Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  Conway was glad that her boss was making the calls. She had been pushing this approach on the president for a long time. The Times and the Post were tone-setters for the news media. No matter how much Trump resented their coverage, he needed to engage them so that they had his version of events.

  Both reporters were TV regulars: Costa was an MSNBC contributor and Haberman a CNN contributor, which meant they would be on the air talking about the calls, amplifying Trump’s message. Haberman had covered Trump as a New York tabloid reporter for years. In 2015, Trump had even offered to let her break the story that he was running for president, but she refused, viewing it as another head fake. Their relationship was often contentious. Trump had called Haberman “third-rate” and “totally in the Hillary circle of bias,” but respected her and sometimes called to thank her for her reporting.

  Reaching out to the press, however, did not stop the flood of negative stories about the administration, many of them related to Trump’s tweets, especially his wiretapping charge. The Wall Street Journal editorial page decried “the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods.…Yet the president clings to his assertion like a drunk to an empty gin bottle, rolling out his press spokesman to make more dubious claims.”

  A deluge of leaks followed, with White House officials anonymously savaging each other and assigning blame for the administration’s missteps.

  Politico reporter Tara Palmeri tweeted that a “source close to @POTUS” said he is open to the possibility of replacing Reince Priebus, and “healthcare was the last straw.” The Times said that Mike Pence’s team “has at times questioned whether Mr. Priebus was up to the demands of his job.”

  Priebus thought these stories were ludicrous. The White House had done everything it could to pass an Obamacare repeal bill, but no one could force members of Congress to vote a certain way. If the knives really were out for him, his life would be a lot easier if he wasn’t chief of staff.

  But the most negative leaks were aimed at Jared Kushner. He and Ivanka had chosen the week of the big health care vote to go skiing in Aspen. That annoyed Trump, but it also annoyed officials who resented that Kushner was getting credit for so many policy initiatives at home and around the world. Here was the biggest legislative showdown of the administration and Jared was AWOL. It underlined his critics’ suspicions that he wasn’t a team player, but merely took credit where he could, and deflected blame from himself when the administration failed. Jared was “a shrewd self-promoter,” Trump aides told Politico, shrewd at grabbing credit and sidestepping blame without being quoted by reporters.

  Trump had repeatedly questioned with his staff whether Jared and Ivanka should be in the West Wing. When he was frustrated with them, he told them to their face. Back during the transition, Trump had warned them that life in the White House would not be good for them and perhaps they shouldn’t come. More recently he suggested in front of others, in a sympathetic tone, that maybe this wasn’t a good fit. Now the feeling was they should have known they were going to get skewered.

  He wasn’t about to dismiss his family members, but he made other staff changes, accepting the resignations of spokesman Boris Epshteyn and Priebus’s deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh.

  This shakeup, minor as it might have seemed, only deepened the sense of an administration in turmoil—and the journalistic sharks smelled blood in the water. CNN ran the headline, “Trump’s Problem with the Truth.” The first in a series of Los Angeles Times editorials was titled “Our Dishonest President,” which the paper turned into a book.

  Spicer complained that reporters were nitpicking and obsessed with “process” rather than substance, though they viewed themselves as the administration’s fact-checkers.

  Then, however, came a story that much of the press barely seemed interested in fact-checking.

  When Fox News and Bloomberg News reported that Susan Rice, Obama’s national security adviser, had “unmasked” Trump and his aides when they were incidentally picked up on foreign intercepts, much of the press was dismissive. Rice, while insisting she had no political motive, admitted the practice to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell, despite having falsely told PBS two weeks earlier that she knew nothing about the allegations.

  It wasn’t clear whether Rice had done anything improper, but some journalists had no interest in finding out. On CNN, Don Lemon said he would not “aid and abet the people who were trying to misinform you, the American people, by creating a diversion.” He had less interest in aiding and abetting journalism.

  When Jim Sciutto, CNN’s national security correspondent, denigrated the story as “largely ginned up, partly as a distraction from this larger investigation,” he failed to mention that he had worked for the Obama State Department just four years earlier.

  The president pushed journalists to cover the Rice story. Despite Glenn Thrush’s negative tweets, Trump was happy to chat with him and Maggie Haberman in the Oval Office. He insisted that Rice might have committed a crime—an extraordinary statement about a former official under investigation—and he chided their newspaper.

  “I think it’s a massive, massive story,” he said. “All over the world, I mean other than the New York Times.”

  “We’ve written about it twice,” Haberman said. In fact, her paper, like many others, had greatly played down the Rice allegations.

  Trump wouldn’t let go: “I mean, I frankly think the Times is missing a big thing by not writing it because you’re missing out on the biggest story there is.”

  Later, Trump made a joke about NBC’s Andrea Mitchell being “Hillary Clinton’s PR person,” adding, “Course, you’ve been accused of that also.”

  “Mostly by you,” said Haberman.

  Trump never let up. He was the nation’s most relentless media critic.

  CHAPTER 13

  ANSWERING WITH AIRSTRIKES

  The press was increasingly portraying the president as a bumbling reactionary on domestic policy and as dangerously ignorant on foreign policy.

