The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  Dedication

  For H.O.P.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1: Empty Frames

  2: The First Lie

  3: The Enemy

  4: Russia, If You’re Listening

  5: Spicy Time

  6: The Worst Wing

  7: Charlottesville

  8: “We Reap What We Sow . . .”

  9: Dictators over Democracies

  10: Humbled in Helsinki

  11: The Rallies

  12: Fear and Losing

  13: A White House Smear

  14: Revocation and Redemption

  Epilogue: America, If You’re Listening

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  “This is CNN breaking news. . . .”

  I was sitting on a plane just minutes after takeoff when the news alert flashed across the cabin’s TV screens. It was the morning of October 25, 2018, and I was en route from Washington’s Ronald Reagan National Airport to San Francisco, where I would be delivering a speech at San Jose State University on the state of the news business under President Donald J. Trump and accepting an award from the school’s journalism program. I’d been planning on using the flight to work on my speech, but suddenly I was glued to the screen in front of me.

  The New York City Police Department had units surrounding the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, across from Central Park. CNN’s headquarters was being evacuated after a suspicious package had been discovered in the building’s mailroom. A pipe bomb had been sent to CNN in New York, but its intended target was former CIA director John Brennan, a frequent Trump critic. The device was similar to bombs that had been mailed to Trump’s leading Democratic Party adversaries, including former president Barack Obama and Trump’s rival in the 2016 election, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

  It has all been building up to some kind of act of violence, I thought.

  I had feared the day would come when the president’s rhetoric would lead one of his supporters to harm or even murder a journalist. And when it happened, the United States would undergo something of a sea change, joining the list of countries around the world where journalists were no longer safe reporting the truth. Perhaps we have already entered that era, a dangerous time to tell the truth in America.

  Of course, there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it from where I was, strapped to my seat at the beginning of a five-hour flight to Northern California. All I could do was watch as the images of domestic terrorism played out on my tiny in-flight TV.

  Yes, for a reporter, there are few things worse than missing a big story like this one. But “fear of missing out” was not the emotion I was feeling at that moment. I was pissed off. Really, really pissed off. This was a terrorist attack on my news organization and, without a doubt, on the American free press.

  Since the days before the Iowa caucuses in 2016, I had covered both Trump’s unimaginable rise to power and his tumultuous presidency. My photographers, producers, and I had covered the rallies where Trump demonized the press, where he called us “disgusting” and “dishonest,” before moving on, at a news conference he held before being sworn into office, to dub my network and me “fake news.” We had listened to the chants of “CNN sucks” from his crowds of supporters, seen them give us the middle finger, and heard them call us “traitors” and “scum.” And of course, who could forget when the president of the United States said we were “the enemy of the people”?

  On the way to California, I ripped up my original speech for the folks at San Jose State and started from scratch. The students, I had decided, would get the unvarnished truth about what I had been witnessing during my time covering Trump. I was afraid the president, I later told the crowd, was putting our lives in danger. But this was no time to back down. The truth, I argued, was bigger than a president who is acting like a bully. We were in a fight for the truth, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

  Throughout Trump’s race for the White House and during his first two years in office, I have been jotting down anecdotes, collecting quotes from sources, listening to stories from Trump aides and associates past and present, and stockpiling reflections on what is clearly the most important political story of my life. In many ways it is one I have been preparing to tell ever since I knew I wanted to be a journalist.

  Growing up in the DC area, I have politics in my blood. The Washington Post was delivered to our house every morning. My parents were blue collar, but Mom read the Post from cover to cover each day. Dad worked at local grocery stores and came home with stories of meeting the likes of Dick Gephardt, the former Missouri congressman and Democratic presidential candidate. As for me, I went to high school with the daughter of U.S. senator Trent Lott. My best friend Robert’s father, Eugene Dwyer, worked at the State Department.

  Unlike a lot of young journalists these days, I took the traditional local news route to my jobs in network and cable news. Over the years, I worked everywhere, from DC to Knoxville to Dallas to Chicago, learning from some great journalists and covering everything under the sun. In local news, I was constantly on the go, running between city hall, the courthouse, and police headquarters. That’s how I began to cultivate sources, generate scoops, and, above all, report things to the best of my ability in a fair and accurate fashion.

  Eventually, CBS News gave me the opportunity of a lifetime: working under the likes of Dan Rather and Bob Schieffer. I covered the war in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the presidential campaign of John Kerry. It was an amazing transition for me, one that opened up a huge world of possibilities, but it was CNN that gave me the job I had always wanted, as a political reporter. In 2008, I covered Barack Obama’s epic battle with Hillary Clinton. In 2010, I carved out a niche for myself covering the rise of the Tea Party (an assignment that would prepare me well for surviving Trump’s rallies many years down the line). And two years later, the network had me covering Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid.

