by Jim Acosta
Sanders seemed to be saying at that moment that words do matter, words can wound—which is why I had a tough time understanding how she could adopt the president’s belief that the press is the enemy. She knows the consequences of that kind of rhetoric. Perhaps she’d decided it was a case of “an eye for an eye,” or a smoky eye perhaps.
Herein lies the struggle we all face in the debate over Trump’s rhetoric and the poisonous effect it’s had on political dialogue in America. If Sarah can defend the president’s comments that the press is the enemy by pointing to what a comedian said about her physical appearance, then almost anything could be held up by the right wing as justification for attacks on the news media. The problem with this “whataboutism” is that it is missing some perspective. The average reporter or politician on the left or right doesn’t have the same megaphone (or MAGA-phone, as I like to call it) that Trump can turn to when he wants to vilify his adversaries. This goes to the heart of the rights and responsibilities of any American president. Sure, the president has the right to free speech, but even free speech has its limits. You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. Also, the president has sworn an oath to the nation to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Trump, I would argue, has shown he doesn’t respect what is perhaps the Constitution’s most vital protection—our freedom of speech.
Of course, nobody is going to impeach the president for calling us the enemy of the people. And, if anything, Sanders had just earned herself another year as press secretary. But the video from that briefing will last forever; it can’t be erased from the internet. And neither can Trump’s demonization of journalists. This weaponization of the bully pulpit to crush dissent and independent thought in America has been captured for the ages. History has shown us that there are real stakes and real dangers to language like Trump’s, and this point in history, when the American president called journalists “the enemy of the people,” will be imprinted on our national consciousness for coming generations. We will be able to read about it in our history books—if we don’t end up burning them one day.
12
Fear and Losing
I could never have predicted the full extent of what the midterms would bring, or that they would converge in such unsettling and dangerous ways with the Russia investigation, Trump’s immigration fearmongering, and of course his escalating war on the media. As I reported from around the country every day, it was clear that the mid-terms were more than just an election, or a referendum on the president’s term to date; they were a pivotal turning point for the nation, answering an essential question for me: would Trump pay a price for his troubling behavior? The voters were about to have a chance to assess the authoritarian impulses, lies, xenophobia, and attacks on American institutions that had all become hallmarks of his first two years in office. For Trump, the midterms would be Judgment Day. A verdict would be rendered.
All the combustible elements from the first two years of the Trump administration, from that first Spicer press conference on, could be found in the final run-up to the congressional elections. Once again, Trump would reach into his bag of media magician’s tricks to dominate the daily news narrative with explosive, hate-filled rhetoric. It had worked before, delivering the White House. But the stakes were higher this time. There was a desperation inside Trumpworld. What unfolded in the final weeks before the midterms was nothing short of a feverish attempt to preserve Republican control of the federal government and spare Trump from facing meaningful congressional oversight. A Democratic-controlled Congress, Trump knew, would leave no stone unturned, and no closet unopened. The Russia investigation, his long-concealed tax returns, and the dark secrets of his immigration policy could all be dredged up in committee hearings chaired by Democrats who had been sharpening their knives from the sidelines during two long years out of power.
Trump’s last line of defense was his “base,” the army of supporters hanging on his every word on conservative media, on Twitter, and, of course, at his rallies. It was Trump’s rhetoric that ensured that these superfans remained energized. For the press, this meant the rallies would remain visible and immediate threats to journalists reporting on his administration. But we would soon learn there were even greater dangers out there, dangers brought on by the frenzy of the midterm’s final months.
A few weeks after Tampa, I traveled to West Virginia. Trump was headed to the Mountaineer State to lend his support for the GOP Senate candidate attempting to knock out the incumbent Democrat, Joe Manchin. It was the middle of August, a little more than two months before the midterms, and Trump was hoping to run the table in a handful of red states where Democrats faced an uphill battle for reelection—Manchin in West Virginia, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Jon Tester in Montana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, and so on. Ever mindful of the Russia investigation, Trump was desperate to keep both houses of Congress in Republican hands. He knew, as did his advisers, that Democrats could potentially begin impeachment proceedings if they somehow eked out victories in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. But the real news that day happened away from the Charleston convention center.
Earlier in the day, Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort was convicted in federal court of an array of financial crimes that were, at that time, unrelated to the Russia investigation. The White House responded to the Manafort news the way it had countless times, distancing the president from the former campaign chairman by describing the longtime GOP operative as having a limited role with the Trump team before the election. Trump repeatedly painted Manafort’s crimes as removed from the campaign’s work.
“It doesn’t involve me,” Trump told reporters that day. This was true at the time, but the peril for Trump was that Manafort would eventually turn against the president and cooperate with federal prosecutors. Still, for now it seemed, Manafort was determined to remain loyal to Trump, in the hope of securing a presidential pardon.
