by Jim Acosta
A lot of these folks were just venting their frustration, I suppose, for what had been burned into their brains by Trump. He hated our coverage, so they despised it, too. Others just wanted to scream at us. But in their chants and acts of rage, they spoke volumes about the man they had come to see. They were a living, breathing extension of the forty-fifth president of the United States, using his language, his talking points, to verbally assault us. For more than two years going back to the 2016 campaign, he had been demonizing the press, and now, with us within shouting distance of them, his supporters were more willing than ever to show they’d been listening.
One of the first rallies I attended during the 2018 cycle was in Nashville. It was great getting back to Tennessee. Knoxville, to the east, had been my first local TV news market, and I had often traveled to Nashville to cover the statehouse. Trump was serving up the red meat that night in late May, referring to then–House minority leader Nancy Pelosi as “the MS-13 lover,” a sneak preview of his coming attractions. He went back to calling Clinton “crooked Hillary” and slammed the press as “fake news,” but what stood out that night wasn’t Trump’s usual ridiculous rhetoric. It was the man, dressed in black, standing just outside our filing area and yelling “scum” and “scumbag” at me.
“You’re scum,” the man yelled at me. “You’re a scumbag,” he continued. This went on for a half hour. One of my colleagues with the New York Times asked him to stop. Then he yelled at her. It seemed like a bad sign for the rest of the year.
About a month later, I traveled down to South Carolina for another rally. As soon as I arrived at the venue in Columbia, there was trouble. Before Trump’s remarks, an elderly woman approached the press cage and told me to “get the fuck out.” I’ve known a lot of grandmas over the years, but this was the first one to tell me to “get the fuck out” of anywhere. (Usually, grandmas love me.) I have to admit, it was a bit surreal. Had I been transported to a planet where elderly people were mean and nasty? The crowd got a kick out of this episode of Grandmas Gone Wild and started chanting, “Go home, Jim.” All of this occurred during my live shot for The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. I tried to shake the woman’s hand, but she swatted it away and told me to “get the fuck outta here.” I later told Wolf we weren’t going to be shouted out of the building and that we would stay and do our jobs.
“Ma’am, I have every right to be here,” I reminded the woman.
“Out! Out! Out! Out!” she yelled, waving her arms as the crowd around her cheered.
Apparently, I didn’t win her over.
Still, it was a fascinating night because of the wide variety of interactions I had with Trump’s supporters. These audiences were not a true reflection of America, mind you. They were overwhelmingly white, blue-collar, and elderly, and I hardly ever saw a person of color. But while homogeneous, these Trump superfans had their differences, too. Their attitudes ranged from salt of the earth to scorched earth. Many came up to me and apologized for the unruly behavior at the rallies. Others uttered the most horrible things that could possibly come to mind. Oddly enough, dozens more simply wanted a selfie with me. I tried to engage with as many of them as possible. Why? you ask. In part, it was strategic. I found that as I listened intently to what they had to say, a good number of them would calm down. Ignoring them didn’t work. Oh God, I tried that, too; it only made things worse. They felt disrespected, and challenged to kick things up a notch. So, the hostility level went up, not down. You try it for yourself and get back to me.
I had a pretty lengthy conversation with one woman who scolded me for my reporting. She accused me of being rude to both the president and Sarah Sanders. I kept my mouth shut and just listened. What she said was deeply disturbing. She accused me of leading the country into another civil war.
“What’s going to happen is we’re going to end up with a civil war. You’re going to have people shooting people,” she warned. “You need to tone it down a little bit. The language, everything. It’s gotta stop. Be decent, please be decent. Don’t ask any more stupid questions,” she added, sounding relieved to have gotten that off her chest before she walked away.
I just kept thinking, Another civil war? Is that where we’re headed?
