Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  The conservative media were almost unanimous in supporting Jeff Sessions. National Review said Trump’s treatment of Sessions was “shameful.” Even Breitbart, which was usually doggedly pro-Trump, praised Sessions and said the president’s approach “only serves to highlight Trump’s own hypocrisy.” Ross Douthat of the New York Times called the anti-Session tweets “an insanely stupid exercise” that showed “this president should not be the president, and the sooner he is not, the better.” Peggy Noonan, in the Wall Street Journal, likened Trump to Woody Allen, calling him “weak and sniveling…whiny, weepy and self-pitying.”

  The president’s allies were right; he had only undermined himself.

  President Trump was rapidly embracing socially conservative causes. Not only was he taking strong stances on abortion, immigration, and religious freedom, he was moving to fight on other fronts of the culture wars as well.

  The administration had conducted a formal policy review on transgender people serving in the military. Reince Priebus called the president at 8:30 in the morning to say that he had prepared a decision memo and explained the four options awaiting the president.

  “Great, let’s talk about it,” Trump said. “I’ll be in the Oval Office in about an hour.”

  Half an hour later, Priebus exclaimed to White House counsel Don McGahn: “Oh my God, he just tweeted this.” Trump announced on Twitter that the government “will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military”—the third-most severe of the four options. There was no longer a need for the meeting.

  The media exploded in thunderous condemnation, interviewing transgender service members and replaying clips of Trump vowing to fight for LGBTQ rights. And some journalists ridiculed the idea of making policy through 140-character tweets.

  Ivanka Trump saw that some critics in the press were blaming her for failing to intercede with her father; she had been working on other issues and hadn’t even known about the move. Sarah Huckabee Sanders couldn’t even say whether currently serving transgender troops would be expelled under Trump’s order.

  In a single issue of Politico Magazine, four of the featured stories were:

  “Why Trump’s Ban on Transgender Servicepeople is Flatly Unconstitutional”

  “13 Trump Scandals You Forgot About”

  “To America, It Looks Like Chaos. For Trump, It’s Just Tuesday”

  “Trump Is a Bad Negotiator”

  Anthony Scaramucci’s top priority was to shut down White House leaks—including the man he viewed as the ultimate leaker, Reince Priebus. He acted like a swashbuckling sheriff, saying in a round of interviews that he would start firing those who were secretly spilling to reporters, even if he had to dismiss the whole communications staff.

  When Politico reported that Scaramucci still stood to profit from the firm he was selling, SkyBridge Capital, which had paid him $10 million in the previous eighteen months, he had a chief suspect for leaking that information. He tweeted that he would be contacting the FBI “in light of the leak of my financial info which is a felony.” And he tagged @Reince45.

  Priebus was furious. Scaramucci had just accused him of a criminal act. This was outright defamation. And he’d had nothing to do with it. Reince thought the Mooch’s conduct was pure insanity.

  After Politico said the information came from his newly available financial disclosure form, Scaramucci deleted the tweet. But he didn’t regret targeting Priebus.

  Scaramucci had been wrong on that story, but he told Trump that mid-level communications staffers had pleaded with him for their jobs, saying they had leaked, but under orders from Priebus and Bannon.

  Scaramucci confronted Reince and told him he had “enemies” in the building but offered to serve as the bridge between the factions. Priebus had in fact lost support in the White House—Kellyanne Conway, among others, thought he was too insecure to be chief of staff—but he didn’t believe the Mooch for a second.

  In an interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN, done at Trump’s suggestion, Scaramucci repeated what Conway had told him in confidence on his first day: “There are people inside the administration that think it is their job to save America from this president. That is not their job.” She was surprised to hear him go public with it.

  Scaramucci knew the establishment wouldn’t let him survive, and told Trump it would be a miracle if he lasted a year. But Trump liked his hard-driving style. “You’ve got some balls on you,” the president told him. “You are a tough son of a bitch.”

  But Scaramucci’s downfall was set in motion when he had dinner with the president, Sean Hannity, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and Bill Shine, the former co-president of Fox News. Scaramucci had worked with Shine as a Fox Business contributor, and wanted him to produce daily television at the White House.

  Ryan Lizza, the veteran New Yorker reporter and caustic Trump critic, learned of the dinner from a White House official and tweeted about it.

  Scaramucci, again convinced that Priebus had leaked the information, called Lizza and asked for his source, which he of course declined to provide.

  But Scaramucci made a rookie mistake. He assumed the conversation was off the record without saying so. And when he launched into an expletive-laden tirade, Lizza published it all.

  The New Yorker piece quoted Scaramucci as saying: “Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.…Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic.” Priebus, Scaramucci said, was trying to “see if I can cock-block these people the way I cock-blocked Scaramucci for six months.” And, he added, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock. I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the president.” Bannon was bemused by the anatomical challenge.

  As the Mooch saw it, Lizza knew full well that he had intended the comments to be off the record and had broken the bounds of human decency. But he had blundered by trusting him and felt Lizza had gotten him on the letter of the law.

