by Howard Kurtz
For an FBI guy, Comey had left his fingerprints on an array of stories depicting Trump as pressuring him. But if his three hours of testimony were a political mixed bag, the media narrative was not. “Comey Says Trump Lied About Him, FBI,” the Washington Post blared. The Politico verdict: “Comey’s Devastating Indictment of Trump.” The Daily News simply stamped the word “LIAR” over Trump’s face.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders had to tell reporters that “I can definitely say the president is not a liar,” calling the question “frankly insulting.”
The media polarization was unmistakable: The liberals, unable to tie Trump to a Russia conspiracy, focused almost exclusively on his alleged attempt to strong-arm Comey. The conservatives concentrated on the failure to prove the president committed an overtly criminal act, as if that was an acceptable standard.
Kushner had been right: Trump did not tweet all day. But that rare restraint lasted only until early the next morning: “Despite so many false statements and lies, total and complete vindication…and WOW, Comey is a leaker!”
Trump’s plan to launch “infrastructure week” was foiled because the media only cared about the scandal. The CNN banner that ran while Trump was giving a speech on infrastructure said, “TRUMP SPEAKS LIVE AFTER CALLING COMEY A LIAR.” The MSNBC banner read, “TRUMP TALKS INFRASTRUCTURE AFTER BLASTING COMEY.”
Corey Lewandowski suddenly emerged as Trump’s leading surrogate. The man was a machine, defending the president and attacking Comey on Fox and MSNBC after the hearing, and the next morning on Today, Good Morning America, and Fox & Friends. He told George Stephanopoulos that Comey represented “the deep state in Washington” and “should be potentially prosecuted” for leaking. NBC’s Savannah Guthrie insisted it wasn’t “intellectually honest” to cite only the parts of Comey’s testimony that helped Trump, but Lewandowski said the bottom line was that the president wasn’t under investigation. The New York Times, for its part, was calling Comey a “Shakespearean” figure.
With White House officials under orders to avoid substantive comment on the probe, Corey Lewandowski and Dave Bossie were the administration’s pit bulls.
The president’s comments had bite as well. He held a news conference at which he taunted the media. Before acknowledging Jon Karl, the feisty ABC correspondent, he mused: “Should I take one of the killer networks that treat me so badly as fake news?” And he told Karl: “Remember how nice you used to be before I ran?”
Trump denied that he asked Comey to end the Flynn probe and denied that he asked for his loyalty. Essentially, he accused Comey of perjury. But Karl slipped in a quick follow-up that made headlines everywhere: “Would you be willing to speak under oath to give your version of those events?”
“One hundred percent,” Trump said.
Christopher Ruddy, founder of the conservative website Newsmax and a friend of Trump, told PBS’s NewsHour that he was afraid the president might fire special counsel Robert Mueller. Sean Spicer, worried about possible fallout, called Ruddy and asked him to make it clear that he had not discussed the matter with Trump. Ruddy refused, saying he never implied he had talked with Trump. He declared the press office to be “amateur hour,” and accused Spicer of doing “a poor job in defending the president.” Spicer was annoyed. He thought he was helping Ruddy and the president, only to find himself castigated.
The Mueller probe was heating up. Newt Gingrich had initially hailed the former FBI chief as a superb choice to lead the investigation. But now Gingrich was ripping him for a severe conflict of interest, because Mueller and Comey were longtime colleagues. Sean Hannity, who constantly attacked the “destroy-Trump media,” called on Mueller to resign. Those close to Trump “say he is so volatile,” the New York Times reported, “they cannot be sure that he will not change his mind” about firing Mueller. The AP reported that according to aides and confidants, the president was “yelling at television sets in the White House” and claiming to be the victim of a conspiracy. This was high-level sabotage by the president’s supposed allies.
