Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  And he would rail away: “Donald Trump has branded himself a traitor to everything this country has stood for. We will remove him.”

  And: “I speak for those unlike Trump, unlike the sycophants who surround him, unlike the hate-filled souls and the conscious optional bigots who applaud him, unlike the Russian puppeteers who may be manipulating him.”

  But such overheated rhetoric, calling the president a traitor, drew no disapproval from the Washington Post. Instead, the paper ran this laudatory headline: “Have Liberals Found Their Combative New Leader in…Keith Olbermann?”

  Or perhaps their new leader was Stephen Colbert, who was mired in last place at CBS’s Late Show until he started a nightly barrage against the new president, catapulting himself into first place. This brought a rave review from the New York Times: “Mr. Colbert has benefited from his decidedly anti-Trump point of view.” And while there were other factors, “Mr. Trump’s victory appears to have single-handedly turned the late-night comedy race upside down” based on Colbert’s anti-Trump mockery.

  But when it came to slamming Trump, fame was not a prerequisite. In what seemed like a spate of disconnected feature stories, newspapers found a subtle way of denigrating Trump by elevating those who found him odious. The stories almost never questioned whether they were going too far; they were cast as men and women of conscience, rallying behind a righteous cause.

  The Washington Post did a whole spread on an obscure Democratic congressman from California, just for trolling the president online: “Ted Lieu is Out-Tweeting Trump, And It’s Making Him a Political Star.”

  The Post even profiled a high school teacher who took on, yes, the White House Easter Egg Roll by investing $5,000 to make protest eggs, telling the paper: “Donald Trump has broken that trust with families and children.”

  Walter Shaub was an Obama appointee running the little-known Office of Government Ethics, and because he challenged the White House on a few conflict-of-interest matters, some Washington Post puffery was inevitable: “How the U.S. Ethics Chief Took On Trump and Became a Reluctant Washington Hero.” To make sure we knew he was a hero, Shaub was quoted as saying, “I feel like I’m working for the good guys.” (He soon resigned, saying the White House was close to an ethical laughingstock.)

  The New York Times lavished ink on poets who, according to the headline, “Rage Against the Right.” These included Jane Hirshfield, who wrote verse on “climate change denial” and Trump’s “dismantling of environmental regulations,” and Danez Smith, whose poem mocked Trump and said “you’re dead, America.”

  A Washington Post piece on how teen magazines were becoming more serious led off, naturally, with a Teen Vogue essay titled “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.”

  Sometimes a gratuitous slap would be inserted into a completely unrelated story. A New York Times book review that began with Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize for literature suggested that “this is a spiritual disaster on par with Donald J. Trump’s election.” The animus was blowing in the wind.

  The Times published a column by Annie Pfeifer titled “Help! My 3-Year-Old Is Obsessed with Trump.” This was a crisis because her daughter attended the kind of liberal New York school “that made counseling available” after the election. “Parents stood together comforting one another on Nov. 9 in an act of collective mourning that I hadn’t seen since Sept. 11.” Of course.

  But perhaps the most forehead-smacking piece in the Washington Post began with a Passover Seder held by a woman whose guests jettisoned the usual reading of the ten plagues—blood, frogs, lice, and so on—for “Neo-Nazis,” “Fake news,” “Freedom Caucus,” “The American Health Care Act,” and other purported plagues from the Trump administration.

  This was said to be a trend among Jews. “For some,” the paper intoned, “the big question has become: Is it right to cast the president of the United States as the villainous pharaoh?”

  There was no hint that this might be an inappropriate question, to liken an American president to the Egyptian ruler who enslaved the Jews. Not even Passover was safe from the anti-Trump virus.

  Imagine for a moment that any of these stories and columns had been written during the last administration. Imagine anchors, comedians, has-beens, and ordinary folks drawing a gusher of positive press for calling Barack Obama a traitor, a liar, a fabricator, and someone reminiscent of Hitler and Pharaoh, and chastising him for presiding over an Easter egg hunt. Those critics would have been diagnosed with Obama Derangement Syndrome. But in the Trump era, it was a sure-fire ticket to good press.

  CHAPTER 14

  WHITE HOUSE GAME OF THRONES

  Most journalists thought Steve Bannon was a dangerous guy, and when he suffered a setback, they practically broke into cheers.

  It began with a bureaucratic move. Trump had been annoyed when Bannon maneuvered himself onto the National Security Council, and the president allowed Mike Flynn’s successor, H. R. McMaster, to remove him, triggering a flood of headlines about how Bannon had been demoted or diminished.

  The new narrative, propelled by a gusher of leaks, had Bannon losing power to Jared Kushner, who seemed to be exerting his influence over just about everyone in the White House and several Cabinet departments as well. Behind the scenes, the seemingly invincible Bannon had grown increasingly frustrated, even openly musing about quitting. Bannon’s spin, that he went to the NSC temporarily to keep an eye on Flynn, was hardly convincing.

  By publicly declaring that he hated the press, by branding journalists as the “opposition party,” Bannon had started a battle that they were now happy to fight. And his rivals in the White House moved quickly to supply the ammunition.

