Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  She wasn’t the one saying that major media organizations were “fake news.” She wasn’t out there talking about the “dishonest media.” She wasn’t the person who had called the press the “opposition party.” That was all Trump and Bannon. But she took the heat.

  Her colleagues egged her on, saying, “You do things nobody else can do, Kellyanne; you have nerves of steel.” She knew that in Washington people built you up only to tear you down later. She also knew that she was in the record books as the first woman to run a winning presidential campaign. What were they going to do, add an asterisk that said “Bowling Green massacre”?

  Conway believed the usual media double standard against conservatives was greatly magnified in the case of Trump, and that a routine misstatement for someone else would be made into a huge controversy for her because he was her boss. She had dismissed advice to wait on joining the administration, to cash in on lucrative offers and then ride to the rescue after the inevitable screwups. Kellyanne felt she had a duty to be there on day one. And now she was paying the price.

  CHAPTER 10

  TRUMP TARGETS MEDIA “ENEMIES”

  Donald Trump was supposed to be preparing a speech for the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland, but he spent the morning telling Steve Bannon how mad he was at the press. The president grew more agitated as he spoke with Bannon and others on that morning. The press, he said, was fundamentally dishonest, and the New York Times was “evil.”

  Bannon reinforced Trump’s darkest feelings toward the news business. The media have complete contempt for you, he would say; they want to destroy you, delegitimize you, and overturn the election.

  Bannon knew that Trump was more ambivalent about the press than he let on. Trump was an optimist and a dealmaker. He liked many reporters; he wanted to work with them; he thought he could win them over.

  Bannon was unburdened by such thoughts. He had wanted to kick the reporters out of the White House and exile them to the Old Executive Office Building. He thought it was patently absurd that they could walk in and out of a building loaded with classified material. He joked that he’d rather see them on the other side of a wire fence.

  The day before Trump’s speech, Bannon, in a rare public appearance, told the CPAC audience that the “corporatist” media, the “globalist” media, were opposed to Trump’s nationalist revolution. CNN, MSNBC, the broadcast networks, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, in his view, all represented the Party of Davos, the internationalist, pro-immigration consensus that included the Republican establishment. The Democrats were a shattered, broken, regional party with enclaves in New York and San Francisco, the Hamptons and Hollywood. The real enemy were the media.

  Bannon fumed about the coverage of immigration issues. Trump was committed to enforcing existing law and reinforcing America’s borders, but the media treated his plans as draconian, even barbaric. There were always stories on families being disrupted and small children suffering.

  Steve Bannon felt that his influence on the president was vastly overstated. He wasn’t privately pulling Trump’s strings. The president was a newcomer on some social conservative issues, but he had been an economic nationalist, a believer in national sovereignty, and a foreign policy skeptic for more than two decades.

  Bannon told the president that the press would never give him credit for these ideas. Media people were history and English majors, they weren’t wealthy, and they could not accept that Trump, a Wharton School graduate, was smarter than they were.

  Bannon believed Clausewitz was right: War is politics by other means. Bannon made his office a war room. He used a standup desk and had Trump’s agenda scribbled on a large whiteboard nearby.

  Bannon didn’t care how the media blackened his reputation. They were trying to make him into Svengali or Rasputin. He wore their hate as a badge of honor. He dismissed media reports about his feuds with Reince Priebus and others as ill-informed gossip. And he believed the more Trump’s agenda succeeded, the worse his media coverage would be.

  As Bannon and Trump groused about the press that morning, the president got fired up. They talked about adding a couple of lines to the CPAC speech. But when the moment came, Trump did more than that. He delivered the most lacerating attack on the media by any president in history. There was no script. No one on his staff knew what was coming. Trump just riffed for twelve long minutes.

  He said much of the news was “fake, phony, fake.” He said those outlets were “the enemy of the American people.” He said journalists “shouldn’t be allowed to use anonymous sources.” He cited one story that said “‘nine people have confirmed.’ There’s no nine people. I don’t believe there were one or two people.” That was the Washington Post piece on Mike Flynn—which was so on the money that Trump fired Flynn.

  Bannon was pumped up about the speech. His only regret was that the self-referential media focused on Trump’s criticism of them rather than on the president’s conservative agenda. Trump of course knew exactly what he was doing and that journalists would devour his antimedia diatribe, enabling him to dominate the headlines.

  Later that day, Spicer, not wanting to compete with the president for air time, dropped his usual televised briefing in favor of an off-camera session in his office. But he made a major misstep.

  In making up the invite list, he invited the press pool, which would distribute the comments to their colleagues. But he added reporters from Breitbart and the conservative-leaning Washington Times and One America News, while leaving off reporters from CNN, Politico, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, and other outlets.

  Spicer belatedly realized that coming just hours after Trump’s “enemy of the people” attack, it looked like retaliation against the administration’s least favorite media outlets. The press was in high dudgeon. The AP and Time boycotted the briefing in solidarity with the excluded reporters. Jake Tapper, on CNN, called the move “un-American.” Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron said it was “appalling.”