There was now a definite rhythm to the Mueller scoops, which erupted as evening earthquakes, usually around seven or eight o’clock, in the Washington Post or New York Times, and the aftershocks would dominate the prime-time programming at MSNBC and CNN. A Post or Times reporter would join Anderson Cooper on CNN or Rachel Maddow on MSNBC to discuss the story. Both cable networks were eagerly adding reporters from the two papers as paid contributors.
On June 14, the Washington Post said that Robert Mueller was now investigating Trump over obstruction of justice allegations. The psychological impact was undeniable, but the details were less dramatic. The paper reported that Mueller intended to interview top intelligence officials about whether Trump had asked them to intervene in Comey’s FBI probe. Mueller, of course, would have been guilty of malpractice had he failed to interview these officials about Comey’s allegations. In other words, Bob Mueller was simply doing his job.
Early that morning, a heartbreaking story grabbed the nation’s attention. A Trump hater named James Hodgkinson had taken a high-powered rifle to a Virginia baseball diamond where Republican lawmakers were practicing and opened fire, nearly killing House GOP Whip Steve Scalise and wounding four other people. It was an attack that stunned the nation, and even as the president and other leaders appealed for unity, much of the media were consumed by a debate over whether harsh left-wing rhetoric had paved the way for the shooting, and whether Trump’s own rhetoric had contributed to the toxic climate.
Despite the sense of national grieving, and with Scalise at severe risk of dying, MSNBC remained fixated on the special counsel that night. So what if a congressional leader was almost assassinated? Chris Matthews led off Hardball by saying, “Donald Trump and his ties with Moscow remain the big story here, even on a day struck by violence.” Maddow did the Russia story about ten minutes into her program, interviewing one of the Washington Post reporters.
Kellyanne Conway was deeply affected by the shooting, and it showed. In a segment on Fox & Friends, she complained that “as Steve Scalise was fighting for his life and crawling into right field in a trail of blood,” some people were trashing Trump. Conway called for “more muted voices,” and then she said this: “Look at Twitter. If I were shot and killed tomorrow half of Twitter would explode in applause and excitement.” That was a sad glimpse of her emotional state.
But the president was using that very social network to unleash some harsh language of his own. Conway had argued days earlier that the media were paying too much attention to his tweets at the expense of his policies, but these tweets were hard to ignore.
Fed up with the endless Russia investigation, Trump again castigated “Crooked H” for her email scandal, and declared that he was the victim of “the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history,” which was “led by some very bad and conflicted people!” That was a clear reference to Bob Mueller and his prosecutors, some of whom had donated money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign. He rebuked the “Fake News Media” over the “phony collusion” story, and took a strange shot at Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who had tapped Mueller as special counsel: “I am being investigated for firing the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch hunt.” Every new lightning bolt in this tweetstorm sparked more coverage.
Another frustration for the president was that his policy agenda was stalled in Congress, depriving the White House of a counter-narrative for the scandal-hungry press.
While issuing executive orders and pruning regulations, Trump had made no progress on tax cuts. Not a single brick had been laid for the border wall. Two versions of the travel ban had been blocked by the courts. And Obamacare repeal was stuck in the Senate. Ivanka Trump made a rare media appearance, promoting a workplace development initiative on Fox & Friends. Yet what made news was not the initiative, but her saying that in Washington she encountered “a level of viciousness that I was not expecting.”
So
me in the press slimed her again, such as Mediaite columnist Kylie Cheung, who ripped Ivanka’s “unwavering loyalty to a self-admitted sexual serial abuser and crude-mouthed misogynist.” Cheung said the president’s career was “built on the oppression of just about every woman in this country who doesn’t share her privilege.”
The oppression of just about every non-wealthy woman?
Ivanka’s husband was dragged into the hostile media spotlight as well. In the next evening earthquake, the Washington Post reported that Mueller was expanding his investigation into Jared Kushner’s business dealings. Once again, this was an incremental development treated as huge news. How could Mueller scrutinize Trump aides and their links to Russia without looking at possible transactions by a top official with major real estate holdings? Jared thought the piece was a nothing-burger. But the story ricocheted everywhere.
