by Jim Acosta
TRUMP: Well, she was actually missing thirty-three and then that got extended with a pile after that.
ACOSTA: Then your numbers were off, too.
TRUMP: No—no, but I did say thirty. But it was actually higher than that.
ACOSTA: If—if I may ask you, sir, it—it sounds as though you do not have much credibility here when it comes to leaking if that is something that you encouraged during the campaign—
TRUMP: OK, fair question.
After Trump defended his past praise of WikiLeaks, I tried to keep the conversation going. That’s basically what we were having at that point, a conversation. It had ceased being a news conference. This was something akin to an interview. There were a million things to ask at that moment, but I had essentially one thing on my mind: Trump’s repeated assaults on the press and our reporting represented to me a continuation of his attacks on truth itself. I felt compelled to explore this further. It wasn’t easy. Trump was determined to turn our exchange into a vaudeville act.
ACOSTA: Just because of the attack of fake news and attacking our network, I just want to ask you, sir—
TRUMP: I’m changing it from fake news, though.
ACOSTA: Doesn’t that under—
TRUMP: Very fake news.
ACOSTA: —I know, but aren’t you—
The room broke out into laughter. Trump has many flaws. Comic timing is not one of them. The jokes would continue. The president was all but under cross-examination, with question after question on the Russia probe. Yet, he seemed to be enjoying himself.
TRUMP: Go ahead.
ACOSTA: Real news, Mr. President, real news.
TRUMP: And you’re not related to our new [Trump refers to Alex Acosta]
ACOSTA: I am not related, sir. No. I do like the sound of Secretary Acosta, I must say.
TRUMP: I looked—you know, I looked at that name. I said, wait a minute, is there any relation there? Alex Acosta.
ACOSTA: I’m sure you checked that out, sir.
TRUMP: OK. Now I checked it—I said—they said, “No, sir.” I said, “Do me a favor, go back and check the family tree.”
I tried to steer us back on course.
ACOSTA: But aren’t you—aren’t you concerned, sir, that you are undermining the people’s faith in the First Amendment, freedom of the press, the press in this country, when you call stories you don’t like “fake news”? Why not just say it’s a story I don’t like?
TRUMP: I do that.
ACOSTA: When you call it “fake news,” you’re undermining confidence in our news media.
TRUMP: No, no. I do that. Here’s the thing. OK. I understand what you’re—and you’re right about that, except this. See, I know when I should get good and when I should get bad. And sometimes I’ll say, “Wow, that’s going to be a great story.” And I’ll get killed. I know what’s good and bad. I’d be a pretty good reporter, not as good as you. But I know what’s good. I know what’s bad.
Trump threw in a compliment about yours truly there, in case you missed it. But more important, he seemed, just for a moment, to concede the point about undermining the public’s confidence in the press.
He went on for a few more minutes and then moved on. The entire news conference seemed to be, for Trump, nothing more than an opportunity to vent. He was hurt by the coverage, and he wanted me to know it. We had gone from a vaudeville act to the psychiatrist’s couch.
Later in the afternoon, I received a phone call. It was a 202 area code followed by nothing else. I had seen this number before: it was the White House calling. I answered the phone. It was Trump’s trusted aide Hope Hicks.
“Hi, Hope. What’s up,” I said, trying to be as friendly as possible.
“Hi, Jim. I just wanted to let you know that I spoke with the president and he wants you to know that he thought you were very professional today,” Hicks said.
Okayyyyy.
“He said, ‘Jim gets it,’” Hicks added. She was so chipper. Trump was complimenting my reporting, you say? After what went on in that room, I now “get it”?
What in the world is she talking about? I thought. He has called me “fake news” and “very fake news” to the entire world twice. I got what, exactly?
I thanked Hope but asked if it would be possible for the president to stop attacking the media. It was not helpful, I argued.
No dice. Hicks had a beef of her own. (She had something to say and she was going to get that out and move on.)
We just didn’t understand the president, she complained. Trump truly does want to “make America great again,” she told me.
This was going nowhere in a hurry. I thanked her, and we hung up.
“That was so weird,” I exclaimed to my colleagues. But as I thought about it further, something dawned on me. Hicks was letting me in on Trump’s thinking. She was doing me a big favor. When Trump told Hope, “Jim gets it,” he was basically saying that I understood that his bluster was something of an act. When he called us “fake news,” in his mind, it was an act. But here’s the problem, and it is still a big one: not everybody was in on the act. This is where I have a problem with Trump’s rhetoric. For starters, I didn’t want to be a part of any kind of contrived reality TV presidency. This wasn’t an episode of The Apprentice. And as I could plainly see in some of the disturbing and downright violent comments that were beginning to surface on my social media, countless Trump supporters didn’t see me as a contestant on Trump’s latest prime-time TV show, either. The press was increasingly being viewed as more than just “the opposition,” as his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had put it a few weeks earlier to the New York Times.