  Lost in the uproar was that Spicer had also added CBS and NBC to the session. The exclusion of CNN and the others was essentially a coincidence once the list had filled up. He wasn’t trying to send a message, hadn’t checked with the president, and didn’t explain himself very well, but his miscue got wall-to-wall coverage and wound up bumping Trump’s speech from the cable news cycle.

  Spicer was disgusted with the accusatory coverage and thought the New York Times and the rest of the liberal media were whiners with a sense of entitlement that he found mind-blowing.

  The pressure was getting to him at times. Spicer seemed constantly agitated. He sometimes yelled at his staff. He picked fights with journalists on Twitter. After two Times reporters described him in a piece as “New England-born,” Spicer, who grew up in Rhode Island but was born elsewhere, tweeted that they “can’t even get where I was born right and failed to ask.” One of them, Glenn Thrush, shot back that he had sent the press secretary two emails with no response: “Did u get them, Sean?” Spicer wouldn’t let up, saying the birthplace question was not in the email: “More excuses for why you get it wrong.”

  More troubling was Spicer’s decision to launch a one-man leak investigation. He called together ten staffers who had been in a meeting where information had leaked and asked for their government-issued phones. One by one, they handed them over. White House lawyers were there to supervise the process. Spicer said that message-encryption apps like Confide were not allowed. He also asked for their personal phones and said he would check on whether certain numbers had been called. And, of course, insiders quickly leaked that story.

  Spicer’s surprise confrontation displayed a striking lack of trust in in his staff, but also a way to show his boss he was serious about stopping leaks.

  Trump, however, did not back him up. While praising Sean as a “fine human being,” he told Fox: “I would have done it differently. I would have gone one-on-one with different peo
ple.” It was hardly a vote of confidence.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE WAR OVER WIRETAPPING

  Kellyanne Conway woke up on Saturday morning, March 4, and found out, like the rest of the world, that Donald Trump was making an explosive charge with absolutely no evidence.

  The president of the United States had gone on Twitter to accuse the former president of the United States of wiretapping him during the campaign. He had charged that Barack Obama was engaged in “McCarthyism,” was using “Nixon/Watergate” tactics, and that he was a “bad (or sick) guy.”

  It was the most self-destructive act of his young presidency. None of his aides knew it was coming. This was the height of defiance disorder.

  Sean Spicer, getting the kids out of bed in his Alexandria, Virginia, home, was also blindsided and hopped on the phone. Nobody in the White House knew quite what to do.

  The president called Reince Priebus at his Alexandria home.

  “Did you like my tweet?” he asked.

  “What tweet?” Priebus replied.

  “About the wiretap. I’ve been wiretapped.” Priebus was frantically searching his phone for Trump’s Twitter feed. While they were talking, the phone exploded with emails and texts. Priebus knew the staff would have to fall into line to prove the tweet correct, the opposite of the usual process of vetting proposed pronouncements. Once the president had committed to 140 characters, he was not going to back off.

  Conway decided that this time she would just say no. She canceled a planned television appearance. She was not going to put herself out there and defend the president without any facts. She would not be the lightning rod on this story. She was done with that.

  Kellyanne called Trump at Mar-a-Lago that morning, but he had already left for the golf course.

  Trump was reacting to right-wing media reports without any attempt to determine the facts. A staffer had given him a Breitbart article, recounting a monologue by conservative radio host Mark Levin on how the Obama administration might have conducted surveillance at Trump Tower. There were references to past newspaper reports that the FBI, as part of its Russia probe, had asked a special national security court for permission to investigate a Trump company server, but it was all very murky. Yet Trump simply stated it as fact.

  The problem was there was not a shred of evidence to support his stunning charge that his predecessor had committed a felony. This wasn’t an exaggeration or a vague declaration. But Trump, who once told his staff that “I hate backing down,” wouldn’t budge.

  As president, he could have called the FBI or CIA and demanded the information. But instead he indulged his itchy Twitter finger. Trump had always been drawn to conspiracy theories, most notably the one that launched his political career, the bogus birtherism charge against Barack Obama. But now these musings had international repercussions.

  In some ways he had yet to grasp his own power. After four hours on the links, still filled with anger, Trump asked a friend if the tweets were having an impact: “Are they talking about it? Is it out there? I’m hoping it’s the lead.” He had no idea of the media furor he had caused. And he had no doubt that his gut was correct.

  “This will be investigated,” Trump said. “It will all come out. I will be proven right.”

  For days, the president had been furious with his attorney general. Jeff Sessions had been an early supporter of the Trump campaign and played a crucial role in the transition, so he recused himself from any investigation of Trump associates and their contacts with Russia—a recusal that Trump thought entirely unnecessary. He was angry at the staff as well. Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon met with the president in the Oval Office, along with Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, and Ivanka.

  “Why would he capitulate like that?” Trump demanded.

  When he unloaded on his White House counsel, Don McGahn, Bannon grew animated and started pointing his finger at Trump.

  Bannon told the president that no one—not Sessions or Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie—could have been confirmed as attorney general unless they promised to bow out of the Russia probe. Chuck Grassley’s Senate Judiciary Committee had made that clear, especially given Sessions’s own contacts with Russians during the campaign.

