by Howard Kurtz
“And you’re not answering it, Kellyanne.”
Conway believed that all this chatter about Russia was irrelevant. They were trying to create jobs, defend the country, support veterans, and help drug addicts—all of which were more important than some unproven Russian conspiracy. And she had a point.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 50 percent of Americans believed the media coverage of allegations against Trump had been irresponsibly overdramatized. Only 34 percent viewed the coverage as responsible and proper. Such a poll might have prompted some serious self-examination by journalists who again seemed disconnected from much of the country. But most were so consumed with proving that Trump had done something wrong that it did not.
Despite his constant criticism of stories quoting anonymous sources, Trump again seized on one such account in a newspaper he usually disparaged. The Washington Post published a lengthy investigation into how Barack Obama sat on intelligence findings for months during the campaign that Vladimir Putin had personally overseen a Russian hacking effort to defeat Hillary Clinton and elect Trump. The paper quoted a former senior Obama administration official as saying, “I feel like we sort of choked.”
The president picked up the blind quote in a Twitter barrage about the story: “Why no action? Focus on them, not T!” Trump went so far as to say his predecessor “colluded or obstructed” when it came to Moscow’s efforts.
The story said Obama and his aides hesitated because they didn’t want to be accused of putting a thumb on the electoral scale and believed Clinton would win anyway. But there was a rich irony in Trump, who had only grudgingly acknowledged the Russians were probably behind the hacking, now embracing that scenario and using the Washington Post as his reliable source. Yet the story, which made Obama look weak, somehow didn’t get much traction in the rest of the media.
When it came to the Russian scandal, the press was laser-focused on Donald Trump.
CHAPTER 21
INVESTIGATIVE OVERREACH
The media’s investigative efforts had grown so intense that even the smallest anti-Trump leads, whose importance was tangential at best, were inflated into full-blown stories.
The Washington Post, for example, published a lengthy piece on Jared Kushner’s real estate company securing a routine refinancing loan for a property near Times Square. Why was this front-page news?
The $285-million loan, which closed in the final weeks of the campaign, came from Deutsche Bank. That bank was said to be negotiating with New York regulators over allegations “that it aided a possible Russian money-laundering scheme.”
There was no suggestion that Kushner had gotten special treatment on the refinancing. There was nothing to indicate that Kushner had even a remote tie to the money-laundering allegations. But, the third paragraph said, the loan “could come under focus” as Robert Mueller reviewed Kushner’s business activities. Even that—could—was a stretch. Kushner could be criticized for not listing the loan on his financial disclosure form, but he had relied on published guidelines from the Office of Government Ethics.
Jared viewed the story as insane. The Post thought it had a big scoop—Kushner bought a building from a Russian guy!—though he emphasized that the purchase had taken place back in 2014.
But for the media, the mere presence of dots, even if they weren’t connected, became news if it could be construed as damaging to Trump. Rachel Maddow cited the Washington Post piece as she led off her show with the less-than-startling news that Kushner had hired a criminal lawyer.
The Post article was a model of good journalism compared to CNN’s report, published on the network’s website, that Anthony Scaramucci, a close Trump adviser, was under investigation for his supposed ties to a Russian investment fund.
Scaramucci, a wealthy former hedge-fund manager, was feisty, fast-talking, and friends with Trump, making him a fat target. Trump frequently called the Mooch for advice.
The CNN piece, relying on one unnamed source, said Scaramucci had held a secret meeting the previous January with an official from the fund and discussed whether the United States would lift sanctions against Moscow.
But there was no secret meeting. Scaramucci had given a speech on Trump’s behalf at Davos, and the Russian had approached him in a restaurant to briefly say hello, with no discussion of sanctions. Scaramucci had never done any business with Russia and had visited the country only once, as a twenty-five-year-old student.
“I was disappointed the story was published,” Scaramucci told me. “It was a lie.” As the story fell apart, Scaramucci told Jeff Zucker he was ready to go to war, that he was willing to file a major lawsuit. The network quickly deleted the piece, saying it “did not meet CNN’s editorial standards,” and apologized to Scaramucci. Three journalists who worked on the story, including a Pulitzer Prize winner hired months earlier from the New York Times, were allowed to resign.
Trump called Scaramucci after seeing him debunk the story on the air. “You killed them. You’re not even in the White House and it’s a great comms win for us,” he said.
The president asked whether he planned to sue, suggesting he could probably win $15 million. Scaramucci said that would take him off television and he wasn’t a fan of lawsuits against journalists.
“I’m not as selfless as you. I would sue the shit out of them,” Trump said. But he was impressed by the Mooch’s tenacity and quickly claimed vindication on Twitter.
“Wow, CNN had to retract big story on ‘Russia,’ with 3 employees forced to resign. What about all the other phony stories they do? FAKE NEWS!” he wrote. He retweeted a mock FNN logo (Fake News Network), took a slap at the ratings being way down (which wasn’t true), and broadened the indictment: “What about NBC, CBS & ABC? What about the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost? They are all Fake News!”
