big companies, such as Walmart and Apple, are promising more spending and more jobs. Trump is claiming he is already turning America around, and with some justification.
Most economists say that the economic performance during the first year of any presidency is largely down to his predecessor, but Trump should get the credit for good economic news going forward.
And Trump is also desperately trying to keep his promises to his supporters. He had six clear priorities when he was on the campaign trail: he said he would cut taxes, pull out of the Paris climate change accord, try to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), deregulate the government and industry, move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and build the wall on the border with Mexico.
He has done, is doing, or is trying to do all of them. He has also kept his promise about the Supreme Court, putting conservative judges in place, which will have a lasting impact.
Strangely, a booming economy normally translates into good poll numbers. But Trump has a problem here… people don’t seem to credit him. A former Clinton adviser, James Carville, famously coined the phrase, ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ What he meant was that it has always been the state of the economy that ultimately determines the way people vote. In other words, other issues are on the sidelines. When it comes to putting a tick in that box, the overwhelming consideration is the economy.
Trump will worry that the connect between the economy and the presidency seems to have been broken – although his approval ratings are ticking upwards.
And polling numbers are one thing; an actual election is quite another. It may well be that if the economy continues to thrive, that when it actually comes down to it people would be prepared to vote for Trump again in 2020. But Trump being Trump, he even drives his own staff to distraction sometimes.
In a stage-managed opportunity to talk up the impact of his tax reform measures, they sent him to a cylinder factory outside Cincinnati in Ohio. They wrote a speech explaining how many of the workers there had received big bonuses as a result of the corporate tax cuts.
Mid-speech, he broke away from the autocue and started berating Democratic lawmakers who didn’t applaud him during his State of the Union address. He called them ‘treasonous’ and ‘un-American’. It was guaranteed to grab all the headlines, and it did. The exasperation and frustration of his speechwriters can only be imagined.
Trump had figured that calling the Democrats un-American would play well with his support. But Republicans as a whole see the economy as the clincher in the mid-term elections, not Trump’s ‘treason’ comments, which would probably have alienated more people than they won over.
The Trump presidency is proving the most extraordinary of modern times. It is astonishing to watch it unfold first-hand, and I honestly have no idea how or when it will end. There are some here who believe he is doing lasting damage to some areas of government, the environment and the judicial system. Elizabeth Drew, the veteran observer of the Washington scene, says: ‘Nixon was bad, but this guy is so corrupt and greedy and oblivious to the norms of democratic governing that the Trump/Russia scandal could be more threatening than Watergate.’
Having lived in America for a year now, it seems to me this country is not a happy place. Hopelessly divided, angry, insular, polarized, unequal and, above all, fearful. There are many representations of the angst and the unhappiness in American society. The horrific and almost weekly mass shootings in schools and churches, the opioid crisis, the racial tensions in part caused by the police shootings of unarmed black men, the continuing allegations of sexual harassment and the unfolding narrative of powerful men and predatory behaviour, the growing income inequality, and the sense of pessimism that pervades many working-class areas where jobs have been lost and hope has evaporated.
President Obama must take at least some of the blame. Ten years ago he came into office offering such hope and optimism despite the global economic crisis. I was in the United States at the time and there was joy among the centre and left, who genuinely felt that America was on the verge of something special. He was a popular president who managed the recession with skill, but his rhetoric scaled much greater heights than his actual achievements, and he battled with Congress and struggled to get things done.
And then came Mr Trump. Maybe we should think of him as a symptom rather than a cause. Maybe we should view Trump as the political manifestation of the angst that prevailed and still prevails here. For it is difficult to believe that, in any other election in modern times, Trump could have won the nomination of the Republican Party, let alone the presidency. A non-politician who has never served in the military, he would have had little chance. He also benefited from a particularly poor performance from his Democrat opponent, Hillary Clinton.
So, unlikely as it may have been, this is his time. He has real populist appeal just when America’s broader mindset is disillusionment with mainstream and establishment politicians. And he has a chance to put in place policies that could lift many of his blue-collar supporters out of their workless despair. He could find ways to do it.
He’s trying to get a massive infrastructure spend through Congress, though his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. He’s also kept a campaign promise to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports. Cheap steel dumped by China has cost thousands of jobs in America.
It may be that his tax cuts will help the process, improve the mood and lift the spirits here. There are signs that they seem to be having the intended effect − they’re boosting corporate earnings, stoking investment, and in some companies, they are trickling down to workers in the form of higher wages. But it does look as if, over the long term, higher earners will proportionally get a bigger tax cut than lower earners, and that will only worsen income equality here.
And this goes to the heart of the problem in America, and of the big challenge that faces President Trump. For a vast number of Americans, the whole idea of rising living standards, which has defined this country for so long, is no longer a real prospect. While 90 per cent of children born in 1940 ended up earning more than their parents, only 40 per cent of those born in 1980 have done so. And expectations are worsening. In a 2016 poll, only 38 per cent of Americans thought their children would be better off than they themselves are.
Now, income inequality has long been tolerated in the US because of the high levels of social mobility. It is the combination that gave rise to the American dream. Yet today the opportunity to live the American dream is much less widespread.
Interestingly, a John Hopkins University study found that poor black and Hispanic people are much more likely than poor white people to report that they live better than their parents did. Low-income whites are seeing the erosion of the American dream.
There are many reasons for that. Technology and automation threw millions out of manufacturing jobs, and many have not retrained or found new work in the service industries. They now exist in decaying towns where depression, drug-taking and suicide are on the increase. The combination of shrinking blue-collar jobs and a readily available supply of drugs such as heroin and fentanyl is a lethal one. In some areas, there has been a significant increase in premature mortality.
Carol Graham, author of Happiness for All?: Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream, says, ‘Desperate people are more likely to die prematurely, but living with a lot of premature death can also erode hope.’ She paints a bleak picture.
And those people who are suffering eroded hope are the very people who Donald Trump has identified and is promising to help. The danger for the president is that by playing to the fears – and, it has to be said, the prejudices of his base – he may simply be contributing to the sense of decay in some parts of America.