  Suddenly there were stories about how the president was angry at Bannon for the rushing of the botched travel ban, and displeased with him for threatening Freedom Caucus members during the failed health care negotiations.

  The Daily Beast said Bannon had referred to Kushner as a “globalist” and a “cuck”—short for “cuckservative,” or a right-winger who sells out. The Washington Post said the “Bannonites” were losing ground to the centrist faction of New York financiers led by Kushner. Politico said Kushner had complained about Bannon’s performance in hours of conversations with people inside and outside the White House. The New York Times said Bannon told Jared that they couldn’t find “common ground” because “you’re a Democrat.”

  That last comment was untrue, and other anecdotes were exaggerated, but Bannon didn’t care. Journalists should take shots at him, he felt, because he was opposed to everything they stood for. The press was the propaganda arm of the status quo, which he was determined to overturn. You wouldn’t hear him whining about the coverage. Bannon thought these Game of Thrones stories were the sort of unadulterated gossip that White House correspondents liked, because they weren’t terribly bright, had no grasp of history, and were functioning more like bloggers, aiming for quick hits on MSNBC.

  There were, what, a hundred stories about him in the Washington Post, including one on which books he read? Now the paper was saying he was a “marked man.” It was all so juvenile. Some news outlets routinely referred to him as anti-Semitic. How many people knew he had gone to Auschwitz and Buchenwald and confronted the horror of the Holocaust as part of a film he had produced?

  Of course he was clashing with Jared, who worked in the adjoining suite of offices, but it was about policy, not personality. In Bannon’s view, they actually got along well. He was a firebrand who fought for nationalism, Kushner a soft-spoken guy with a globalist outlook.

  Jared had a very different view of their ongoing battle. He thought it was rooted in personality and that though they agreed on many things, they had different values and different ways of pursuing their goals.

  Kushner had no doubt that Bannon and his allies were planting unfavorable stories about him. These were usually passed to the same half-dozen reporters. Finally, Kushner confronted him.

  There were three options, Jared said.


  Bannon could keep leaking against him and he would do nothing in response. That wasn’t happening.

  Bannon could keep leaking against him and he would retaliate with his own leaks. That wasn’t happening, because it wouldn’t help the president.

  Or Bannon could stop this garbage.

  If not, Kushner indicated, Bannon would be gone.

  Bannon told friends this incident never happened, but there was no question that he was locked in constant political warfare with Jared and his wife Ivanka. Bannon had told Ivanka early in the administration: “My daughter loves me as a dad. You love your dad, I get that. But you’re just another staffer who doesn’t know what you’re doing.” The president’s daughter fought back hard.

  During one Oval Office meeting between the president and his senior staff, Bannon bluntly blamed Ivanka for a leak, and Trump backed him.

  “Baby, I think Steve’s right here,” Trump told her.

  Bannon had, of course engaged in a few strategic leaks of his own. But, in his view, that was nothing compared to the gusher of leaks emanating from the entity he called Javanka.

  The infighting drew so much media attention that Trump told Bannon and Kushner to work things out, or he would do it for them. The situation was simply not sustainable.

  Bannon understood Trump’s frustration, and he didn’t blame the president for getting angry when Time magazine put him on its cover. Bannon had refused to cooperate with the magazine, but Time had taken a black-and-white photo of him that had been shot for Trump’s Person of the Year issue and colorized it in an ominous way for the cover. He felt it made him look like Dr. Evil.

  Some journalists were practically high-fiving when Trump apparently whacked Bannon in a pair of interviews. The president told the New York Post that Steve had joined the campaign late and “I’m my own strategist,” and described Bannon to the Wall Street Journal as “a guy who works for me.” To Bannon, both statements were self-evidently true. He was just a staff guy. He wasn’t offended.

  Bannon hadn’t had a boss since he left Goldman Sachs in his early thirties, and he didn’t care about his status as a presidential aide. He was the ultimate cause guy. He would fight the establishment from inside the White House or outside the gates. He had said from the beginning, he might be at the White House for eight minutes or eight years. If Trump concluded, or he decided on his own, that he couldn’t do the job, he would be gone.

  There was something about Trump in the White House that brought out the worst in left-wing journalists. They were affronted by his very presence. They thought it reflected badly on America. And their angst came to a head when Trump struggled to pass a health care bill. The fact that Trump insisted on covering patients with preexisting conditions and favored more moderate policies than House Republicans mattered not at all to liberal writers. What mattered was that Trump was open to compromises to win conservative votes. The left was aflame that some of the proposed compromises meant an estimated twenty-four million people could lose health care coverage over the next ten years.

  Liberal commentators argued that Trump was betraying the very voters who put him in the White House, that his health care plan would especially hurt working-class Americans. Journalists dutifully tracked down families who were worried about losing their insurance. And this struck a deep chord among the pundits who believed that Trump had essentially deceived these blue-collar folks, that he had exploited their cultural resentments but would hurt them financially by catering to the rich.

  In their anger against Trump, and their gloating over Trump’s alleged betrayal of blue-collar Americans, they showed an ugly side of themselves.