Privately, Trump vented that the people at CNN were horrible human beings. He repeated unsubstantiated rumors that Jeff Zucker might resign if AT&T’s bid for CNN’s parent company Time Warner won federal approval.
Zucker was upset by the botched Scaramucci story and told his troops that they had to “play error-free ball.” By publishing such an unsubstantiated piece, CNN handed the president a club to attack the network.
White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders echoed the president’s anger after taking a question from a Breitbart reporter.
“It’s the barrage of fake news directed at the president that has garnered his frustration.…If the media can’t be trusted to report the news, that’s a dangerous place for America,” she said.
Brian Karem, editor of Maryland’s suburban Sentinel papers and a Playboy columnist, interrupted her with an angry lecture: “What you just did is inflammatory to people all over the country who look at it and say, ‘See, once again, the president is right and everybody else is just fake media.’ Everybody in this room is only trying to do their job.”
Sanders looked down and hesitated. She was ready to hit back hard, but thought it would be better to use southern charm than come off as an angry mom scolding her kids. Besides, how could she, a thirty-four-year-old woman, be threatening to this fifty-something guy? “If anything has been inflamed,” she said evenly, “it’s the dishonesty that often takes place by the news media. I think it is outrageous for you to accuse me of inflaming a story when I was simply trying to respond to his question.”
Karem became an instant hero, booked on a spate of shows on MSNBC and CNN, and Zucker gave him a contract. He said the White House had “bullied and browbeaten” journalists and, channeling mad-as-hell Howard Beale, declared that “it’s disheartening. It’s unnerving. I can’t take it anymore.”
The bullying, the undermining of the First Amendment, as Karem put it, was that the president and his spokesmen criticized the media, sometimes in strong language. But the First Amendment protected their free speech rights as well.
Chuck Todd, looking angry, told viewers that the White House “war on the media” was “nothing less than
a war on the truth.” By squarely putting his profession on the side of the truth, the NBC anchor suggested that the administration was using lies while journalists played it straight. He did acknowledge that his network and other outlets didn’t always get it right but said they took responsibility for their mistakes.
The rush to defend CNN melded into media complaints about the state of White House press briefings. CNN’s Jim Acosta heckled Spicer: “Why are the cameras off, Sean?” He essentially accused Sanders of being a minister of propaganda: “Does this feel like America? Where the White House takes Q’s from conservatives, then openly trashes the news media in the briefing room.”
Actually, political aides in America have every right to push back against media malfeasance. It might have been a stretch for Sanders to turn CNN’s debacle into a broadside against the entire press, but the White House had a point that its newsworthy policies—such as making it easier to fire incompetents at the Veterans Administration—got next to no coverage, while each detail of the amorphous Russia probe was endlessly chronicled. And when news outlets got it wrong, they often either downplayed or ignored the error. CNN ignored its retraction on the air, with only fleeting mentions after the White House attack, and MSNBC ignored it as well; many in the media considered a botched story against Trump to be a non-story.
It had not been a good stretch for CNN. The network had just suffered the humiliation of having reported that Jim Comey would tell the Senate that the president was under investigation, when in fact he testified that he wasn’t. Sometimes journalists wished a bit too hard for their Trump stories to be true.
It was just another day at the office for the Morning Joe crew.
Mika Brzezinski seized upon on a less-than-earthshaking Washington Post scoop: that clubhouses, at several golf courses owned by Trump, had posted on their walls a mock Time magazine cover with a made-up story about The Apprentice. “Nothing makes a man feel better than making a fake cover of a magazine about himself, lying every day, and destroying the country,” Brzezinski said, adding that Trump’s hands looked teensy on the covers.
Minutes later, the president struck back with tweets that would unite virtually the entire media world against him. He had heard (since he insisted he didn’t watch) that the MSNBC duo was speaking badly about him.
“Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”
Blood. Face lift. A woman’s looks. It was reminiscent of the blowback he had generated during the campaign when he criticized Megyn Kelly for asking him “ridiculous” debate questions: “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
Trump asked Anthony Scaramucci what he thought of the tweets against Mika and Joe: “I know what you’re going to say—unpresidential. Then what?”
“I don’t think you needed to go there,” Scaramucci said.
“Is Korea off the TV?” Trump asked. Yes, the Mooch replied. North Korea’s nuclear buildup had been eclipsed.
“Is health care off the TV?” True, the impasse over the Senate bill had faded.
“Sounds good to me,” Trump said.
The Mika maelstrom dominated cable news. Even if there was a method to the madness, it was portrayed as madness. Anchors, panelists, guests, including most of those on Fox News, said Trump had gone too far, as did some Republican lawmakers. He was accused of being a misogynist, of being consumed by animosity, of having a personality disorder. Carl Bernstein made this apocalyptic announcement on CNN: “This is the greatest journalistic challenge of the modern era, to report on a malignant presidency.”
Some programs replayed the Fox footage of Ivanka saying she had been surprised by the viciousness of Washington, and of Melania calling for an end to cyberbullying.