And yes, there were some who would, out of the blue, show incredible kindness. I always tried to be kind to them. Shortly before Trump’s speech, an older gentleman, maybe in his fifties, asked if any of us in the press could lend him a chair for an elderly woman who was not feeling well. She, like so many of the president’s supporters, had been standing in line for hours in ninety-degree heat, just to get a glimpse of Trump in action. Without hesitation, I offered him mine. The man later came back to the cage with his mother to thank me. A reporter for the Associated Press in Columbia, Meg Kinnard, captured the moment.
Thank goodness, I thought. Nobody is going to believe I had a civil moment with a Trump supporter.
“You’re a good man,” the woman’s son told me. “Your mama raised you right.”
“She tried,” I joked to him.
He then made a strange observation, commenting that he found it remarkable that I had recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sung “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the rally began.
I thought to myself, Yes, I know the pledge and the national anthem. I’m an American.
But the moment spoke volumes. Members of the press have been so savaged by Trump and his propagandists in the media that journalists seem almost foreign or anti-American to his supporters. In hindsight, the man’s stunning observation is not that unusual at all. Trump supporters routinely look over to the press risers to see if we reporters are reciting the pledge or singing the national anthem. Allow me to assure any Trump backer reading this book: not only do the reporters covering these rallies know the pledge and even the national anthem (something the president apparently hasn’t memorized—have you seen the clips of him trying to sing along?), but we are also patriotic Americans.
As the president railed against the press during his speech, the same man looked back at me and smiled. He knew I was not the enemy. At the end of the rally, his mother shook my hand, holding it for a few moments, before she paused and said, “I hope you’re going to be okay.” Minutes later, with our security guard trying to keep up, we ran back to our cars as other Trump supporters yelled, “Fake news!”
At the end of July, it was off to Tampa, where my producer Matt Hoye and I decided to start documenting on video some of the abuse we were taking. This was critical, as the harassing messages and threats on social media were increasing. I wanted to make sure that some of this hostile feedback was caught on video, so there could be no confusion as to what was happening to us. As a number of viral videos later demonstrated, we were subjected to a bewildering mudslide of anger and abuse. Hundreds of Trump supporters shouted “CNN sucks” as I was broadcasting live on the air. After we packed up at the end of the rally, I whipped out my phone and recorded about a minute of video of Trump supporters screaming all sorts of insults, ranging from “you suck” to “traitor.” Others were giving me the middle finger or wearing T-shirts that read, “Fuck the Media.” In the background, behind all the shouting, you can hear Trump’s rally closer, the Rolling Stones song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” The vitriol from Trump fans that day was suddenly all over social media, as several local reporters captured the moment as well. One woman, who was giving me double middle fingers, briefly became something of an internet legend.
Trump was pleased with the outpouring of hostility. His son Eric tweeted a link to a video of the outrageous scene with the remark “Truth.” Trump retweeted that tweet, which catapulted its viewership into the tens of millions. As far as I was concerned, this was putting the First Family seal of approval on abuse of the press. Anybody remember the First Lady Melania Trump’s pet cause of combating cyberbullying, Be Best? This is being best? Not the president.
By the next day, my video clip of all the screaming and the middle fingers
had gone viral, playing not just on Morning Joe, but on news sites around the world. I was flooded with requests for interviews from the foreign press. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to know what it was like being in the eye of Trump’s crossfire hurricane, to quote the Stones. It would be dishonest to deny that his abuse had given me some notoriety, but there was a price to be paid for it. I had become “public enemy number one,” according to one of my sources, an administration official who also saw the danger in Trump’s attacks.
In the days after Tampa, the death threats were back with a vengeance. Memes were being created showing images of me balled up on the floor of a rubber room of a psychiatric hospital and so on. On my Instagram account, a visitor left a disturbing message, one of many: “Hopefully he gets beaten to death at one soon.”
