by Jim Acosta
Trump had told some whoppers during the campaign. The biggest whopper of them all may have been his vow to build a wall and make Mexico pay for it, especially in light of Trump’s repeated efforts to force U.S. taxpayers to foot the bill for the immense project. Still, there was much more to Trump’s mountain of stump speech manure.
He falsely accused Ted Cruz’s father of being a part of the conspiracy to assassinate John F. Kennedy.
Trump questioned the validity of the U.S. unemployment rate, arguing it was more than 40 percent when it was really in the neighborhood of 5 percent.
He said he witnessed Muslims celebrating the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. That never happened.
Trump claimed he was against the Iraq War even as past interviews demonstrated that he had supported the Bush administration’s military misadventure there.
He lied about how much Trump family money he received to start his own business, falsely stating his father gave him only $1 million, a fraction of the actual amount of that financial support.
It is no wonder Trump demonizes the press. As Lesley Stahl of CBS News once told Judy Woodruff of PBS, Trump confided to her that he calls the media “fake news” so people won’t believe what the press is reporting.
There we were, sitting inside the lobby of Trump Tower, listening to the next president of the United States rip us to shreds. But Trump was simply doing what he had done throughout the campaign: attack the messenger. Same as at the rallies. Over the course of the 2016 campaign, he had called us:
Dishonest
Disgusting
Liars
Scum
Thieves
Sleaze
The worst
The “fake news” attack on CNN and BuzzFeed at the press conference felt like a coordinated strike. As Trump likes to put it, when he gets hit, he hits back ten times harder. After listening to this withering criticism of my employer, and after months of hearing Trump’s crowds chant “CNN sucks” on the campaign trail, I decided I was going to get my question answered. One way or another, I had to ask Trump about the Russians. Did they have the goods on him? And perhaps more important, had his associates had any contacts with the Russians during the course of the campaign?
Finally, my opening arrived. For most of the press conference, Trump had been waving me off. While I called out, “Mr. President-elect,” loudly but respectfully at least a dozen times, he selected other reporters for questions. He would look at me and shake his head as if to say, “No question.” So, I had a decision to make: either I would let the attacks stand and we’d walk out of that news conference after taking his abuse one more time, or I would disrupt the news conference and try a move he hadn’t seen coming.
Here’s what I was thinking: Trump had attacked CNN’s credibility. He had called us “fake news.” It was only fair that we ask a question, even if it meant causing a bit of a scene. So, that’s what I did.
ACOSTA: Since you’re attacking us, can you give us a question? Mr. President-elect—
TRUMP: Go ahead [spoken to another reporter].
ACOSTA: Mr. President-elect, since you are attacking our news organization—
TRUMP: Not you. Not you.
ACOSTA: Can you give us a chance?
TRUMP: Your organization is terrible.
ACOSTA: You are attacking our news organization, can you give us a chance to ask a question, sir? Sir, can you—
TRUMP: Quiet.
ACOSTA: Mr. President-elect, can you say—
TRUMP: He’s asking a question, don’t be rude. Don’t be rude.
ACOSTA: Can you give us a question since you’re attacking us? Can you give us a question?
TRUMP: Don’t be rude. No, I’m not going to give you a question. I’m not going to give you a question.
ACOSTA: Can you state—
TRUMP: You are fake news. Go ahead [again, to another reporter].
ACOSTA: Sir, can you state categorically that nobody—no, Mr. President-elect, that’s not appropriate.
I shook my head. There was no need to go any further. My point had been made. In hindsight, I wish I had said something more than “that’s not appropriate.” But there it was; it had happened: a U.S. president had impugned the integrity of a news organization with a catchphrase that sounded a lot like “You’re fired,” from his days on The Apprentice.
As the PBS documentary program Frontline later revealed in an episode on the Russia investigation, broadcast in the fall of 2018, I did manage to spit out my question despite Trump’s repeated interruptions:
“Did you or your aides or associates have any contacts with the Russians during the campaign?”
Not surprisingly, he didn’t answer.
My disruption was not received well by the Trump transition team. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the president-elect’s incoming chief strategist, Steve Bannon, motion to Trump’s private security team. Bannon wanted me tossed out.
Moments later, Sean Spicer moved in my direction. He looked at me and said if I did that again I would be removed from the news conference. To punctuate his point, he gestured in the same way a baseball umpire calls a batter out. If I tried that again, Spicer made clear, I would be out of the game.
After the news conference was over, Spicer walked up to me again and scolded me further, insisting that in disrupting the news conference I had crossed a line and that my behavior was inappropriate. I tried to shake his hand, but he refused. He had a job to do. He had to stand up for his boss. But I had had a job to do as well. My job, in that moment, had been to ask a question of the president-elect. It was obviously a question Trump did not want to address.
He did finally answer it, though. At the tail end of the news conference, a reporter from ABC News, Cecilia Vega, posed the same question I had tried to ask: whether any of the president’s associates had had contact with the Russians during the campaign. But her query was only the first half of a two-part question. Trump answered the second half of the question from the podium but notably sidestepped the part about contact with the Russians.