Brzezinski later insisted that she hadn’t had a face lift, that she had told Melania at the Mar-a-Lago meeting brokered by Jared that she’d had skin tightened under her chin and Donald kept asking who her doctor was. He thought the face-lift slap would sting, unconcerned that it might reinforce the media indictment that he liked to denigrate women’s looks. Trump always believed in hitting back at his opponents, and he had thrown a hard punch. But as far as the media were concerned, the only face he had bloodied was his own.
Even if Trump was punching down and shouldn’t have retaliated against Mika and Joe, they were hardly innocent bystanders. The harsh personal attacks by Scarborough and Brzezinski—calling Trump mentally ill, a liar, a racist, a thug, and a goon—were minimized or ignored in the coverage of Trump’s tweets.
Scarborough felt that at times he went too far in ripping Trump, and he regretted it. He knew he wasn’t helping his case by sounding angry or emotional on the air. He and Mika had recently discussed whether their rhetoric was getting too strong, but kept it up nonetheless.
One of Morning Joe’s sharpest critics was Kellyanne Conway. She thought little of Brzezinski as a journalist and resented being trashed by her in the past. It was Mika she had in mind when she made the on-air crack about face lifts, and was surprised that the plastic surgery story had not come out earlier, since the president had told a group of congressmen about it. Kellyanne believed that Mika and Joe got good press because journalists were the show’s target audience, and many wanted to be invited on as guests.
The press was much more sympathetic to Mika than Kellyanne. An associate of conservative activist James O’Keefe had captured on tape CNN’s Jimmy Carr, an associate producer on New Day, saying that Trump was “fucking crazy” and Kellyanne was an “awful woman” who “looks like she got hit with a shovel.” There were no cries of sexism about that.
In her television appearances, Conway condemned the “toxic” attacks on the president by what she called the “jackals and hyenas” in the press. She edged into questionable territory by telling George Stephanopoulos that the harsh coverage of Trump was not “patriotic”—though she meant the harsh personal attacks, not the political criticism.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders had her own resentment toward Morning Joe, which had slammed her, and defended her boss: “I think that the president is pushing back against people who attack him day after day after day. Where’s the outrage on that?”
The next morning, Joe and Mika responded with what they hoped was a dispassionate approach. Brzezinski said Trump’s tweets didn’t bother her, but “it does worry me about the country.…He appears to have a fragile, impetuous, child-like ego that we’ve seen over and over again, especially with women.”
Scarborough gave the saga a tabloid twist, saying White House aides had warned him that if he wanted to stop an exposé of him and Mika in the National Enquirer—owned by close Trump pal David Pecker—he had to call the president and apologize. Some pundits immediately branded this an attempt at blackmail.
The president denied any strong-arming, and said Scarborough had called him, which wasn’t true—they hadn’t spoken at all. White House sources said Joe had called Jared Kushner, worried about the pending Enquirer exposé, and Kushner suggested he take it up with Trump. When Scarborough said he could not because Trump was mad at him, Jared suggested that maybe he should apologize. That was hardly a quid pro quo.
But that account was just part of the backstory. Scarborough had called a White House official and said he knew what was happening: “I hear Donald is having the National Enquirer do a story on us. I want you to know I know: If this story runs, I’m going to know Donald is calling for him to do it.”
No, he would never do that, the official said.
“Trust me,” said Scarborough. “He would do it, he is doing it, and it’s a mistake.” And if that happened, Scarborough warned, he would make clear that Trump’s fingerprints were all over it.
Two more White House officials got in touch. You need to call Donald and apologize for how tough your coverage has been, they said, and he will kill the s
tory. No way, said Scarborough.
So they started calling Mika. She told them to back off.
Finally, a senior White House official sent Scarborough a last, desperate text: “This is going to be really bad. You really need to give him a call.”
Joe and Mika were worried about the story. They both had kids, and they hadn’t yet made their romance public. But they were not going to capitulate. (The Enquirer piece, which ran weeks later after the previously married hosts announced their engagement, was headlined “‘Morning Joe’ Sleazy Cheating Scandal.”)
Morning Joe became the top cable news morning program for one fleeting day when they responded to Trump’s tweets. (Conway thought people tuned in to make their own assessment of Mika’s face.) Trump offered an olive branch, tweeting that Joe and Mika weren’t “bad people,” but that the show was “dominated by their NBC bosses.” He couldn’t resist adding, however, that Mika was “dumb as a rock.”
In the end, Trump gave the cable couple a bonanza of free publicity. The usually supportive Laura Ingraham told him, “No one cares.…Stop helping their ratings & jacking up their speaking fees.”
Indeed, the lead story that day should have been the Supreme Court’s approving parts of Trump’s travel ban. Instead, the media focused on Trump’s least favorite morning news show.
Over the July Fourth weekend, Trump posted old footage of him play-tackling his friend Vince McMahon, the WWE boss, at a wrestling match, superimposing the CNN logo over McMahon’s head.
It was a crude animation, not particularly funny, and definitely undignified, but more about Trump trying to be entertaining than a serious attack on CNN. The media, however, treated the video as a fundamental threat to journalistic freedom.
In that sense, it was the perfect Rorschach test. Journalists, who always took Trump literally, saw him body-slamming a major news organization; the president and his supporters saw him as having some laughs trolling the media.