This trend toward demonizing the press would become all too clear the day after that news conference, when, shortly after Air Force One landed at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, for a weekend of golf, the president posted a dark and dangerous tweet.
@realDonaldTrump
The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!
This was actually his second attempt at launching this extraordinary attack on the free press in America. Minutes before this, he had tweeted a similar message but left out the references to CBS and ABC. That first tweet was deleted and replaced with this one. Fox News, it should be noted, was not included in either tweet—as of this publication, the revised tweet still exists on Twitter, under the handle operated by the president of the United States.
Now, up until this point, a chorus of critics at a variety of news outlets had advised against my “taking the bait” from the president and responding to his “fake news” attacks. Trump, they argued, was luring the press into a trap. He wanted to troll and trigger outraged journalists, provoking them into a fight, one that he would always win, these critics complained. In my view, the Monday-morning quarterbacks were wrong.
Trump had crossed a clear, bright line. This was un-American. This should not go unchallenged.
Here’s why. When he labeled the media the “enemy,” the president, for all intents and purposes, was issuing a threat. Under the Soviet Union, Stalin had called the press “the enemy.” So had Richard Nixon, during Watergate. Under Trump, who had whipped up his crowds to bash the press at his rallies, the danger was that the folks at home wouldn’t know what he was doing. Was this an act? Was he serious? At that early point, it was an academic discussion. Too many of his supporters saw Trump’s attacks on the press as a call to arms. My email inbox and social media accounts were routinely filled with threats of violence left by people who claimed to be a part of the MAGA movement. Once Trump called me “fake news,” I changed the settings for the notifications on my Twitter account, as viewing all these posts would have been akin to peering into an open sewer or, more accurately, staring down an angry mob.
Memes featuring me began showing up all over Twitter. In one meme, my face had been superimposed over that of a 1940s gangster lying dead from gunfire. In another, a computer-animated scene por
traying Nazis sending people into a gas chamber, my face was placed over that of the character hitting the Start button. It was ghastly, psychotic stuff. One person left a message on my Facebook account informing me that if he ever saw me out on the streets of DC, I would be dead. These were empty threats, I hoped. These people were merely venting their frustration at an easy target. I just wish they had been in on Trump’s “act,” as Hope Hicks had put it. If only they could see the man behind the curtain, in this dystopian Oz.
Even before he became White House chief strategist, Steve Bannon, a key figure during the presidential transition period, was talking about the press as the “opposition party,” a catchphrase the former Breitbart boss used to describe what he thought was a torrent of negative stories about the incoming president. Press coverage was a subject Bannon and Trump continued to discuss in the early weeks of the administration. In an interview, Bannon explained to me that he and the new president had developed the “enemy of the people” label for the press during their conversations about media stories they didn’t like. It was a bit of brainstorming or spitballing, Bannon said, that had occurred around that February news conference as a way to put Trump’s frustrations into words. The term enemy of the people was a natural “corollary” that flowed from the terms opposition party and fake news.
“I think it’s safe to say that we both came up with it in discussion,” Bannon said of the “enemy of the people” label.
But he made sure that Trump got partial credit. “I think I threw out ‘opposition media party’ first, and then he threw out ‘fake news is the enemy of the people,’” Bannon added.
The conservative firebrand was careful to explain that Trump didn’t mean that all media were the enemy, though, Bannon said, it was obvious Trump felt that CNN and other outlets were “fake news.” Therefore, CNN, in the president’s mind, was the “enemy.”
A senior White House official insisted Bannon was not taking full ownership of the expression. Bannon came up with “the enemy of the people,” three aides to the president told me.
“‘Enemy of the people’ was first said in this White House by somebody who spent all of his time talking to the media,” the senior official told me. “It’s absolutely Bannon,” the official added.
“It’s meant to incite the media. Not the people,” the official continued.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told me in an interview that she is not a fan of the expression.
“I don’t use that phrase. Yet there is ample evidence that the media are often the enemy of the relevant,” she said.
Then she acknowledged the risks of using that kind of language.
“It’s fraught. It’s danger—” Conway stopped midsentence, catching herself before saying “dangerous.”
“I think calling the president a Russian asset is dangerous,” she added.
Sounding almost professorial about Trump’s attitude toward the press, Bannon insisted that the president was a creature straight out of the teachings of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher who coined the phrase “the medium is the message,” a theory taught in mass communications classes in college. (Disclosure: I have a degree in mass comm., and we studied this.) Trump understood, Bannon said, that a mastery of the news cycle was capable of fueling today’s media-saturated presidential campaigns. Take control of the narrative, Bannon and McLuhan would argue, and you take control of the race. This is Bannon’s theory as to how Trump cut through sixteen GOP presidential candidates like a “scythe through grass,” as he put it.