  Scaramucci told Trump that the call was mischaracterized; it wasn’t an angry rant. On Lizza’s tape, the reporter could be heard laughing as the Mooch did his shtick. But he said he’d made a mistake and that he wouldn’t be dropping any more F-bombs to journalists. The president lectured him, though not without laughing at times. “You start out as Harvard Anthony, you wound up in the gutter with a crowbar in your hand,” Trump said.

  The drive to replace Obamacare had utterly collapsed.

  Senate Republicans finally abandoned the effort after one of their own, John McCain—hailed in glowing media accounts as a principled maverick bravely fighting a brain tumor and frequently at odds with Trump—flew back to Washington to cast the deciding vote against the last-ditch bill. He did so delivering a blast against “the bombastic loudmouths on the radio, television, and the Internet.”

  Liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman had denounced McCain as a “world-class hypocrite” for supporting an earlier version of the bill. But now most journalists cast McCain as a hero, and Trump as a humiliated dealmaker.

  The new media narrative was that most lawmakers no longer feared the new president, bucking him not only on health care, but giving overwhelming support to a bill, which Trump opposed but signed anyway, imposing tougher sanctions on Moscow.

  Reince Priebus wanted out. And while reporters assumed he was fighting for his political life, he was calling friends and saying the Scaramucci craziness was giving him the perfect escape route.

  Priebus could keep putting up with Mooch madness or he could resign. He was tired of the humiliations he had suffered from the start. He had been prepared to hang on a few more months, but Anthony’s antics had created a clear path to the exit.

  When Reince told the president he wanted out, Trump tried to dissuade him.

  “Let’s just play it slow, see what happens,” Trump said. “Let’s go to Bedminster and talk.”

  But Priebus said no and suggested a few names as possible replacement
s.

  The next morning, Trump announced on Twitter that John Kelly, the strong-willed retired Marine Corps general who was running Homeland Security, would become chief of staff. Only afterward did Trump thank Priebus for his service. Typically, Trump announced the decision without telling Priebus and without having made a formal offer to Kelly. The general went radio silent for two hours, calling his family to discuss the matter, but the Twitter preemption had left him little choice.

  The press, which never showed Priebus much respect, ran instant eulogies, depicting him as a weak chief of staff whose establishment pedigree had failed to produce a health care victory or tame the Wild West Wing. He played the obedient soldier, telling Wolf Blitzer and Sean Hannity that he wouldn’t get into “the mud” by responding to Scaramucci’s blasts.

  Most journalists were ready to salute Kelly, who had a well-deserved reputation as a leader. “New Chief of Staff Seen as a Beacon of Discipline,” the New York Times said in writing about a “dysfunctional” White House. “John Kelly Will Bring Plain-Spoken Discipline to an Often Chaotic West Wing,” the Washington Post agreed, describing a “floundering” administration at its “nadir.”

  The White House was at war with itself, so Trump brought in a real warrior, a Marine who had commanded troops in Iraq. But many pundits expressed skepticism about whether even a four-star general could rein in this commander-in-chief.

  Things suddenly took a nastier turn for Scaramucci. The New York Post’s Page Six reported that his wife had filed for divorce when she was eight months’ pregnant, supposedly complaining about his “naked political ambition,” and noted he hadn’t been there for the birth of their son. The Mooch suspected, without evidence, that Priebus, the day after he was ousted, had leaked that story through intermediaries, since the filing had been public for weeks.

  Scaramucci had predicted he wouldn’t survive a year. He lasted eleven days.

  He never saw it coming. Although Scaramucci had bragged, as a slap at Priebus, about dealing directly with the president, he sent John Kelly a message that he would happily report to him.

  But the president’s view had changed. As much as he enjoyed the Mooch’s brash style, he hated the media fallout. “Please stop talking,” Ivanka told Scaramucci. “You’re not the press secretary.”

  At eight a.m. on Monday, Scaramucci knew he was toast when his White House phone stopped working. Kelly was sworn in, and then asked for his resignation at 9:30. The president tweeted that morning that there was “no WH chaos!” Reporters, however, gave Scaramucci’s dismissal saturation coverage. Liberal media outlets were overjoyed. “TRUMP SCREWS THE MOOCH,” the Huffington Post banner blared.

  The man who had vowed to fire all the leakers was now the target of nasty White House leaks. The Washington Post reported that Kelly told associates he had found Scaramucci’s phone call to Lizza “abhorrent and embarrassing for the president.” Politico quoted an unnamed White House official as saying Scaramucci’s “antics over the past week were crazy by any standard.”

  In a bizarre way, once Scaramucci had completed his suicide mission against Priebus, his usefulness came to an end. It was now John Kelly’s mission to stop the leaks and bring order to the White House.

  A growing number of journalists were calling Donald Trump a liar—not just commentators but anchors and beat reporters. It was repeated like a mantra, as an established fact.

  It began with an evening earthquake from the Washington Post, which reported that the president himself had “dictated” Don Jr.’s first minimal, and misleading, statement about his meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya. The president’s lawyer, Jay Sekulow, had denied that Trump was involved, but Kellyanne Conway conceded the point with a pro-family twist, saying “the president weighed in because fathers do that.”

