The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  “I just think it’s changing the culture. I think it’s a very negative thing for Europe. I think it’s very negative,” he said about the impact of immigration on European culture. “And I know it’s politically not necessarily correct to say that. But I’ll say it and I’ll say it loud. And I think they better watch themselves because you are changing culture. You are changing a lot of things. You’re changing security.”

  There it is—Trump was speaking in code about what he sees in the United States, echoing the far-right extremists in Europe who have bemoaned the arrival of migrants there from war-torn countries such as Syria. To her credit, May responded to Trump’s remarks by sounding more committed to the American tradition of welcoming immigrants than the American president himself. She rejected the notion that immigration had been a “negative thing” for Europe. It was quite a remark coming from the prime minister of the United Kingdom, whose leaders have historically spent a good deal of diplomatic energy maintaining Britain’s “special relationship” with the United States. It’s also worth noting, May was the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party and had been attempting to finalize Brexit, the United Kingdom’s messy withdrawal from the European Union. A fire-breathing liberal she was not.

  “The UK has a proud history of welcoming people who are fleeing persecution to our country,” May said, in what immediately sounded like a rebuke of Trump’s immigration views. “We have a proud history of welcoming people who want to come to our country to contribute to our economy and contribute to our society. And over the years, overall immigration has been good for the UK,” she added. A British diplomatic source said May’s comments were a point of pride for the officials who had gathered for the news conference at Chequers. May’s team was cheering her on behind the scenes, I’m told. She had repudiated Trump’s xenophobia. It was another clear signal from an important U.S. ally that Trump’s deeply unsettling rhetoric had to be challenged.

  Trump wasn’t finished with me. The next day, he posted a tweet declaring that he had gotten the upper hand at Chequers.

  @realDonaldTrump

  So funny! I just checked out Fake News CNN, for the first time in a long time (they are dying in the ratings), to see if they covered my takedown yesterday of Jim Acosta (actually a nice guy). They didn’t! But they did say I already lost in my meeting with Putin.

  Fake News. . . . .

  He forgot to mention the fact that I had asked him a question as he was leaving the press conference. But that’s fine. Still, he got one thing right, which I mentioned in my tweet in response to his.

  @Acosta

  Takedown? I don’t think so. Perhaps we should even the playing field next time and you can take my question. (You’re right about one thing. I am a nice guy)

  I remember the moment I saw Trump’s tweet. My producer on that trip, Allie Malloy, and I were walking across St. James’s Park, in London, touring the city for a bit before our flights to Finland. Allie and I both looked at the lock screens on our iPhones as the notification of the Trump tweet about me flashed. We both started laughing. What a time to be alive! It’s a surreal experience being on the receiving end of one of Trump’s Twitter attacks. First of all, your phone immediately blows up. “RIP your notifications,” as the kids say. But this is nothing to celebrate. There is a darker side, as this is also when the Trump troll army joins the fray, posting a barrage of tweets supporting the president and attacking me. This is often when the death threats roll in.

  Not to spend too much ink dissecting this, but I should also call attention to the fact that Trump was, in his own way, praising me in this tweet, which is how it was described in a number of news reports about our confrontation. “[A]ctually a nice guy,” he’d tweeted about me. Fact check: True. This raises something I’ve heard from a number of Trump aides, advisers, and friends: the president actually enjoys sparring with me. Some of this goes back to what Hope Hicks once told me, that Trump thinks, “Jim gets it.” In a world where he’s surrounded by sycophants, I suppose, he likes the challenge.

  Trump may have thought I was a nice guy, but the folks at the White House weren’t pleased. They decided to retaliate by pulling National Security Advisor John Bolton from a scheduled appearance on CNN’s Sunday show State of the Union with Jake Tapper. This was an attempt by the White House to punish CNN for my clash with Trump at the news conference. But perhaps the White House had another motivation for pulling Bolton. The national security advisor would have been forced to explain on air all of Trump’s destabilizing rhetoric from his previous two stops at NATO headquarters and in Britain. Removing Bolton from one of the Sunday talk shows provided some damage control.

  There was more fallout for me after the Chequers press conference: I lost a friend. After John Roberts had asked his question, he came under attack for not having defended NBC and CNN. Tapper and others pointed out on Twitter that other networks had stood up for Fox in the past, when it had been treated poorly during the Obama administration. This was a fair point. Roberts released a statement to try to deal with the criticism.

  “I know Kristen Welker of NBC. She is honest as the day is long. For the President to call her dishonest is unfair,” Roberts said in a statement obtained by the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple. “I also used to work at CNN. There are some fine journalists who work there and risk their lives to report on stories around the world. To issue a blanket condemnation of the network as ‘fake news’ is also unfair.”

  John then repeated the same statement on the air on Fox News. It was hard to miss the underlying message in his remarks: he was willing to defend Kristen by name, but he did not do the same for me. He said that CNN was not “fake news”—we all know that—but he allowed the “dishonest” remark to hang there.

