Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  CNBC’s John Harwood began a piece by saying Trump’s father had been arrested at a Klan rally ninety years ago—a disputed fact based on an ambiguous 1927 New York Times story, and denied by Trump—and ended by raising the possibility “that Trump’s presidency itself will be cut short.”

  Even Jimmy Fallon, the only late-night host not regularly skewering Trump, called the remarks “shameful.”

  The president was again defying political convention and then refusing to back down. By declining to name the fringe groups, Trump allowed his detractors to charge that these were his people, that he was determined not to alienate his base. Many journalists noted that he was quicker to blast Mitch McConnell or Mika Brzezinski than people marching with swastika flags. And it was the mirror image of Trump’s criticism of Barack Obama for not naming radical Islamic terrorists, a cause the media had never embraced.

  It was true that the press was far more consumed by Trump’s reticent language than by the violence in Virginia. All sense of proportion had been lost. But Ivanka Trump tweeted that there was “no place in society for racism, white supremacy and neo-Nazis”—and privately urged her dad to step up his criticism. Mike Pence and many other Republicans condemned the groups as well. And that allowed journalists to bring up Trump’s apparent hesitancy during the campaign to criticize David Duke, who was at the rally.

  Steve Bannon had been having his regular Saturday coffee meeting with Robert Costa when the Washington Post reporter glanced up at the office television and said, “Man, this Charlottesville thing.” Bannon, who grew up in Virginia, didn’t know what he was talking about. He quickly called the editor of Breitbart and told him to dispatch a team there.

  On Monday morning, as the staff debated whether the president needed to say more, Bannon argued against it. Trump, he told Kelly, was close to having another racially charged uproar like the campaign blowups over his calling Judge Gonzalo Curiel biased over his Mexican heritage and his harsh criticism of Gold Star father Khizr Khan.

  While other aides pushed for a more explicit denunciation of the hate groups at the University of Virginia, Bannon warned that things would spin out of control. Trump would read the scripted words without enthusiasm and the press would dismiss whatever he said as too late and not enough.

  He did not prevail. That afternoon, the president finally said that “racism is evil” and included “the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups.” The media reaction was pretty much as Bannon had predicted. Trump was “LATE ON HATE,” the Huffington Post scoffed. MSNBC complained that he hadn’t used the word “terrorism.” NBC’s Katy Tur said Trump hadn’t spoken “from the heart.” CNN’s Jim Acosta shouted a question about why he hadn’t named the groups earlier. “You know,” said Trump, “I like real news, not fake news. You’re fake news.”

  The next day, the White House was planning a Trump Tower event on pruning regulations for infrastructure projects. Bannon, again, argued against it. The announcement was a nothing-burger, he said, and Trump would inevitably take some questions. CNN would bait him and there would be a meltdown.

  Bannon recalled a prescient warning from Corey Lewandowski: You can’t just let Trump be Trump, but at the same time you can’t control him too tightly without having a pressure valve, or else he would erupt.

  As if on cue, the president, who was not scheduled to take questions, went rogue. In another act of defiance disorder, he stunned his advisers—John Kelly was looking down, grim-faced—by staging an impromptu news conference and appearing to equate the white supremacists in Charlottesville with the counter-protestors. “You had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that, but I’ll say it right now,” Trump told the press. Some of the marchers were “very fine people,” and “if you were honest reporters, and in many cases you’re not,” the stories would say that they “were there to protest the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.”

  That, of course, prompted the networks to show footage of torch-bearing marchers shouting anti-Semitic slogans, with no sighting of “nice” folks among them. And while some of the left-wing “Antifa” counter-protestors had hit the marchers with clubs, the press hardly viewed them as equivalent to the raging band of neo-Nazis.

  What followed in the media was the fiercest and most sustained eruption of moral outrage since Trump took office. The mask dropped and journalists who had long insinuated or suggested that Trump was a racist came out and called him just that. “Mr. Trump Gives Comfort to Racists,” said a Washington Post editorial. Jake Tapper called the comments “unpatriotic” and “un-American.” The even-tempered Willie Geist said on MSNBC that Trump’s message “was extraordinary and it was despicable.” And Jim Acosta said on CNN, “he has united the country against the views that he espoused today, which were right there on the edge of white nationalism.”

  Mika Brzezinski went the furthest, saying Trump had “created a permissive climate for violence” and “the blood and carnage will be on his hands.” That was the most audacious of charges, one that had sometimes been hurled at Obama after violence committed by blacks against police officers.

  But the condemnation was almost as loud on the right. “A moral disgrace,” Fox’s Charles Krauthammer said. Fox News host Kat Timpf said, “I have too much eye makeup on to start crying right now. It’s disgusting.” Former Bush aide Nicolle Wallace said on MSNBC that the president had “so disgraced not just the Republican Party, but the country.”

  Some no doubt were expressing deep feelings. I was also disappointed that Trump had made the divisive remarks. But many of the denunciations were marked by an exasperated, we-tried-to-warn-you tone.