  But Trump berated Sessions, calling him an idiot and saying he should resign. The president insisted Sessions had panicked and screwed up.

  “That’s not what happened,” Bannon said. “We talked about it with them. He wouldn’t have been your attorney general otherwise.”

  “Well, you should have told me that,” Trump said.

  “We did tell you that,” Bannon shot back.

  The president, who nonetheless rejected Sessions’s resignation letter, was especially livid that the media’s endless chatter about Sessions’s recusal had overshadowed the favorable coverage of his first address to a joint session of Congress. He had been praised for delivering a substantive and unifying speech. A day later, that story had vanished.

  This place is a mess, Trump declared.

  Among the messes were an endless stream of hostile or gossipy press reports based on White House leaks.

  Priebus, for instance, had to dismiss what he considered a silly rumor that Trump ordered him not to attend an RNC donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago. Priebus and Bannon told reporters, off the record, that Trump wasn’t mad at them and hadn’t kicked them off Air Force One, they had just stayed behind to work.

  Conway had missed the meeting in the Oval Office—instead attending a health care strategy session with Hope Hicks—but accounts of Trump’s tantrum quickly leaked to the press.

  Conway told Priebus sardonically, “Well, we know Hope and I aren’t the leakers.” She was distressed by reports that Trump had sworn at his staff: “You’d better clean this up,” she told Reince. “They said he used profanity and he did not.”

  Meanwhile, the president spoke by phone with Newt Gingrich and said how glad he was to have unloaded on Obama through Twitter. He said he fully grasped that he was in a war with the Washington Post and New York Times. Gingrich told Trump that at least 95 percent of donations from federal employees had gone to Hillary Clinton; the bureaucracy was full of leakers, he said, and they are not for you.

  Kellyanne needed answers on how to respond to questions about Trump’s tweeted Obama wiretapping allegations. She was thinking of possible on-air defenses as she worked out on a treadmill. She finally reached the president late Saturday afternoon, but there was no consensus on how to respond, so she abruptly canceled a scheduled interview with Fox’s Jeanine Pirro. Conway didn’t want her information to be false or wrong or incomplete or to be a replay of the Mike Flynn fiasco, where she declared on air the president’s “full confidence” in the general hours before he was fired.

  The next morning, minutes before the Sunday shows aired, the president had Spicer put out a statement urging Congress to investigate the “very troubling” allegations and saying the White House would have no further comment until then. They were trying to tamp down the wildfire that the boss had started.

  Now that she had some marching orders, Conway agreed to tape a segment with Jeanine Pirro. She played her weak hand as best she could.

  Did Trump know for sure he had been tapped? “He may.” The president sees “different intelligence than everyone else,” Conway said, and “there were politically motivated stories and investigations all through the campaign season, and those come from credible news sources, and the president wants to get to the bottom of it. What is everyone afraid of?”

  What she didn’t say was that the allegation was true or that she believed it to be true.

  That was fortunate for her, because that afternoon sources leaked word to the New York Times that FBI Director James Comey wanted the Justice Department to issue a statement saying there was no truth to the wiretapping allegation—essentially calling the president a liar.

  Spicer answered reporters’ questions with great caution, as Conway had. “I think the president’s tweets speak for t
hemselves,” he said. When asked if the administration had intelligence reports to confirm these allegations, Spicer replied that the answer to that question was “above my pay grade.” He got hammered nonetheless, with Chris Matthews branding him “Baghdad Bob,” after Saddam Hussein’s famous lying information minister.

  This controversy was different from Trump’s other Twitter eruptions, because the media were stunned that a sitting president would hurl such an unsubstantiated charge at a former president. And the story was even bigger than that: the nation’s intelligence services appeared to be leaking against the president, and congressional intelligence panels were gearing up to investigate.

  Trump’s closest aides knew he had done himself long-term damage. Pundits on the right as well as the left were questioning his mental stability. It was the Lewandowski theory on steroids: Trump had been confined, sticking to the script of his speech to Congress, and hadn’t been allowed to break free. When he did, all hell broke loose.

  Despite the storm, Conway didn’t believe this was the apocalypse depicted by the media. People didn’t focus on every jot and tittle of these convoluted stories, they saw the big picture. They were more likely to have watched a clip of Trump’s speech to Congress than to be closely following the Sessions controversy.

  The press was treating Kellyanne like a piñata. A harmless picture of a shoeless Conway in the Oval Office, with her legs tucked under her on the couch, went viral and brought her all kinds of abuse, accusing her of everything from flouting protocol to being disrespectful of minorities (because she was taking pictures of visiting officials from historically black colleges). Trump hated the image, but the media could not get enough of it. A Democratic congressman, Cedric Richmond, even joked that she “looked kind of familiar” on her knees and referred to what happened in “the ’90s” with Monica Lewinsky. He eventually apologized.

  The media portrayed a tempestuous administration that could do very little right, which was a major source of embarrassment to Trump and his family. Virtually everything seemed to leak. Even Reince Priebus’s walking into a senior staff meeting and giving a little pep talk prompted a wave of bad press.