But there was another, potentially more devastating bombshell to drop that day, when Trump’s ex-fixer and former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws by funneling money to two of the president’s alleged mistresses, including the porn star Stormy Daniels. Cohen admitted to federal prosecutors that he had made the payments “at the direction of” a political candidate, a clear reference to the president that placed Trump in immediate jeopardy. Because the money was aimed at influencing the 2016 election, Cohen’s actions violated campaign finance laws, prosecutors said. Adding to the melodrama of the Stormy Daniels saga, the porn star’s attorney, Michael Avenatti, was taunting Trump and his outside attorney Rudy Giuliani. The Daniels story was certainly sleazier than the Russia investigation, but Avenatti had a case on his hands that put Trump in real political danger. Legal scholars argued over whether a sitting president could be indicted. But if Trump had violated a campaign finance law, he was entering the realm of the “high crimes and misdemeanors,” potentially meeting the standard for impeachment.
Buckle Up Buttercup, Avenatti tweeted.
As for Cohen, his guilty plea was a stunning turn of events for the Manhattan businessman’s former personal fixer, or, as one Trump adviser described him to me, “a less cool version of Ray Donovan,” the titular character played by Liev Schreiber on the Showtime drama. Cohen’s decision to come clean was costly to the president’s team, revealing a pattern of deception that the White House had been engaged in for months as it tried to hide Trump’s involvement in the payments to Daniels. The bad news had started for Cohen back in January 2018, when the Wall Street Journal first reported that he had funneled $130,000 in hush money to the porn star. As we all know in perhaps too-vivid detail, the secret payment was made to the actress, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, to keep her from discussing her past relationship with Trump in the final days before the 2016 election. The payment was not declared in official filings with the Federal Election Commission. As in the case with the Trump Tower meeting with the Russians, the initial
explanations from Trump’s team about the Stormy saga turned out to be lies.
Once again, Sarah Sanders was a central figure in misleading the public about the president’s legal troubles. At the White House press briefing on March 7, 2018, Sanders was asked by my colleague Jeff Zeleny about the payment to Daniels.
ZELENY: Did the President approve of the payment that was made in October of 2016 by his longtime lawyer and advisor, Michael Cohen?
SANDERS: Look, the President has addressed these directly and made very well clear that none of these allegations are true.
Trump was asked directly by Catherine Lucey of the Associated Press a few weeks later if he knew where the money had come from to pay Daniels.
“No, I don’t know,” Trump said, in an outright lie. “You’ll have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael’s my attorney,” he added, a comment that would come back to haunt him.
About a month later, on May 2, 2018, Giuliani blew the whole thing wide open when he explained that the money had been funneled through Cohen and his law firm “and the President repaid him.”
At the White House press briefing the following day, I asked Sarah about her past false statement on the Stormy payment.
ACOSTA: If I could just follow up on—you said, on March 7, “There was no knowledge of any payments from the President, and he’s denied all of these allegations.” Were you lying to us at the time, or were you in the dark?
SANDERS: The President has denied and continues to deny the underlying claim. And again, I had given the best information I had at the time. And I would refer you back to the comments that you, yourself, just mentioned a few minutes ago about the timeline for Mayor Giuliani.
Much was made of my basic question to Sanders: “Were you lying to us at the time, or were you in the dark?” The implication was that I was asking an unfair question to get attention. Even if she didn’t know the truth, Trump most certainly did, and he had lied about it, both to people in his administration and to the American public. The truth needs to mean something at the White House, and this was a glaring example of the president and his top aides lying to the American people. And the porn payoff story was more than just a tawdry news item. Had Stormy Daniels’s allegation of an affair with the president surfaced in the remaining days of the 2016 campaign, it’s quite possible the election would have turned out differently. The payoff to Daniels was a successful attempt to cover up what Trump knew to be a damaging story. So, these questions do matter.
It was not long after Sanders’s performance that day that we saw a scaling back of the White House press briefings. Sarah went on to hold, on average, about one briefing per week. By the end of 2018, these appearances by the press secretary had all but disappeared. The briefings themselves became shorter, approximately fifteen to twenty minutes each. Conservative critics blamed the media, and guys like me, for this trend, but the responsibility lies squarely with the president and his press secretary. My sense is that Sanders was coming to the realization that she could no longer come out to the briefings on a regular basis and still maintain the last shred of credibility she had left, especially when her occasional false statements could have serious legal implications.
But a senior White House official said Trump had also seen enough of the briefings. In an admission that hardly surprised me, the official explained that Trump preferred having the live TV cameras hanging on his every word.
“It’s the president,” the official said. “He likes to do it. He likes to talk on the South Lawn and the pool sprays.”
In April 2018, just days after Trump lied about his payment to Daniels, the FBI raided Michael Cohen’s office, seizing an array of documents and records related to the Southern District of New York investigation of the Stormy Daniels case. As we learned later in the year, Michael Cohen turned against his old boss and began to help those same prosecutors.