  Roberts had been a colleague of mine and, I thought, a friend for many years. We had both worked on the same CNN program, American Morning, for a couple of years. He was the anchor of the show, and I was one of its correspondents based in Washington. I would, on occasion, fill in for John on the anchor desk. And before our time together at CNN, we both worked at CBS News. John was the weekend anchor, and I was working out of the New York bureau. I had always looked up to John, who was in the running to replace Dan Rather on the CBS anchor desk. He was certainly one of the best broadcasters I had ever seen. I remember covering Hurricane Katrina from Biloxi, Mississippi, for CBS while he was braving the storm from New Orleans. We both led the CBS Evening News the night Katrina hit. Sadly, John didn’t get the CBS anchor gig, and he left for CNN. I soon followed.

  When I left CBS News for CNN, John had vouched for me to the network’s management. It was helpful to have him on my side. Others, such as Scott Pelley from CBS, had spoken on my behalf as well. In addition to that, John knew my father from when he shopped at my dad’s employer, a Safeway grocery store in Virginia. My dad would ask me all the time, “How’s John? How’s his family?”

  By the time we all got to Helsinki, the damage to our friendship had been done. Shortly after our arrival, my producer Allie and I were walking up the street outside our hotel in Helsinki as Roberts and his producer, Fin Gomez, approached, heading in our direction. Then, all of a sudden, they both walked over to the other side of the street to avoid crossing our path. I haven’t really talked to John since.

  When folks wonder if I have any regrets, I have to say I really do wish I had not lost any friends during these three crazy years covering Trump. But it’s happened. Unfortunately, I think it’s happened to a lot of us.

  * * *

  BEFORE LONG, WE BOARDED THE PRESS BUSES FOR THE MAIN EVENT, the Trump-Putin joint news conference. As I set foot on the bus, I immediately spotted two of my biggest critics: Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity, Trump’s chief propagandists at Fox, were seated on the bus, too. And you know what? After all their attacks on me during their prime-time “state TV” programs, they didn’t say a word to me. You’d think they would have had something to say to my face, but their fauxmacho man bullshit, as
it turns out, seems to stop at the doors to the Fox News headquarters.

  When I arrived at the presidential palace in Finland’s capital, a grand setting for the news conference, I came upon a chaotic scene. A massive crowd of journalists from around the world had gathered in the cramped holding area, all of us eager to take our seats. There was pushing and shoving. Print reporters yelled at TV photographers as they bumped into one another with their heavy equipment.

  The scene would become only more crazed once we made our way inside. Within minutes, as we were waiting for Trump and Putin to finish their closed-door meeting, all hell broke loose. Finnish and American security officers had approached a man sitting a few rows behind me and asked him to leave. He refused and had to be forcibly removed from the venue. The man, who described himself as a writer for The Nation, was wrestled out of the press area of the ballroom, but not before he held up a sign that read, “Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty.” He insisted he hadn’t done anything wrong. I can only tell you what I saw from my vantage point. Perhaps he had good intentions, but if you’re a journalist, you don’t bring a protest sign to a news conference.

  The brief scuffle only added to the tension in the room. The press corps had been divided in half. Russians were on one side of the room; the Americans and other foreign press were assembled on the other side. I remember thinking, Am I with the bride or the groom? (But let’s not take that analogy any further.) Then the moment finally arrived, as Trump and Putin entered the room. Both men made brief statements about their meeting, and then we were off to the races.

  The real news of the day came during the question-and-answer session. The Russian reporters, not surprisingly, asked what sounded like scripted questions from the Kremlin, a reminder of the truly awful state of affairs for the press in that country. Then Jeff Mason, a colleague of mine over at Reuters news service and former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, began to drill down. He did so, as any good reporter would, by asking about the news of the day. Even now, Trump’s answers in Helsinki are still astounding.

  MASON: Mr. President, you tweeted this morning that it’s U.S. foolishness, stupidity, and the Mueller probe that is responsible for the decline in U.S. relations with Russia. Do you hold Russia at all accountable for anything in particular? And if so, what would you consider them—that they are responsible for?

  TRUMP: Yes, I do. I hold both countries responsible. I think that the United States has been foolish. I think we’ve all been foolish. We should have had this dialogue a long time ago—a long time, frankly, before I got to office. And I think we’re all to blame. . . . But I do feel that we have both made some mistakes. I think that the probe is a disaster for our country. I think it’s kept us apart. It’s kept us separated. There was no collusion at all. Everybody knows it. People are being brought out to the fore.

  We were off to a bad start. The American president was calling the United States “foolish” in front of Putin. Trump’s words were already dripping with submission. He said the Mueller investigation was a “disaster” for the United States. Again, if he had nothing to worry about, why was it such a disaster?

  Putin made some news of his own, offering to cooperate with Mueller’s investigation, but he never really denied interfering in the election. Later on in the news conference, after the Russians reporters had had another turn, Jonathan Lemire with the Associated Press got to the heart of the matter with Trump.

  LEMIRE: My first question for you, sir, is, who do you believe? My second question is, would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016? And would you warn him to never do it again?