He finally answered as he was walking to the elevator at the end of the news conference. “No,” he said, before racing out of the lobby. There was no time for a follow-up. The elevator doors had closed.
As the world would learn much later, as many as fourteen individuals associated with him and his campaign had had some form of contact with Russians during the course of the campaign. And because the question had been asked, now Trump was on record with an answer. It just so happened that that answer wasn’t true.
* * *
AFTER THE NEWS CONFERENCE, THE MAGNITUDE OF MY ACTIONS started to dawn on me. In the moment, I had merely acted to try to get Trump to take my question. Now, as I made my way across the lobby of Trump Tower, I realized I had done something that would be considered pretty controversial: I had made myself part of the story.
I was curious how the moment had come across to my colleagues. First, I turned to my producer for the Trump Tower press conference, Elizabeth Landers. I won’t forget the look on her face: her jaw had dropped. She was speechless. I then turned to my former producer and longtime friend Matt Hoye. He was there, producing for my colleague and correspondent Sara Murray. “What did you think?” I asked him.
“It was great!” he exclaimed.
Landers then turned to me and grabbed my attention. I was in a bit of a daze at that moment. CNN wanted me on the air immediately. Reporters from other news outlets tried to stop me as I made my way to the camera. The question was essentially: why’d you do that, Jim?
I then recounted live on CNN the events that had unfolded at the press conference. I explained that CNN had been under attack from the incoming president. We deserved a question, I argued. Unfortunately, Spicer had made things personal. In subsequent interviews on the Trump campaign’s favorite network, Fox News, Sean would call me a liar and a “disgrace,” demanding that I apologize to the president-elect for my behavior, wh
ich he called disrespectful. I tried to take the high road. As I later explained on CNN, I didn’t take Spicer’s attacks personally. In fact, I mentioned that I had known Sean for years, and added that I liked and respected him.
CNN released a very strong statement defending my attempts to ask a question at the news conference. “Being persistent and asking tough questions is his job, and he has our complete support,” the statement read. That was a relief. It’s good when the company backs you up, especially with something as big as this.
The CNN statement addressed some of Spicer’s criticism and the incoming press secretary’s own occasional challenges with telling the truth. “As we have learned many times, just because Sean Spicer says something doesn’t make it true. Jim Acosta is a veteran reporter with the utmost integrity and extensive experience in covering both the White House and the President-elect,” the statement read.
That moment at Trump Tower put Spicer and me on something of a collision course, one that would play out countless times during the daily White House briefings. As for Spicer’s demand that I apologize—sorry, but that’s not happening. I was just doing my job. Also, I don’t recall Trump ever apologizing for his behavior.
At that news conference on January 11, 2017, all I did was try to ask a question. I am a reporter. That’s what I do. And as the press was under assault throughout the 2016 campaign, here’s what I told myself: My job is to ask questions of government officials and, as the old saying goes, speak truth to power. But after Trump’s election, it had quickly become clear that the duty of the press was even bigger than that: We had to fight for the truth, because suddenly it was a battleground. For years we had done our jobs under the given that certain facts and truths are universal; with this administration, that was no longer the case. Everything had to be questioned. I wanted to make clear that they could attack us all they wanted, could call us all the names they wanted, but we were still going to search for the truth. And when we were confident we’d found it, we were going to report the news. Not fake news. Real news.
The Russia story was real news because there were so many legitimate questions at the time. We would have been derelict in our duty had we not asked them.
The American public seemed to agree. Ever since that moment at the press conference, people were walking up to me to thank me—at the airport, at the train station, at the grocery store. Ladies were applauding me at the hair salon. Strangers on the street were stopping me to ask for a selfie. A neighbor put a bottle of bourbon in my mailbox. That was not the last bottle sent to me, either. I suddenly had more than I could drink, in fact.
Here’s what I felt then, and feel even more strongly today: I don’t believe reporters are supposed to be the story. That’s how I was trained. But at that press conference, I had faced a choice: Do we just absorb Trump’s attacks? Or do we push back and stand up for ourselves? It’s a difficult decision, and one that members of the press confronted repeatedly during Trump’s first two years in office. In my view, Trump represented a new kind of president, one that required a different kind of playbook for journalists.
But there was a more pressing emergency that day: Trump’s disregard for the truth. The incoming president was questioning the validity of a perfectly legitimate news story. Trump knew we weren’t going to buy it, but he also fully realized that millions of his supporters would accept his version of events. Hold on a damn minute, I thought that day. This man at the podium is about to be sworn in as president. He can’t do this. This was no longer the brash businessman shattering conventional wisdom, as Trump’s defenders had described him. This was a man about to take over the most powerful office in the world.