  After Romney’s defeat, CNN moved me over to the White House to cover Obama’s second term. “No drama Obama,” as he was known, experienced plenty of drama during his final four years in office. The Benghazi attack, the ill-fated rollout of the Obamacare website, the rise of ISIS, and the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs were all serious challenges that plagued Obama, damaging his legacy as the president who stopped a second Great Depression and ordered the mission to take out Osama bin Laden. As it turns out, many of the stories that kept us busy during Obama’s second term, such as ISIS and the president’s inability to pass immigration reform, teed up some of the themes Trump would ride into the Oval Office.

  Long before he became a presidential candidate, Trump was a political fixture on cable news partly because of his devotion to the “birther” movement, which was fueled by the false conspiracy theory that Obama had not been born in the United States. Trump was one of the biggest proponents of this bogus claim about the nation’s first African American president. With his successful reality TV show, The Apprentice, Trump was already a star, but the “birther” conspiracy made him something of a household name in conservative circles, as he began popping up on “the shows” to talk about his strong suspicion that Obama wasn’t really an American. It was shameful.

  The Washington establishment, truth be told, did not consider Trump a credible figure. And President Obama brushed off the attacks coming from him as the rants of a “carnival barker.” Still, I remember that we in the press gave that outlandish birther lie a ridiculous amount of coverage.


  After Trump declared his run for president in June 2015, few folks inside Obama’s West Wing gave him good odds on winning the White House. For them, he was considered more of a punch line than presidential material. Hillary Clinton, they were convinced, would be the next president.

  It didn’t take long for that view to change.

  By the fall of 2015, as Trump was beginning to draw large crowds at his rallies, I remember attending an off-record reception at the office of National Security Advisor Susan Rice. (Think drinks with the staff.) A top official asked me if I thought Trump could actually win the Republican nomination. Sure, I said. Just look at the massive audiences showing up at his events.

  The Obama people were beginning to pay attention, but they were still fully confident that Clinton would become the forty-fifth president. So was just about everybody else.

  After Obama’s State of the Union address in 2016, I exited the gates of the White House with a new assignment on the horizon. For the next ten months, I would cover the Trump campaign, from the Iowa caucuses to Election Night in Midtown Manhattan. I would then settle into my hotel across from Central Park for the transition period, until, mercifully, I was finally able to get back home to Washington.

  I’ll never forget what I saw on the campaign trail and what I have witnessed covering the Trump presidency. Even now, more than two years into his presidency, it’s still shocking to remember Trump, as a presidential candidate, saying he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and get away with it. It’s still shocking to remember him mocking the captivity of a war hero the way he mocked John McCain, poking fun at a disabled reporter, and describing Mexican undocumented immigrants as “rapists”—and still escaping the kind of accountability that would have knocked anyone else out of the race.

  Beyond the slash-and-burn tactics employed by his campaign against his rivals, Trump has often twisted the truth, lied, and attacked those who would call out his falsehoods—most notably the national press corps. The Washington Post fact-checkers have catalogued nearly ten thousand false or misleading statements in the first two years of his presidency. He has thrived in this upside-down, through-the-looking-glass landscape because facts don’t carry the same currency they once did. The late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” But that’s hardly the case anymore. These days, everybody has his or her own set of facts. The result: facts are under attack, every minute of every day, in our fractured news spectrum—think Breitbart and Fox News—and of course on social media. Just try to ask a question the president doesn’t want to answer, and you’re sometimes labeled “fake news” or “the enemy of the people.” Or worse than that: one administration official nicknamed me, I think affectionately, “public enemy number one.”

  The hardest part to understand is how too many of my fellow Americans have accepted and, in some cases, even adopted this degradation of our political culture. In short, America has changed right before my eyes. I see this phenomenon in the death threats and violent messages streaming into my social media accounts. Self-described Trump supporters have left countless messages saying I should be murdered in all sorts of medieval ways. The comments posted on my Instagram and Facebook pages recommend that I be castrated, decapitated, and set on fire. Out of curiosity, I will click on the accounts responsible for these horrific messages. Theirs was the same kind of hatred that had now driven someone to send pipe bombs to CNN.

  Knowing that I still had hours until the plane touched down in San Francisco, I sat back in my seat and stared blankly at the TV screen, thinking about everything that had led up to this moment. In spite of the fear I felt for my colleagues and myself—the threat of physical violence now felt suddenly, horribly real—I knew this was no time to be intimidated. This was the time to ask the hard questions.