  Around the same time, Trump said he had received positive calls from Mexico’s president and the head of the Boy Scouts, though both denied making the calls.

  “So he lied?” ABC reporter Cecilia Vega asked at a briefing. Sarah Huckabee Sanders called that a “bold accusation,” saying the president was referring to personal conversations, not phone calls.

  On CNN, anchor John King said, “Is basic truth-telling too much to ask?…I’m waiting for my children to tell me, ‘It’s okay that I fib, Daddy, the president does it all the time.’”

  “There is evidence,” said CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “that Donald Trump likes to make things up.”

  The New York Times offered the thirty-thousand-foot view: “Many Politicians Lie. But Trump Has Elevated the Art of Fabrication.” While acknowledging the history of presidential prevarications, the piece said the scope of Trump’s falsehoods raised questions about whether “the consequences for politicians’ being caught saying things that just are not true have diminished over time”—much to the paper’s frustration.

  NBC’s Chuck Todd offered a stinging indictment: “Why is it so difficult for this administration to tell the truth the first time?”

  Todd often wrestled with whether he was going too far, whether they would be as tough on any president who behaved this way or were treating Trump differently. He felt they had to be careful not to play into the president’s hands. Todd worried that Steve Bannon had put them in a box by dubbing the media the opposition party, that any criticism would make them sound like political partisans.

  The paradox was that Chuck Todd had never had more access to a president. He could get Trump on the phone and was invited to off-the-record chats in the Oval Office. The sessions always began the same way, with Trump yelling at him over some NBC story or something he’d said, and Todd often shouting back. But after the first twenty minutes, they would settle down to a cordial conversation. It would begin with a tirade and end with a charm offensive.

  During one visit, Trump complained about journalists using fake sources.

  “You know we don’t make things up,” Todd told him. “Mr. President, you know we couldn’t report this story without people talking to us.”

  Hope Hicks quickly chimed in: “I keep telling him the call is coming from inside the building.”

  Todd thought Trump’s view of journalism had been distorted because, as a businessman, he had dealt with New York’s gossip columnists, and Washington journalists wouldn’t play ball the same way. Chuck had a running joke with Hope about his tempestuous relationship with the president: “We can’t quit each other.”

  For many in the media, Donald Trump was risking nuclear war.

  The North Korean regime was conducting advanced nuclear missile tests and making increasingly provocative threats against its neighbors and the United States. On August 8, the president told reporters on camera that further threats “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

  The mainstream media, which greatly preferred quiet diplomacy, immediately depicted Trump as bringing the country to the brink of a nuclear confrontation with Kim Jong Un. He repeated the harsh words at the second of two impromptu news conferences at his New Jersey resort, and later said that the military was “locked and loaded” if North Korea acted unwisely. There were breaking-news banners with each tough comment, such as that Kim “will regret it fast” if he kept up the threats.

  While Trump’s language might have been calculated to make Kim back down, it was obviously unsettling. CNN went on a war footing, reporting from a bunker in Hawaii after Kim said the islands were in range of his nuclear missiles and experts calculated the missiles could hit within twenty minutes of launch. On MSNBC, Brian Williams said his job was “actually to scare people to death on this subject.”

  The crisis “has been exaggerated and mishandled by the Trump administration to a degree that is deeply worrying and dangerous,” Fareed Zakaria announced.

  Other outlets questioned Trump’s sanity in ways large and small. A Huffington Post banner called him “M.A.D. MAN,” playing on the acronym for mutually assured destruction. Politico ran a piece titled “The Madman and the Bomb,” hark
ening back to Nixon and the question of an unstable president controlling the nuclear codes.

  Trump-hating celebrities launched their own missiles. Chelsea Handler appeared to call for a coup against the president, tweeting: “To all the generals surrounding our idiot-in-chief…the longer U wait to remove him, the longer UR name will appear negatively in history.” So much for elections.

  CHAPTER 24

  CHARLOTTESVILLE CATASTROPHE

  The television crews were on high alert in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a Saturday morning protest by white supremacists and neo-Nazis. When it was over, one woman had been killed, three dozen people wounded, and Donald Trump’s presidency stained.

  That was the overwhelming media consensus, across the political spectrum, after the president chose to denounce the violent outbreak, which included one man ramming his car into a crowd, in generic language. “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides,” Trump said. But as the press was relentless in pointing out, only one side had killed anyone.

  From the right, National Review ran an editorial titled “Condemn the White Supremacists, Mr. President.” From the left, a New York Times editorial said: “Let’s discard the fiction that President Trump wasn’t placating white supremacists by responding so weakly.”

  Trump’s critics were ablaze with anger. “What a pathetic statement,” Joe Scarborough said. “We have a president who is scared of calling out racism and terrorism. Disgraceful and disgusting.” CNN’s Chris Cillizza said that “it’s hard to overstate how unpresidential it is to not condemn white supremacy and paint Charlottesville as a ‘both sides do it’ issue.” Times columnist Paul Krugman flat-out declared that “the current president of the United States isn’t a real American.”