  But on the night of April 7, 2017, the mainstream media suddenly went into a collective swoon over Donald Trump. He had ordered the firing of fifty-nine Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian air base, in retaliation for Syria’s using chemical weapons in an attack against civilians. Many of Trump’s fiercest critics gave him the equivalent of a standing ovation.

  They praised Trump for doing what Barack Obama had failed to do in 2013, when he famously drew a red line against any Syrian chemical weapons attack, and then backed away from military action after Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad used sarin gas against civilians in Damascus.

  “Donald Trump has restored the credibility of American power,” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius declared on Morning Joe.

  Even CNN host Fareed Zakaria—who detested Trump and twice called him a “bullshitter” on the air—was impressed. With that attack, he said, “Donald Trump became president.”

  The press loves denouncing politicians as flip-floppers, suggesting that they bend with the wind, but the dirty little secret is that journalists care far less about flip-flopping if you flip in their direction, and on some foreign policy issues Trump had done just that. During the campaign, for instance, Trump said he would authorize the use of torture against terrorists. But after hiring General Mattis as Defense secretary, he ceded the decision to his Pentagon chief, who opposed torture as ineffective.

  The president had also mused about reviewing the One-China policy that denied recognition to Taiwan, which the Communist mainland viewed as a breakaway province. He had shattered protocol by accepting a post-election call from the leader of Taiwan. But by the time he arranged a call with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump had to put out a statement reaffirming the One-China approach. And when he wanted Xi’s help to rein in North Korea, he quietly dropped his insistence that China be punished for manipulating its currency, which Chin
a had quietly stopped doing anyway.

  The media could have said that Trump was “growing” or “evolving” in office—as happened when Obama came out for gay marriage—but aside from cheering the attack on Syria, they continued to lay into him.

  And at certain times Trump was not “evolving,” but just working the angles. In a background briefing with network anchors before he addressed Congress, the president suddenly opined that he would be open to a bill that provided a path to legalization, and perhaps even citizenship, for many illegal immigrants. “There’s got to be a coming together,” Trump said, a compromise that would satisfy both the “far left” and “far right.” Sean Spicer quickly interrupted, saying they didn’t want to put that on background and allow the networks to report it. But Trump agreed before the anchors left that they could use the information on background. In his hip-shooting way, he had just contradicted a year and a half of campaign rhetoric without a firm idea of what the legislation would look like. But whether it was a moment of candor or a plan to buy a few hours of favorable coverage, Trump didn’t include the idea in his Hill speech and it quickly faded.

  The media accused Trump of being erratic, and Trump did have a tendency to revise his answers. But he sometimes did so with a politically savvy element of guile. For example, Trump had long argued that the North American Free Trade Agreement was a bad deal for America. In an orchestrated leak in late April, two unnamed White House officials told CNN and Politico that Trump was considering an immediate executive order to withdraw from NAFTA.

  Within hours, Canada’s Justin Trudeau and Mexico’s Enrique Peña Nieto had placed pleading calls to the White House.

  The next morning, Trump told reporters he had decided against terminating NAFTA and would renegotiate the deal instead—though he reserved the right to pull the plug.

  Trump was acting like a New York real estate guy—making unrealistic demands, pulling back, issuing threats, making the other side think you might do something crazy—all in the service of gaining negotiating leverage.

  The same pattern emerged on North Korea. When rogue dictator Kim Jong Un stepped up his testing of nuclear weapons, Trump ridiculed and threatened him, prompting a New York Times news story to admonish: “The biggest risk, critics say, is that Mr. Trump will talk himself into a war.” When Trump later said he’d be honored to meet Kim under the right circumstances, his deputies thought he was masterfully keeping the young leader off balance.

  The media were accustomed to covering presidents whose language was carefully calibrated, whose every utterance was vetted by the bureaucracy. Trump’s endless talkathon, his habit of making policy on the fly, made for good copy but it also left Washington reporters appalled, as they held him to a standard he had no intention of observing.

  More than most presidents, Trump faced a hostile bureaucracy and previous administration holdovers who wanted to undermine their new boss. Nowhere was that more evident than in Trump’s early round of calls with foreign leaders.

  Sources told the Washington Post, for instance, that Trump had scolded Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee agreement he had negotiated with President Obama. Of Trump’s four conversations with world leaders that day, “this was the worst call by far.”

  When Trump spoke to Mexican President Peña Nieto, an obviously well-placed official gave a transcript to the Associated Press. The wire service reported that Trump had warned he was ready to send U.S. troops to stop “bad hombres down there” unless the Mexican president did more to control them.

  The pattern continued when the president had a call with Vladimir Putin. In another leak, Reuters reported that when the talk turned to the New START nuclear treaty between the two countries, Trump paused to ask his aides what the agreement was.

  These leaks were nothing short of extraordinary. The president was unable to conduct confidential conversations with other heads of state without anonymous dissidents spilling the beans to the press. And news organizations were happy to publish the stories that, invariably, depicted Trump as a hothead who was smashing china on the world stage.

  Sean Spicer had an uncanny knack for getting bad press.