One thing I tried to make clear at that news conference is that the truth is worth defending. It’s the force that maintains order in our world—in the end, it’s all we really have. The incoming president was throwing that force off balance. Trump, who had been described by Jeb Bush as the “chaos candidate,” excelled at creating disorder. As a very senior White House official would later tell me, this was all by design.
“He rules by instability. He wins by making everything around him unstable,” the official told me. That way, the official said, Trump controls the chaos.
At that infamous news conference in Midtown Manhattan, Trump was destabilizing our collective sense of the real world. What was real had been deemed “fake.” Trump had denied reality time and again during that crazy campaign. But what was the harm in a novice political candidate doing so over the course of an election? folks thought. This was different. This was serious. With less than ten days to go before Inauguration Day, a terrible visual flashed in my mind: that we were all about to be pulled into the dumpster fire. On January 11, 2017, in my view, Donald J. Trump had declared war on more than just the press. He had declared war on the facts. Our fight for the truth had just begun.
2
The First Lie
Inauguration Day had finally come, and I had a job to do. My assignment was to cover the president, as in President Donald J. Trump, from the White House that day—well, to be more precise, I would be stationed out in the middle of the North Lawn of the White House. Yes, smack dab in the middle, where I would do my live reporting on what would become the first of many more surreal days of this administration.
Now, this was an odd place to be positioned. Normally, the press would go live from “Pebble Beach,” the designated, tent-covered media stand-up area on the far western side of the North Lawn. But on this day, the White House and Secret Service were allowing us to report from the middle of the front yard of the Executive Mansion, where a long blue carpet was laid out linking the front door of the White House to the presidential reviewing stands for the Inaugural Parade. This enviable location would allow me to observe Trump’s movements as he departed the parade route and made his way into the White House for the first time as president.
And a thought occurred to me: I was in a glorious position to shout a question to the new president.
But before Trump even arrived, we had a story on our hands. The reviewing stands along the pedestrian section of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House were largely empty. Row after row was vacant. Sure, there were thousands of folks lined up along the parade route, but my experience in covering inaugurals for Barack Obama told me that these stands should not have been empty. Trump would notice this. (Anybody would have noticed it.) And Trump being Trump, he would not be happy.
The empty stands were either a sign that Trump’s inauguration crowd was much smaller than that for Barack Obama’s two Inauguration Days or an indictment of the presidential inaugural committee for not having made sure those stands were filled—or, perhaps, a bit of both. That unmistakable image of empty reviewing stands, and the pictures of the smaller crowd size overall, would become part of a critical story that was about to unfold.
Despite the dark tone of Trump’s inaugural address, in which he spoke of an “American carnage” destroying the country, the new president was in good spirits. As he and First Lady Melania Trump crossed the North Lawn, I decided to ask—okay, shout—a fairly benign question. For once, I lobbed a softball.
“How was the day, Mr. President?” I asked.
“It was incredible,” he said with a smile. Melania, who had always been a friendly face up until that point, appeared genuinely happy as well.
So many of my colleagues sent me emails congratulating me on receiving a response from Trump. That’s so good for you, Jim, a few said. It was a sign, some thought, that there would be peace with the press or CNN or perhaps just me. But having covered him, I knew this was just Trump being Trump. He is capable of being charming, even to those he considers the opposition. Still, this was his day. This was his inauguration. There is no way, I thought, I can get away with shouting a confrontational question. Those days will come. And they did.
* * *
AS IT TURNED OUT, THOSE DAYS CAME MUCH SOONER THAN ANY OF us could have imagined. For many American
s who had voted against Trump, the first two weeks of the new administration were the worst-case scenario coming true, as the forty-fifth president took charge. Although I thought I had seen just about everything during the campaign, there were some appalling moments that surprised even me. Indeed, two main controversies during those weeks, the administration’s war on the media and its harsh immigration policies, were deeply personal. And their arrival at such an early moment helped lay the foundation for much of my coverage in the years to come.
It started on Saturday, January 21, Trump’s first full day as president. With one look outside the windows of the White House residence that morning, Trump could see and hear that he was leading a bitterly divided nation. A day of protests was under way across the country, including in Washington. The demonstration outside the White House was so loud that we could hear it inside the Briefing Room. So, Trump could hear it as well.
Trump would have the opportunity to view some of that democracy in action firsthand as he made his way out to Virginia for the highlight of his schedule that day, a trip to the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley. He was not happy with the CIA at that time. He had blamed the intelligence community for those leaks to the news media regarding compromising information the Russian government may have had on him, not to mention all the stories of Kremlin interference in the election on his behalf.
But the president was seething over something else that day. As he often does, Trump had watched the news that first morning in office, and he grew furious over reports that his inauguration crowd, while decent, had been fairly modest when compared to inaugural crowds in recent memory, particularly those for his nemesis Barack Obama.
Trump later made his bruised feelings clear in a fiery speech at the CIA. Standing in front of a memorial dedicated to fallen Agency officers, the president ripped into the news media, accusing the press of intentionally lying about the size of his inauguration. Fake news, he cried.