Not all the feedback was menacing. Thankfully, my mom texted me some moral support: “Tell it like it is. Shine on, Jim,” she wrote. A former Fox News anchor whose name you would recognize wrote to tell me that she was “sending me strength.” And an administration official who is close to the president wrote to say he was sorry about what had happened. I have all these texts and direct messages saved, so don’t bother to say I am making this up.
All the while, I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who were so full of rage and hatred in that crowd in Tampa. One woman held up a baby wearing a button on his onesie. It read, “CNN Sucks.” All I could think was, My God! There are babies being raised to hate us, almost right out of the womb. What’s next? In utero indoctrination?
This outpouring of venom was the natural result, I thought, of years of Trump’s attacks on the media. He had normalized and sanitized nastiness and cruelty. People thought nothing of directing this level of hostility at their fellow Americans. We weren’t really human to them anymore. This was the climate of fear that Trump had created. In this environment, a Trump supporter could resort to violence, I reasoned. It had become a dangerous time in America.
Perhaps the most disturbing sight in Tampa was the stunning array of “QAnon” signs we saw throughout the crowd. There were references to this fringe conspiracy theory on T-shirts, signs, and hats. QAnon refers to the twisted and false claim that celebrities throughout Hollywood are involved in pedophile rings. This is the same kind of nonsense we saw alleged in the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which falsely accused Clinton campaign manager John Podesta of being involved in sex trafficking out of a pizzeria in Washington. With QAnon, the virus had spread to slander political opponents in Hollywood. This insanity, pushed by the darkest forces of the far-right echo chamber, seemed to have no end.
My colleagues wonder why I would want to cover Trump rallies. This is why. How else am I supposed to see with my own eyes what the Trump phenomenon has done to America? The QAnon theory is a perfect example. When you have a well-known conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office, it’s only natural that his most ardent supporters would travel down the same fact-challenged rabbit hole. One of the failures of the Trump era has been Trump’s unwillingness to smack down these dangerous theories. As in the case of his attacks on journalists, Trump’s eagerness to exploit this kind of nutty behavior could have dire consequences.
* * *
EVER SINCE THE PRESIDENT REFERRED TO THE PRESS AS THE “ENEMY of the people” in 2017, a lot of us in the media worried that it was only a matter of time before a reporter was killed. Those fears only worsened after the mass shooting attack on the Annapolis newspaper the Capital Gazette in June 2018. The shooting did not occur as a direct result of the president’s rhetoric, but the attack did appear to be in retaliation for past reporting the newspaper had done. In the aftermath of the shooting, some Gazette staffers voiced their concerns about the president’s comments in a letter to Trump.
“We won’t forget being called an enemy of the people,” they wrote. “No, we won’t forget that. Because exposing evil, shining light on wrongs and fighting injustice is what we do.”
Now, I know the Annapolis newspaper well, having lived in the Maryland capital for several years. It’s everything a local newspaper should be, covering the political scene, crime, and high school sports and offering reviews of all the amazing seafood restaurants the city has to offer. The newspaper employs a tiny but dedicated staff, for whom no story is too big or too small. I’ll never forget the time a picture of my son ice-skating at a local rink appeared in the paper. A lot of people around Annapolis have pictures of their kids or grandkids up on their refrigerators thanks to the photographers at the city’s paper. Enemy of the people it is not.
The day after the attack in Annapolis, Trump toned down his rhetoric on the press at an unrelated event at the White House. “Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job,” he told a small crowd of supporters gathered in the East Room.
Still, at that same White House event, I thought it was important to get the president on the record on a critical question: would he stop referring to the press as the “enemy”?
“Mr. President, will you stop calling the press the enemy of the people?” I shouted from the back of the room at the end of his remarks. On my mind were the Capital Gazette reporters who had just died that week: Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, and Wendi Winters. It seemed to me the folks at the newspaper would have wanted this question asked.
I didn’t get an answer.
About a month later, Ivanka Trump told Axios reporter Mike Allen that she did not agree with her father’s line of attack that the press is the enemy of the people.