  But he took that to a new level behind the podium on April 11, when Spicer was explaining Trump’s airstrikes against Syria.

  “We didn’t use chemical weapons in World War II,” he began. “You know, you had a—someone who is as despicable as Hitler who didn’t even sink to the—to the—to using chemical weapons.”

  To historians it is common knowledge that Hitler did not use battlefield chemical weapons, which were banned after World War I. But as a spokesman, not a historian, Spicer should have known he was treading down a dangerous path.

  An ABC correspondent, Cecilia Vega, saw that Spicer’s comment was blowing up on Twitter, so she repeated Spicer’s answer and gave him a chance to clarify.

  “I think when you come to sarin gas, there was no—he was not using the gas on his own people the same way that Assad is doing,” Spicer said. “I mean, there was clearly, I understand your point.…I appreciate that.…[H]e brought them into the Holocaust centers, I understand that. But I’m saying, in the way that Assad used them where he went into towns, dropped them down to innocent, into the middle of town.…So, the use of it…I appreciate the clarification. That was not the intent.”

  Spicer’s comments were a media disaster. After the briefing, the press secretary plunged into damage control mode. He told Trump how he planned to fix things, and the president was understanding. “I knew exactly what you were trying to say. I know you didn’t mean it,” Trump said.

  Spicer put out two clarifications. When that didn’t work, he apologized in successive interviews on the lawn with CNN, Fox, and MSNBC. And at a forum the next day, he was completely contrite.

  Spicer said he had “screwed up.” His mistake was “inexcusable and reprehensible.” What made the controversy worse was that it had happened during Passover. And, he admitted, he had let the president down. Trump was asked about it, of course, and said that Spicer had made a mistake.

  But as terribly as Spicer had blundered, the media reaction in some quarters was just as bad. It might be predictable that Nancy Pelosi called on him to resign. But some critics online called him a Holocaust denier. Everyone knew what Spicer had clumsily tried to say, that even Hitler hadn’t used chemical weapons on the battlefield. Chris Matthews had made the same point four years earlier. The attempt to paint the president’s spokesman as anti-Semitic, with no evidence, was even more pathetic than Spicer’s stumbling performance at the podium.

  When the Tea Party movement arose during the Obama administration, some in the media depicted its members as right-wing zealots infused by borderline racism.

  Taunting Trump, however, was cool, and the media, as cultural arbiters, adored those who were placed on the hip side of history—especially if they came out as part of the anti-Trump “resistance.”

  One of them was Dan Rather.

  The former CBS anchor was now eighty-five, decades beyond his heyday. He had enjoyed a storied career as a newsman, but had also been widely criticized for his liberal leanings, especially after he made unsubstantiated charges in 2004 that George W. Bush had gone AWOL during his days in the National Guard, a story that collapsed when a key source admitted to lying and experts concluded that the documents in question were forgeries. Rather apologized for the story, but later insisted it was true and unsuccessfully sued CBS for firing him. He wound up with a little-noticed show on the AXS cable station.

  But now, as Politico put it, Rather was enjoying “an unexpected, career-redefining resurrection aided by Trump’s shocking ascent.” He was “one of the leading voices of the Trump resistance,” with a weekly Sirius XM show and a popular Facebook page, which he used to describe Trump as “unsettling and unstable and incompetent and erratic and gloating and swaggering and petulant and ill-informed.”

  Rather was “alarmed” at the “potential peril” of a T
rump presidency, and weeks after the inauguration declared that “this is an emergency.” Rather told Politico that he had been thinking a lot about Adolf Hitler: “And I’m not comparing Trump to Hitler, but…”

  This was the nature of his comeback.

  Ironically, Rather’s eventual successor as CBS anchor, Scott Pelley, began using his newscast to score anti-Trump points. And that earned him praise from Margaret Sullivan in her Washington Post media column.

  Pelley was doing what evening news anchors generally avoid, and that was “abandoning careful neutrality in favor of pointed truth-telling,” she wrote. Think about that: neutrality was out. Opinion, dressed up as “truth-telling,” was now in on the program once anchored by Walter Cronkite.

  Pelley was more “dogged” and “blunter” than NBC’s Lester Holt or ABC’s David Muir, talking about Trump’s “boasting and tendency to believe conspiracy theories.”

  Pelley would begin the CBS Evening News this way: “It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality.” He would speak of Trump having “another Twitter tantrum” or say that “the president’s real troubles today were not with the media, but with the facts.” He would denigrate “the president’s fictitious claims, whether imaginary or fabricated.”

  Sometimes Pelley would call out presidential statements offered without evidence, but everyone in the business could see that he was using loaded language. Pelley dismissed Kellyanne Conway as a “fearless fabulist.” All this earned him praise from Washington’s top newspaper.

  The Washington Post also lionized Keith Olbermann, once a powerful liberal voice on MSNBC, who had left six years earlier in a bitter dispute with his bosses. He was later fired by Current TV, leading to litigation, and subsequently laid off by ESPN. So Olbermann took his fiery diatribes to a low-production web series, sponsored by GQ magazine, to fulminate against Trump. He called his online show The Resistance.