Cohen quickly learned what life was like on the wrong side of the president. One month after the raid, the National Enquirer, the supermarket tabloid run by Trump’s friend David Pecker, ran a hit piece on Cohen entitled “Trump Fixer’s Secrets and Lies.” The Enquirer was long suspected to be a “house organ” for Trump, willing to coordinate “catch and kill” stories that involved payoffs to people such as Karen McDougal, a Playboy model who had also accused Trump of an affair. The Enquirer’s parent company, it’s been alleged, paid McDougal to buy her silence. As for that Enquirer story accusing Cohen of “lies,” I had asked him if the piece was a message being sent to him by Trump.
Cohen’s response, which we reported at the time: “What do you think?”
Michael Cohen’s cooperation with federal prosecutors brought about his excommunication from Trumpworld. Trump would later call his former fixer a “rat” on Twitter, the kind of language used by Mob bosses before putting a hit on a snitch. Cohen would later worry that all the pressure coming from the Trump team had put his family in danger. I had spoken with Michael over the phone a few times. Because his case was still pending in court, he didn’t want to speak on the record, but it was clear as we were talking over the phone that his life was falling apart. The legal career he had built working for a reality TV star turned president was crashing down around him. Trump’s aides and advisers were merciless, calling Cohen a “liar” who couldn’t be trusted—which raised the question: if that was so, how did he get the job with Trump in the first place? Still, one Trump adviser told me he felt “sad” for Cohen, describing him as a man who “has no country.” When you leave Trumpworld, it seems, you are banished forever.
At the rally in West Virginia on that late August day, it was pure coincidence that the Cohen and Manafort news came almost at once, hours before Trump would take the stage. The timing of it demonstrated just how mired in scandal the president really was. Of course, Trump didn’t mention any of it at the rally. Still, he seemed deflated as he attacked his usual targets—namely, the news media, immigrants, and congressional Democrats. I never would have expected him to discuss the conviction of his former campaign manager or the guilty plea of his former personal lawyer at length, and in any case, I imagined that many people in the arena that day were tuning out those news stories. Convinced that the mainstream media were spreading lies about Trump, they simply might have chosen not to believe that people close to him had that very day proven to be guilty of federal crimes. It was the “deep state” working with the “fake news” media to frame Trump, he would have them believe. The Trump supporters who spent the rally trying to intimidate us with stares and signs were intent on casting journalists as criminals, and yet the people close to Trump were the ones going to prison. That’s a hell of a juxtaposition.
As I stood there reconciling the scene in front of me with what had happened in the courts that day, I looked over and saw a huge Trump supporter glaring at me. For a good twenty minutes he just stood there and held a menacing stare. I’ve often tried to wave to these folks, to see if they are looking for some kind of acknowledgment. But that didn’t work with this guy; he just kept staring. Honestly, he looked psychotic. Our security guard at the rally, an equally big and intimidating guy sporting a Mohawk, and whose day job was as a local prison guard, stared intently back at the man, ready to rumble. I just wanted out of there. Even with our formidable security guard, it did not feel safe.
As we tried to quickly exit the convention center, there was more trouble almost immediately. A young reporter, Millie Weaver from the fringe website Infowars, ambushed me on the street. Out of nowhere, she shoved an Infowars mic in my face as her cameraperson was rolling. My producer Matt and our Mohawk-coifed security contractor tried to block her path so we could keep moving. Worried for a moment that Infowars would trash us for blowing past their cameras, I thought, You know what? Let her ask her questions.
Millie asked me about Facebook’s decision to ban Infowars over the website’s history of hate speech, including its false conspiracy theory that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecti
cut, had been a government hoax. Sandy Hook parents have sued the site over the bogus story, a real-life example of actual fake news (pardon the oxymoron). Millie’s ambush interview now lives forever on the internet under the banner “Millie Weaver Schools Jim Acosta on First Amendment.” You can watch it for yourself on YouTube. Actually, she schooled herself.
“Hey, Jim Acosta, what do you think about Alex Jones being banned?” she asked.
We had a brief debate over the issue outside the Charleston Civic Center. I talked about the value of a free press, knowing this was not what she had in mind.
“Are you concerned at all?” she continued.
“I certainly support freedom of the press,” I told Millie. “I support freedom of speech. I certainly don’t like what I’ve seen over the last couple of years [with] the president attacking the press. I think that’s certainly put a spotlight on the importance of a free press. And I think that anybody who responsibly exercises that right of free speech and that right of freedom of the press, that ought to be respected.”
“And don’t you think it’s within the president’s First Amendment [sic] to criticize and make comment against the media,” she countered.
“Absolutely, it’s well within his First Amendment rights to make comments about the media,” I responded. “But it’s also within my First Amendment rights to say that I don’t think it’s a good idea for the president of the United States to demonize the press and to call us the enemy of the people and that sort of thing. I think that kind of speech could potentially put journalists in harm’s way.”