“No, I do not,” she replied. “I’ve certainly received my fair share of reporting on me personally that I know not to be fully accurate, so I have some sensitivity around why people have concerns and gripe, especially when they’re sort of targeted,” she added. “But no, I do not feel that the media is the enemy of the people.”
Later that day, at a rare press briefing at the White House, Sarah Sanders was asked about Ivanka’s rejection of her father’s line of attack against the press. Sarah, shocking no one, dodged the question. So, I followed up with her.
ACOSTA: I think it would be a good thing if you were to say, right here, at this briefing, that the press, the people who are gathered in this room right now, doing their jobs every day, asking questions of officials like the ones you brought forward earlier, are not the enemy of the people. I think we deserve that.
SANDERS: If the President has made his position known, I also think it’s ironic—
She was starting to dodge the question again. I interrupted. We went back and forth over that. And then, finally, she started to give something resembling an answer.
SANDERS: It’s ironic, Jim, that not only you and the media attack the President for his rhetoric when they frequently lower the level of conversation in this country. Repeatedly—repeatedly—the media resorts to personal attacks without any content other than to incite anger. The media has attacked me personally on a number of occasions, including your own network; said I should be harassed as a life sentence; that I should be choked . . . When I was hosted by the Correspondents’ Association, of which almost all of you are members of, you brought a comedian up to attack my appearance and called me a traitor to my own gender.
She was referring to comedian Michelle Wolf’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner earlier in the year. Wolf, while delivering a scathing rebuke of the Trump administration, had poked fun at Sarah’s “smoky eye.” Honestly, I had no idea what that meant at the time, until some female colleagues clued me in that it was a remark about Sanders’s makeup, with an extra dig about the press secretary’s tendency to lie at the briefings. Some in the press sharply criticized Wolf’s performance, opining that it was beneath the dignity of the event. But, to be fair, the WHCA dinner had already surrendered much of that credibility over the years, with so many celebrities attending what was supposed to be a scholarship event for young journalists. But, again, tha
t’s a debate for another time.
In my exchange with Sarah, I reminded her that the press had not mocked her eye makeup at that event; a comedian had.
ACOSTA: We didn’t try to do that, Sarah.
SANDERS: In fact, as I know—as far as I know, I’m the first Press Secretary in the history of the United States that’s required Secret Service protection . . . The media continues to ratchet up the verbal assault against the President and everyone in this administration, and certainly we have a role to play, but the media has a role to play for the discourse in this country, as well.
Secret Service protection, Sanders said. What about the security that’s required for us? I thought. But I wasn’t about to let her off the hook.
ACOSTA: Excuse me. You did not say, in the course of those remarks that you just made, that the press is not the enemy of the people. Are we to take it, from what you just said—we all get put through the wringer, we all get put in the meat grinder in this town, and you’re no exception. And I’m sorry that that happened to you. I wish that that had not happened. But for the sake of this room, the people who are in this room, this democracy, this country, all the people around the world are watching what you’re saying, Sarah. And the White House, for the United States of America, the President of the United States should not refer to us as the enemy of the people. His own daughter acknowledges that, and all I’m asking you to do, Sarah, is to acknowledge that right now and right here.
SANDERS: I appreciate your passion; I share it. I’ve addressed this question. I’ve addressed my personal feelings. I’m here to speak on behalf of the President, and he’s made his comments clear.
The only reasonable takeaway from that exchange is that the White House press secretary, a taxpayer-funded spokeswoman for the United States, believes the press is the enemy of the people—or, at the very least, she doesn’t have the guts to disagree with her boss. What’s also alarming is that she was obviously nursing some grudges left over from the WHCA dinner and was letting them affect her job in the Briefing Room. Sarah, it seemed, could dish it out but she couldn’t take it. After all, she’d gone after individual journalists in briefings; she’d called CNN “fake news.” But have a comedian tell a few jokes, and she can’t take the heat. Give me a break.