The same thing happened when Mike Pence hired a lawyer. What top official wouldn’t retain counsel when faced with an FBI interview? “Very routine,” the vice president told reporters.
But some media outlets treated the move as highly significant. The Washington Post questioned whether Pence’s approach to his job was one of “serene confidence or willful oblivion” and quoted a senior White House official as saying how important it was that Pence, who “never says no,” not be just a “yes man.”
The battle between Trump and the media was, at bottom, a grand battle over the truth.
To the press, it was a matter of fact that Trump was under investigation, that he had improperly pressured his FBI director, that he had no respect for the independence of law enforcement, that the evidence of a cover-up was strong, that he had a suspiciously soft approach to Russia, that he was acting like a man with much to hide.
To the president, the truth looked very different: that the investigation was a sham, designed by detractors to delegitimize his election, that he had not demanded anything of Comey, that there was nothing wrong with asking aides for loyalty, that illegal leakers were working with the press to undermine him, that he had nothing to do with Russia and therefore had nothing to cover up.
Trump’s incessant tweeting, in his eyes, was explicitly meant to combat a negative media narrative over a nonexistent conspiracy. But the press saw it as a self-destructive practice creating self-inflicted wounds.
One truth, however, remained self-evident: the melodramatic coverage of Trump’s troubles was blotting out his efforts to change the country.
What had been fairly obvious to just about everyone in journalism was nonetheless treated as a bombshell.
More than a month after tweeting that Jim Comey had better hope there were no tapes of their conversations, Trump returned to Twitter to admit that, yes, he had no tapes.
It was, of course, a bluff from the start—and a bit of a taunt aimed at Comey. In baseball, you’d call it a brushback pitch. Trump was undoubtedly enjoying all the frenzied media speculation, but clearly underestimated how the echoes of Richard Nixon’s downfall would make the story resonate with the press. It was not the wisest decision he’d ever made.
After Trump’s admission in late June, NoTapeGate was practically handled as a scandal in itself. On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell said it showed “the president is an utter ignoramus in matters of law and governing.” On CNN, Jake Tapper issued a broader criticism: “Was it bluster, witness intimidation, a desire to pressure Comey to be as truthful as possible?” The plan had “backfired,” Tapper declared, and was part of a White House effort to spare his staff from having to “go on live TV and defend aberrant behavior on Twitter or explain the false things the president says.”
Tapper often thought about the Joe McCarthy era, and the people who stayed silent as the notorious senator smeared innocent people as Communists. He didn’t want something similar to be said about him in the Trump era. Tapper fervently believed there weren’t two sides when it came to the truth; there was only the truth.
Trump claimed on Fox & Friends that his maneuver might have had an impact on Comey’s testimony: “When he found out that there may be tapes out there.…I think his story may have changed.”
“It was a smart way to make sure he stayed honest in those hearings,” anchor Ainsley Earhardt replied.
There was no evidence that Comey had changed his account. But the question of Trump’s veracity—even though he never actually said he had tapes—became an increasingly prominent media theme. The New York Times devoted a full page to a dense list purporting to show nearly every untruth uttered by Trump as president: “Many Americans have become accustomed to President Trump’s lies. But as regular as they have become, the country should not allow itself to become numb to them.” That was the narrative. (The second example was that Trump said he had been on Time’s cover “14 or 15 times,” when it was actually eleven.)
A parallel media narrative, powered by self-serving leaks from administration officials, was that Trump’s staff was valiantly struggling to save the embattled president from himself.
Politico ran a piece headlined “Trump Gives Priebus Until July 4th To Clean Up White House”—or get the boot. “It’s ridiculous, just fake news,” the president told him. It’s idiots making things up. You’re not going anywhere.” As the imaginary deadline approached, Trump and Priebus joked that it must be firing time.