  Frank Rich had been a talented op-ed columnist and theater critic for the New York Times. Now, in New York magazine, he assailed “the hardcore, often self-sabotaging Trump voters who helped drive the country into a ditch on Election Day.…If we are free to loathe Trump, we are free to loathe his most loyal voters, who have put the rest of us at risk.”

  The Huffington Post ran a piece headlined, “A Vote for Trump Was a Hate Crime.”

  Conor Lynch, in Salon, said of Trump’s “culturally backward” voters: “Let them lose their health care; maybe they’ll learn something this time around.”

  Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek took the next logical step, admitting a deadly wish: “As one w/ preexisting condition: I hope every GOPr who voted 4 Trumpcare sees a family member get long term condition, lose insurance, & die,” he tweeted.

  Rather than back off after being confronted on Twitter for that hateful statement, Eichenwald upped the ante. He said that the family members of Republican lawmakers should be “tortured.”

  Tortured was a good way to describe the media anguish. How did people who marched under the liberal banner, who professed to care about the little guy, wind up hoping for lower-income Americans to lose their health insurance, even drop dead? How did they feel comfortable beating up on “hillbillies,” the term adopted by Frank Rich? It was another case of Trump Trauma that caused liberals to lose their minds and their sense of decency.

  It was one thing to assail the president they despised. But somehow they felt entitled to sneer at the sixty-three million voters who put him in office.

  Everyone knew it was an ossified media ritual, tied to an utterly arbitrary date, but even a president determined to write his own rules was going to be judged by his first hundred days.

  To preempt an inevitable avalanche of bad press, Trump touted his Supreme Court confirmation of Neil Gorsuch as a major achievement and tweeted: “No matter how much I accomplish during the ridiculous standard of the first 100 days, & it has been a lot (including S.C.), media will kill!”

  Corey Lewandowski told him to ignore the media hype: “Who cares about this artificial 100-day marker? It’s inside-the-Beltway news. If you believed them, you never would have run, never would have filed your papers, would have quit after finishing second in Iowa, and never would have won the general election.”

  Trump, of course, had campaigned on a hundred-day action plan. And his team had held meetings to “brand” the time period—meetings that, like almost everything inside the White House, quickly leaked to the press. Sean Spicer was deluged with so many requests for interviews and comments that he knew a media hurricane was coming. Kellyanne Conway saw it as an opportunity to defend Trump’s agenda.

  The press had marked Barack Obama’s first one hundred days dramatically differently. In Time, Joe Klein called Obama’s debut “the most impressive of any presidency since FDR.” Mark Halperin called him “instantly comfortable and highly skilled at the hardest job in the world…even temper, cool demeanor, boldness under pressure.”

  Now the press was ready to give Obama’s successor grief for not having pushed a major bill through Congress. That was a critical measurement, but journalists tended to minimize his other accomplishments, from regulatory rollbacks to executive orders, from killing the Pacific trade deal to jump-starting the Keystone pipeline.

  Trump broke tradition again by skipping the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, since he had no desire to be skewered by hostile journalists and a comedian. Instead, the television veteran decided to engage in some counterprogramming.

  On the night of April 29, when 2,500 journalists gathered in a Washington Hilton ballroom, Trump was giving a stemwinder in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He mocked the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, ripped the media as a “disgrace” and sounded a populist note: “The Washington media is part of the problem. Their priorities are not my priorities and they’re not your priorities.”

  And he singled out two outlets in particular. “CNN and MSNBC are fake news,” the president declared, amid chants of “CNN sucks!”

  On the way back to the plane, Trump asked Kellyanne whether CNN had aired that part of his speech. The answer was yes. All three cable news networks had carried the rally live.

  The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, deprived of its star, was low energy. There were self
-congratulatory speeches about protecting the First Amendment and holding a president accountable. Only Bob Woodward, who appeared with Carl Bernstein, found fault with the profession. He said the media made mistakes and had to face up to a loss of public trust. But he still delivered a suitable sound bite: “Mr. President, the media is not fake news.”

  Before he knew Trump would be absent, Graydon Carter canceled the huge Vanity Fair bash that he had thrown during the Obama years. The New Yorker abandoned its lavish soiree as well. Once Trump bailed, other parties vanished. Hollywood celebrities, who invaded the capital every spring for Obama, were nowhere to be found; and journalists, in a fitting metaphor, were left talking to themselves. The media’s prom weekend was a flop.

  Trump, however, knew how to combat the negative press reviews. He returned for a campaign-style media blitz, sitting down with journalists he spent so much time deriding. Trump did interviews with the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Washington Examiner, CBS, Fox, and Bloomberg, among others. He even wrote an op-ed for the Post.

  His critics pounced on any wayward phrase. Trump told Reuters that “I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”

  Aha! He had no clue what the presidency would be like; the president was obviously a dope who had lucked into the world’s toughest job—at least that was the media narrative. But really it was simply Trump sharing a candid thought—and unlike most politicians, he shared many such thoughts; he didn’t carefully weigh his words as other politicians did.

  There was a deeply uncomfortable moment on CBS’s Face the Nation. Trump liked his interviewer, John Dickerson, but was wary of him, feeling that Dickerson’s easy demeanor and pleasant smile masked the ability to suddenly stick the knife in.