  Trump would then go on to make perhaps the biggest gaffe of his political life, but to folks back in Washington, Democrats and Republicans alike, the moment felt worse than a gaffe.

  TRUMP: My people came to me—Dan Coats came to me and some others—they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be . . . So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.

  Trump didn’t realize how much controversy his comments had created until he returned to Washington, Kellyanne Conway told me. The president told Kellyanne that he had misspoken.

  “He said, ‘Why would I not believe him? And I meant why would I not not believe him,’” Conway remembers Trump saying.

  So Conway and the rest of the president’s team worked with Trump to come up with a new statement to the press, explaining what they claimed was a mistake.

  “The sentence should have been . . . ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” Trump later told reporters.

  Conway told me in an interview that she saw it as part of her job to tell Trump he had gotten things wrong in Helsinki.

  “I am not afraid to tell him the truth. He accepts that and expects that. What would be the point of working here if my voice isn’t heard and my view is not considered,” she said.

  The president all but bowed to Putin, the puppet master whom Clinton had warned about during her debate with Trump in Vegas. No Mueller indictment was necessary. Trump was guilty of showing weakness. The president told the world he would take Putin’s word over that of his own handpicked intelligence officials, including Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence.

  Putin was “extremely strong and powerful” in his denial? Reporters in the room were aghast. The white flag had been raised. Putin, at least on this day, had achieved a long-sought goal. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the economic collapse that followed, he had elevated the Russians back to an equal footing with the United States. And he didn’t have to lift a finger. Trump had done all the work for him.

  Jonathan then asked Putin what you could call the “money question”:

  LEMIRE: Does the Russian government have any compromising material on President Trump or his family?

  Putin laughed, and there was laughter across the rest of the room. But the Russian leader had not intended to let any tension out of the room. When he laughed, he had sounded more like a Bond villain than an ally of the United States.

  PUTIN: Now, distinguished colleague let me tell you this: When President Trump was at Moscow back then, I didn’t even know that he was in Moscow. I treat President Trump with utmost respect. But back then, when he was a private individual, a businessman, nobody informed me that he was in Moscow.

  Then came the nondenial denial from Putin.

  PUTIN: Well, let’s take St. Petersburg Economic Forum, for instance. There were over 500 American businessmen—high-ranking, high-level ones. I don’t even remember the last names of each and every one of them. Well, do you remember—do you think that we try to collect compromising material on each and every single one of them? Well, it’s difficult to imagine an utter nonsense of a bigger scale than this. Well, please, just disregard these issues and don’t think about this anymore again.

  Yeah, that’s right. Putin did not deny that he had compromising information on Trump. And let’s just address the elephant in the room: we all knew what Putin was talking about. He was not denying that his government was in possession of the infamous “pee tape” video of prostitutes at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow. In fact, based on Putin’s response, it sounded as though his spies had been in the business of obtaining compromising information on American businessmen in Russia but simply didn’t have the capability to collect “compromising material” on all of them.

  Then, in one last shocking moment from what had been an insane news conference, Trump addressed the “pee tape” issue as well.

  If it were real, he seemed to be saying, “It would have been out long ago.”

  And with that, it was over. As reporters shouted more questions, Putin and Trump exited the room. CNN cut to anchor Anderson Cooper, who immediately spoke to the sentiment of commentators
for the rest of the day.

  “You have been watching perhaps one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president at a summit in front of a Russian leader certainly that I’ve ever seen.”

  I will never forget what happened next. During their news conference, Putin presented Trump with a soccer ball, a bit of a plug from the Russian president for the FIFA World Cup hosted by his country that summer. It was another attempt by Putin to lighten the mood. As the Secret Service must have known, never trust an ex-KGB agent bearing gifts.

  As I walked out of the news conference, I ran into one of those Secret Service agents carrying the soccer ball out on the street. It appeared to me that he had just had Putin’s gift scanned for bugs. Probably a good idea.

  Walking away from Helsinki, it was hard to shake the feeling that I had just witnessed a shameful spectacle. As nasty as our domestic politics had become, as disturbing as Charlottesville had been, at least they were our politics and shared history. For Trump to act as he had in Helsinki, while the world watched, was a truly unique humiliation for our country, one that showed just how far we had fallen. It used to be the job of American presidents, both Republican and Democratic, going back decades, to stand up to Russian aggression; instead, in the face of Russia’s most brazen attack on American interests in decades, Trump was actually siding with Russia. He could have looked to Reagan for guidance. Reagan once told Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” Trump had been handed a similar moment. He could have told Putin to “go to hell,” and Americans back home would have cheered. Instead, he chose to prostrate himself. It was an awful sight, and it felt downright un-American.

  Even for those inclined to give Trump the benefit of the doubt, it was next to impossible to justify what we had all just witnessed. Trump’s most ardent supporters in Congress struggled to defend him. For anyone who doubted the Trump-Russia connection prior to Helsinki, the news conference was perplexing at best, demonstrating just how far Trump was willing to go to take Putin’s word over that of the hardworking men and women of the U.S. intelligence community.