  So many corporate executives bailed on Trump’s advisory councils that the president had to abolish them, winning the business titans instant media praise. CEOs were “testing their moral voice,” the New York Times said, and Trump was “inspiring C-suite moral courage,” in the Washington Post’s words. As the likes of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and Presidents George W. and George H. W. Bush issued tough statements, it was easier for the press to portray Trump as isolated.

  Trump had made at least some reasonable comments. In a series of tweets, he wrote, “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson—who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!”

  But to the media, he was on the wrong side of a cultural civil war.

  And, once again, his own administration was at war with itself, with some aides using leaks as a vote of no confidence in the president. The New York Times had this killer paragraph: “The president’s top advisers described themselves as stunned, despondent and numb. Several said they were unable to see how Mr. Trump’s presidency would recover, and others expressed doubts about his capacity to do the job.” And General Kelly, initially hailed for his military discipline, was said to be “frustrated.” The Washington Post reported that chief economic adviser Gary Cohn, who had been standing near Trump at his impromptu news conference, was “disgusted” and “frantically unhappy.”

  Bannon was livid too—but for other reasons. He told colleagues that Cohn and his compatriots were wrong to leak against Trump. The leakers were pouring gasoline on the fire, giving cover to Republican lawmakers to talk about censuring the president, and that, Bannon felt, could be a preamble to impeachment.

  Trump called “shame” on the media for distorting his position, but as with a number of other controversies, his wounds were largely self-inflicted, and legions of pundits raced to pour salt in those wounds.

  It was another turning point. The media had declared him a domestic policy failure when the health care bill collapsed. The media had declared him an ethical failure when the Russia investigation enveloped his inner circle. The media had declared him a foreign policy failure when he threatened t
o annihilate North Korea. Now the media were declaring him a moral failure as he spread the blame beyond the white supremacists to the Antifa counter-protesters for the violence at Charlottesville. And his first summer in office wasn’t even over.

  Steve Bannon knew that part of the media backlash was aimed at him, since he had been counseling the president throughout the weekend and was viewed as the alt-right guy in the White House. Despite the hailstorm of negative coverage, Bannon thought Trump was providing a strong example of cultural leadership.

  He had no use for these extremist creeps with their Nazi slogans, but he believed that Trump was outsmarting the Democrats, who seemed to be obsessed with making everything about race. Bannon believed that bringing back manufacturing jobs would do more to help the black, white, and Hispanic working class, than any number of speeches about racism. But palace intrigue, Bannon knew, was much more alluring for the press than substantive issues. Charlottesville was a proxy war, and he was target.

  Pundits and pols called for him to be fired. Rupert Murdoch, who spoke to Trump about every ten days, had been urging him for months to dump Steve Bannon, viewing him as a leaker and a dark influence on Trump. Bannon had his own resentments, recalling that Murdoch had initially opposed Trump while Breitbart had been firmly behind him. It was true that Trump was not Murdoch’s first choice, but he preferred him over Ted Cruz and there was no way he would have backed Hillary Clinton.

  Breitbart opined that no one, including Steve Bannon, was bigger than Trump, but that “getting rid of Bannon would be the strongest signal to his voters that Trump has sold them out.”

  What no one knew was that two weeks earlier, Bannon had met with John Kelly and offered his resignation. It was clear that Kelly wanted him out. The strategist knew that his usefulness was about to expire, that the Marine general Kelly would rein in the old Navy officer Bannon. And he believed that you could only fight so many battles without bleeding out.

  Had Priebus remained, Bannon felt, he probably would have stayed on, if only to support Reince after they had forged a pragmatic alliance. But Kelly was running a tight ship for everyone; even Ivanka, Bannon would say, couldn’t run to daddy and cry. Bannon had been right on target when he told friends that he would probably last eight months.

  He realized he had made too many enemies inside the mansion, from Jared and Ivanka, who had wanted him out for months, to Gary Cohn and H. R. McMaster, who he was fighting virtually every day. And Bannon was losing more battles, from his push to raise taxes on the rich to dropping the militaristic approach toward North Korea.

  Bannon knew he still had clout with the president, but felt it waning. In the end he was just another schmendrick in a meeting, arguing against what he called “the apparatus.” In the White House he had influence, but if he returned to Breitbart—if he once again ran his own media operation—he would have power. Breitbart was a machine. He could seize an issue and put it on the national radar without the shackles of an administration bureaucracy.

  Bannon went back to Kelly and said he definitely wanted to leave. But, he said, “You can’t tell the boss.”

  He knew that Trump would chat about it with everyone and the news would quickly leak. But Bannon also confided in one of the president’s lawyers, John Dowd, and the next day Trump found out. The president called him and said he wanted to think about it. Bannon figured Trump wanted to make sure that he wouldn’t go buck wild on Jared and Ivanka after leaving the premises.

  Bannon tried to justify his disruptive style. “I am going after the guys who are stopping your program, because you are dead in the water,” he told Trump. He also warned the president that he was not feared or respected on Capitol Hill.

  The press was starting to play up Trump’s feud with Mitch McConnell, and things were worse than the headlines suggested. Trump told Bannon that he wanted McConnell out as majority leader.

  Bannon and Trump eventually agreed to announce his departure on Monday, August 14. But that weekend, Charlottesville erupted.