  I remember sitting down for drinks one afternoon with a senior White House official who blurted out, “The president’s insane.” The official went on to confide that when he came into office, Trump did not understand the Constitution. What were the rules for appointing Cabinet officials? Trump wanted to know. How long can an acting secretary stay on? The official was frustrated with Trump’s ignorance, his behavior. A lot of us are. But is Trump really to blame for what we see every day? Or should we look in the mirror for a change? Do we want this to be the state of our politics? Over the last couple of years, there has been plenty of conversation about whether we have allowed our political discourse to descend to a level that is beneath all of us. There is a growing chorus, not just among Democrats and liberals, but of Republicans and conservatives as well, who are exhausted with the disintegration of decency in our elections. In the decades to come, what in the world will we put in our history books to explain what has happened to America?

  The answer: That depends on what we do right now. Because it’s all riding on us.

  I have seen my life turned upside down covering Trump. His attacks on me and my colleagues, dedicated and talented journalists, have real-life consequences. My family and friends worry about my safety. I hope at the end of the day the sacrifice will be worth it. No. I know it will be.

  1

  Empty Frames

  As the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States approached, there were reminders everywhere of how dramatically the world was about to change. On January 19, 2017, I was reporting from the White House on the final day of Barack Obama’s administration. But the story was no longer Obama; his time was up. The story was the arrival of Trump. And there was a sense of dread inside the Obama West Wing.

  That day, the last before Trump would be sworn into office, I decided to roam the media-accessible hallway of the West Wing that leads to the area known as “Upper Press.” This is where the office of the White House press secretary is located, and I was milling around, looking to say farewell to some of the people who had worked for Obama. The last press secretary of the Obama administration, Josh Earnest, had already cleared out his office. He was gone. So, too, was Eric Schultz, Obama’s deputy press secretary. Schultz and I had developed a good working relationship during my time covering the Obama White House.

  Anybody who knew Eric understood full well that he had his own misgivings about the press. He thought we chased Trump’s bright, shiny objects too much, and he was right. Schultz also enjoyed needling me over my question to Obama at a news conference at the 2015 G20 summit in Turkey. That was when I pressed Obama on his administration’s inability to control the spread of the terrorist group ISIS as it stormed across Iraq and Syria, creating a caliphate that destabilized the region and was responsible for murdering a number of foreign journalists.

  “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” I asked Obama at that news conference.

  Obama offered a detailed and somewhat detached, almost clinical response to the question. Obama, for all his strengths and intellect, seemed to have misread the public’s anxiety over ISIS, something his own aides would later admit to me privately. People inside the White House were incensed over the question at the time, and Schultz never let me forget that the Obama team disliked the question. From that day forward, Eric would email me news reports of various success stories from the Obama White House battle against ISIS.

  “We got one of the bastards,” he would email me from time to time. He meant it, in part, in good fun—or so I thought—but it was also a way for him to let me know I had pissed them off.

  In the days following Trump’s victory, I’d caught up with Eric in his office. Schultz had an unforgettable look of sleep-deprived agony on his face. During the run-up to the 2016 campaign, he and I had lengthy discussions about the wisdom of Hillary Clinton running for president. Schultz, like many in the Obama White House, was despondent that Clinton seemed to have botched what should have been a thoroughly winnable campaign. They had all suffered a crushing loss. They had all banked on the conventional wisdom that was ma
rrow deep in Washington that Trump had no chance of winning. How could the man who had laughably accused Obama of not having been born in the United States succeed the first African American president of the United States, they all wondered with dread. How could it all end like this? they thought.

  Now, standing in Upper Press on the night of January 19, I saw that Eric and the rest of the Obama gang had vanished from the press-accessible areas of the West Wing. All I could find, as I looked around, were empty walls, empty desks, and an eerie silence. It is a sight few Americans ever get to see. Obama’s aides had packed up to leave. This was the transition of power under way. Out with the old and in with the new. This is how our democracy works.

  No image crystallized this cold reality more than the picture frames hanging in the hallway outside Upper Press. During the Obama years, photographs of the forty-fourth president and his family hung there. But on the night of January 19, the frames were empty. The photos of Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama had been taken down. Over the next several weeks, pictures of Trump and his family would fill those frames. Until then, they were a blank canvas.

  In a sense, every new administration is an empty frame, and we were all about to learn how Trump would fill his. For all the bluster on the campaign trail, no one knew for sure exactly how he would govern. Of course, some things were easy to envision. Trump’s ability to pit one group of Americans against another, his bullying of immigrants, and yes, his demonizing of the press and assaults on the truth were also hallmarks of his rise to power. Trump was brash, but that’s being too kind; he could also act like a bully. With this style of governance, the question was clear: would he change the office, or would the office change him?