Bannon discounted the notion that Trump’s rhetoric could lead to violence against journalists. But the former White House chief strategist said that attacking the media was a key element of Trump’s strategy in the early days of his presidency. In the eyes of him and Trump, Bannon said, nobody cared about the Democratic Party at that point. Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. That made going after the press essential. Trump needed a punching bag, Bannon believed, to continue to drive the narrative and own the coverage. And that punching bag was the press.
As for Trump’s Democratic critics, such as Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal, a former senior White House official laughed. “Nobody knows who the fuck he is,” the former official said, arguing that most people were more familiar with the anchors and correspondents from CNN and other networks who covered the Trump campaign and presidency.
A week later, on February 24, during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trump defended his new label for the press.
“A few days ago, I called the fake news ‘the enemy of the people’—and they are. They are the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources, they just make them up when there are none. I saw one story recently where they said nine people have confirmed. There are no nine people. I don’t believe there was one or two people. Nine people. And I said, give me a break. Because I know the people. I know who they talked to. There were no nine people. But they say, nine people, and somebody reads it and they think, oh, nine people. They have nine sources. They make up sources.”
Ultimately, this “enemy of the people” designation mattered, not just because it was a threat to a free press but also because of the moment when Trump first uttered it. Coming in the wake of Michael Flynn’s firing and additional scrutiny from the Russia investigation, these words held new power to discredit our reporting and were an increasingly important tool for keeping his political allies close and his base closer. Why should Trump supporters trust stories about Russian collusion, after all, if those articles were written by “enemies” of the president? I’ll tell you why. For starters, remember that Flynn had been fired by the president for lying about his contacts with Kislyak, a real (not fake) thing that happened. How could the press simply ignore something of that magnitude? The short answer is obviously we couldn’t.
As menacing as Trump’s public campaign to discredit us was for us in the press, it was in some of the quieter exchanges with the administration that the truly unsettling lies took place. Such was the case at the end of March, when I had my first run-in with Jared Kushner.
A White House official had summoned me to the office of Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, where I was joined by a couple of other reporters who had also heard about the looming departure of Deputy Chief of Staff Katie Walsh. Walsh, who came over to the White House from Reince’s staff at the RNC, had become something of a scapegoat after the White House lost in its initial attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare. Stymied in its push for a travel ban, the White House had begun its attempted takedown of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. Trump was furious, blaming Democrats but also the Freedom Caucus, the gang of very-far-right House lawmakers who make it their business to torch legislation they don’t see as sufficiently conservative. The White House was looking for someone to blame, and officials had landed on Walsh.
Following the departure of Michael Flynn, Walsh was viewed as the next high-profile departure from the Trump White House. I had gotten wind that she was about to be fired.
Yep, the Trump campaign people were eager to get that news out, as Katie was an RNC person, but I wasn’t the only one to have received the tip. The White House had asked a small group of reporters, including me, to assemble in Reince’s office. White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was also in the room. The two men walked us through what they wanted us to report, which was that Walsh was leaving to go to an outside group supporting Trump’s agenda. We were also told that in no way was she being fired. All this was spin, of course, as Katie was being shown the door.
Then came the meeting’s star attraction. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, popped in to join us. This was my first time meeting Jared. He seemed nice enough, polite and polished, though rail thin and a bit gaunt. The only reason I’m relaying the Katie Walsh story is because of what Jared said to me after the meeting was over: it was on Russia.
“Hey, you�
��re the fake news guy,” he said to me with a smile on his face. I got the sense he was trying to be friendly, but he had a point he wanted to make.
“We’re real news,” I told him. I then asked why he considered my news outlet to be fake news.
The Russia story, he responded. “There’s nothing to it.”
What did he mean? I asked. Flynn had just been fired for lying about Russia.
Nothing to it, he repeated, and walked away.
That was not true. Not by a long shot.
4
Russia, If You’re Listening . . .
Contrary to what Jared Kushner wanted me to believe, there were indeed plenty of pressing questions about the Russia story. In fact, I’d had some of my own dating back to the campaign. One matter that was of particular interest to federal investigators during the 2016 campaign was that the Russians had succeeded in infiltrating Hillary Clinton’s private email system on the very same day that Trump issued a plea to Moscow to hack into the Democratic contender’s personal server.
The Trump campaign later said he was just kidding about that. It sure didn’t seem that way from my vantage point sitting in the front row of that news conference at the Trump Doral Golf Course Clubhouse on July 27, 2016. Trump was asked about possible Russian interference—yes, even back then—as the Democratic National Committee had been hacked just days earlier.
Trump was peppered with questions about the DNC server breach. One particular line of questioning that seemed to get under his skin was whether he was too soft on Russian president Vladimir Putin. The Russian president, most foreign policy experts believed, was also meddling in other elections in Western states. Add it all up, and the growing consensus was that Putin was simply trying to reconstitute Russia’s standing in the world as a superpower, a long-stated goal of the ex-KGB agent who lamented the fall of the Soviet Union.
About twelve minutes into the news conference, Trump turned to me. “Why not get tough on Putin and tell him to stay out,” I asked, in reference to the DNC hack.