  He and Trump agreed to delay the announcement. Bannon did not want to be painted as a white nativist leaving in the middle of a racially charged mess. Bannon told Maggie Haberman off the record that he was on his way out. He might have detested the press, but at the moment he felt he needed the New York Times. She wrote that Bannon was in “a kind of internal exile.”

  Trump told reporters that he liked Bannon as a friend and that “he is not a racist, I can tell you that. He actually gets a very unfair press in that regard.” What Trump conspicuously would not say was that his friend would stay in the job.

  Bannon had a five-hour dinner on Long Island with billionaire financier Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Breitbart, and was assured that his old job as executive chairman of the website was waiting for him. They had met three times over the summer, and Mercer had urged Bannon to stay in the White House. But the next night, after dining with Trump, Mercer called Bannon. “I want you out of there right away,” he said.

  In a bizarre twist, Bannon made an out-of-the-blue call to Robert Kuttner, the liberal co-editor of the American Prospect (whose first issue after the election was “Resisting Trump”). He knew that Kuttner was a hawk on trade with China and wanted to put that issue in play. He ripped Gary Cohn and said some administration officials he had targeted were “wetting themselves.” He also called the white supremacist movement “a collection of clowns” and argued that “the media plays it up too much.”

  But Bannon’s real strategy was in undercutting the president on North Korea, saying, “There’s no military solution here, they got us.” He knew that would cause people’s heads to explode.

  Despite the media chatter that Bannon might have pulled a Mooch—and thought he was off the record—he knew exactly what he was doing, drawing fire away from the president. He gave quotes to the New York Times and Washington Post as well.

  Kelly was outraged by the comments to Kuttner. On August 18, after word dribbled out to Drudge, the White House confirmed that Steve Bannon was out.

  Most of the press misconstrued Bannon’s influence by viewing him as a malevolent force. He didn’t push Trump anywhere that the president didn’t want to go. But he was a disruptive figure precisely because he believed that was the only way to force change on an entrenched establishment.

  The press practically cheered Bannon’s ouster. With few exceptions “the Bannon presidency was a colossal failure,” the Wall Street Journal editorial page said. MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace said his legacy could not be separated “from racism and from Charlottesville.”

  Reporters on Twitter insisted that the real problem was his former boss. “Ultimately you don’t need a Bannon when you are a Bannon,” Glenn Thrush wrote. And CNBC’s John Harwood said: “Bannon’s departure can’t resolve core problems of Trump WH: his selfishness, impulsiveness, inattention, ignorance.”

  With Spicer, Priebus, Scaramucci, Bannon, and Bannon ally and national security aide Sebastian Gorka gone within weeks; Jared distracted with the Russia probe; and outside advisers no longer allowed to stroll into the Oval Office; the atmosphere in the White House changed. Kellyanne Conway was now a stabilizing force; Hope Hicks was elevated to communications director, and there was no drama churning around her.

  Conway thought the media were being grossly unfair by using Trump’s language as an opportunity to impugn his character. It would have been better if he had ripped the protesting neo-Nazis and then talked about bad people generally, but that was not the way he spoke. And what if the president had gone too far with his Charlottesville remarks—how did that affect the average voter?

  The biggest problem, Kellyanne thought, was that nobody had the guts to stand up to those who falsely accused Trump of being a racist.

  Bannon, meanwhile, had shrewdly stage-managed his relaunch. Five hours after leaving the White House, he walked back into the Breitbart townhouse on Capitol Hill and chaired the evening editorial meeting. And he started making news.

  “The
Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon told the Weekly Standard. This stirred up some uninformed media speculation that he would exact revenge by attacking Trump. His real plan was to keep whacking his White House antagonists and others who opposed his populist agenda, and to harness his notoriety to make Breitbart a dominant force in conservative media.

  He was now Bannon the Barbarian, unchained from the White House, and more excited than he’d been in months. He concluded that the press had normalized him in just twenty-four hours as they pivoted to saying he wasn’t all that important.

  He knew that he wasn’t the media’s ultimate target. That, of course, was Donald Trump.

  CHAPTER 25

  TACKLING THE SPORTS WORLD

  By the media’s conventional yardstick, Donald Trump was in deep trouble. His approval ratings were mired in the mid-30s. Republican lawmakers were openly criticizing him. His congressional agenda was stalled. Corporate executives he had counted on for cooperation were running for the exits. Charities canceled events at Mar-a-Lago. Entertainers shunned him, prompting him to pull out of the Kennedy Center Honors. Rabbis canceled a Jewish New Year conference call. A Democratic state senator in Missouri even hoped on Facebook that Trump would be assassinated, with little uproar. The president blamed much of this on the media. Most elected Republicans stuck by him, as did an overwhelming majority of Republican voters, despite calamities that would sink an ordinary politician.

  Trump represented one side of a cultural civil war, with the press clearly on the other, which is why the president’s supporters loved his attacks on a media establishment that viewed them with such condescension. It was a view summed up in the headline, “Dear Trump Voters: You’re a Bunch of Idiots,” which ran over a column by conservative Trump critic Matt Lewis in the Daily Beast. The more that Trump was under media assault, the more his base rallied around him.