A Washington Post story said White House officials were trying to govern “while also indulging and managing Trump’s combative and sometimes self-destructive impulses.” These unnamed sources were upset by what they viewed as “the president’s fits of rage,” and worried about his health as “his mood has been more sour than at any point since they have known him.”
The leaks were driving Ivanka crazy. She was from the business world and liked organization and structure, not spending hours each day having to deal with stupid leaked stories. It was one of the reasons that she and her husband wanted Reince Priebus gone, because they held him responsible for either leaking or tolerating other White House leakers, whom Ivanka viewed as building their own brands.
She was especially annoyed by leaks that cast her as an ultra-liberal opponent of her father. The real news, contrary to the media’s portrait, was that she wasn’t.
Sean Spicer decided that most press briefings were now going to be off camera—and the media, convinced that they had a right to interrogate the press secretary on camera, threw a fit.
Spicer, undaunted, went further. “There are days I’ll decide that the president’s voice should be the one that speaks,” he said, and on those days he would bar audio recordings.
CNN correspondent Jim Acosta accused the White House of “suppression of information.” He told viewers that Spicer was “just kind of useless,” so “why are we even having these briefings or these gaggles in the first place?” He compared the press operation to “Pravda.” He tried to organize an insurrection, telling the Huffington Post that “we should walk out” to stop the “stonewalling.”
Spicer found Acosta’s protests sad. Sean was, to be sure, trying to dim the harsh spotlight that had enveloped him. But Spicer believed that he and Sarah Huckabee Sanders were providing plenty of information, and by turning off the cameras he intended to discourage showboating reporters who just wanted to generate more YouTube clips for themselves. Some print reporters preferred the more businesslike tone of the off-camera gaggles. Most TV reporters naturally missed their cameras. At one audio-only briefing, CNN subtly protested the camera ban by sending a sketch artist, as news outlets did at courthouse trials. Steve Bannon jokingly texted an Atlantic reporter that the real reason the briefings were moved off camera was because “Sean got fatter.”
The president was pleased with the pared-back briefings, and Spicer knew that he was playing to an audience of one. He knew as well that Sean Hannity had publicly urged Trump to curtail the briefings. Laura Ingraham had advised briefing reporters only when the administration had something to push. And Newt Gingrich had suggested that CNN be banned.
&nb
sp; Spicer had read stories predicting his ouster practically since the day he arrived. It was though they were saying it would rain, he thought; one day they would be right. But now there was, in fact, an ongoing search for a new press secretary. What journalists didn’t know was that Spicer had had a series of conversations with Trump about moving into a senior management role and leaving the press briefings to someone else. That, he figured, could take months, but he was already thinking about making more money on the outside.
Bannon reached out to Laura Ingraham, but she never wanted the job and wasn’t going to give up her lucrative media career. David Martosko, U.S. political editor of the Daily Mail, announced he had been considered—he was Jared and Ivanka’s preference—but had withdrawn his name. “You’ll be thrown to the wolves,” Bannon had warned him if he took the job.
While the names of his possible replacements kept getting floated in the press, Spicer, with an air of resignation, just kept plugging away.
If the White House believed the press was firmly in opposition, Glenn Thrush had a way of reinforcing that on Twitter. “FIVE months in: 36% approval, GOP support sags to 71%, no briefings, denialism, ugh policy record, Bannon resurgent,” the Times reporter wrote.
One reason for the president’s unpopularity was the daily media diet of scandalous fare tied to Russia. Kellyanne Conway tried to shift the focus to other issues, but the media wouldn’t budge. CNN morning host Alisyn Camerota repeatedly asked Kellyanne what the president was doing about Russian hacking during the election. Conway pushed back hard.
“Alisyn, I know you just like to say the word Russia, Russia to mislead the voters, and I know that CNN is aiding and abetting this nonsense,” she said. “You’ve asked me the same question three times.”