by Jim Acosta
Weaver went on to compare Infowars to CNN and NBC, saying we all got called “fake news.”
“My personal opinion is that you can’t put CNN in the same category as Infowars, with all due respect,” I said. “I think if you look at what the Sandy Hook parents are going through right now—”
She tried to cut me off, but I kept going.
“I think if you look at what the Sandy Hook parents are going through right now with respect to Infowars that there is a conversation to be had about what is being said in the public sphere and what’s being said on social media and what’s being told to a lot of people out there who trust what you say. And for example, I don’t think it’s right to say to the Sandy Hook parents out there that what happened was a hoax. I don’t think that’s appropriate.”
The look on Millie’s face was priceless. In short, she couldn’t handle the truth. She knew the Sandy Hook conspiracy was bullshit. I could see she was struggling to disregard what I was saying, like a kid fighting a parent administering cough syrup.
The episode was telling. Conspiracy theories have become a powerful force in our politics because they prey on a specific fear. For gun enthusiasts, it’s the fear of firearms confiscation. For xenophobes, it’s the fear of millions of migrants flooding the streets of American cities. Lies work best, Trump knows, when they are rooted in fear.
* * *
AS THE NATION BARRELED TOWARD THE MIDTERMS IN THE FALL, Trump juiced his base with this kind of fearmongering. He appealed to the Infowars and QAnon crowds with his attacks on the press and by showing sympathy for their cries of censorship in social media, often sounding like the conspiracy theorist in chief at several of his rallies. But it wasn’t until October that we saw Trump home in on a campaign message that combined this outreach to fringe elements with an actual policy idea. After passing one of the most unpopular tax cuts in history and trying to take health care away from millions, he turned from his legislative agenda and once more to immigration and the wave of nativist fear he’d ridden to the White House two years earlier. But whereas two years earlier he’d built his argument around the image of the wall, now, with the power of the presidency at his disposal, he was able to manufacture an immigration crisis designed to sow racial discord and drive his base to the polls.
It started that October, when Trump, to pitch his long-sought border wall, seized on the existence of a caravan of four thousand migrants making their way to the U.S. border from Central America, casting the threat posed by this group of asylum seekers in the darkest light. The Trump campaign went as far as to produce a racist ad depicting the migrants as wall-climbing invaders, which was dubbed the “Willie Horton ad” of 2018. For those who don’t remember it, this was a reference to a pro–George H. W. Bush campaign commercial from 1988 that seized on Democrat Michael Dukakis’s decision as governor of Massachusetts to grant a prison furlough to an African American man, Willie Horton, who went on to commit rape and murder. Even at the time, the Willie Horton ad was seen as racially divisive. So, too, was Trump’s invasion ad, which was nothing more than a Hail Mary aimed at shaking up an election that had turned against the GOP, particularly in the House races that would mean the difference between House Speaker Paul Ryan or Nancy Pelosi. A bunch of the networks, including CNN, Fox News, and Fox Business, refused to run Trump’s ad.
As if that weren’t enough, Trump was adding new twists to his appeals to the xenophobes in his base. At his rallies, he began to speculate that Democratic dark-money forces were behind the caravan, lending credence to the conspiracy theory floated by some on the right that the billionaire philanthropist George Soros was bankrolling the migrants as a way to pump left-leaning voters into the electorate.
“Now we’re starting to find out—and I won’t say it 100 percent, I’ll put it a little [sic] tiny question mark on the end, but we’re not going to get it, but we have the fake news back there, fake news—a lot of money has been passing through people to try to get to the border by Election Day, because they think that is a negative for us,” Trump told a Montana rally in October.
As if his unverified claims of Soros’s involvement weren’t enough, Trump was casting the caravan as some kind of perfect storm of immigration chaos, expanding his conspiracy theory to include unproven statements about Muslims infiltrating the ranks of the migrants, making their trek to the border the visual embodiment of his base’s economic and security anxiety. Trump was suggesting that there were people of Middle Eastern descent using the caravan as cover, presumably to enter the United States to carry out terrorist attacks. He went as far as to put this racially loaded accusation in a tweet.
@realDonaldTrump
Sadly, it looks like Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in. I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy. Must change laws!
8:37 AM—22 Oct 2018
Despite the fact that there was no evidence that there were Middle Easterners in the caravan, Trump continued pushing that fantasy, something I challenged that same week in the Oval Office. We had gathered for a bill signing on a separate issue. Then the caravan came up again as reporters began to ask questions.
“I have very good information,” Trump told reporters.
I pressed him to find out if he had any proof. He didn’t.
“There’s no proof of anything but they could very well be,” he said, adding a new expression to the ranks of “alternative facts” and Rudy Giuliani’s comment to NBC that “the truth isn’t truth.” “There’s no proof of anything” felt like a fitting slogan for Trump’s fact-challenged grip on power. In Trump’s mind, any false statement, if expressed passionately enough, carries the same weight as an objective truth grounded in reality. If Trump could convince enough people that there were potential terrorists crossing the border, then he could conceivably secure enough support for any kind of policy, from a medieval wall to a family-separation policy that devastates the lives of untold numbers of children.
For almost two years, we’d all been witnessing an administration firmly detached from the truth, but in the noncrisis that was the migrant caravan, the whole country could see how Trump, if left to his own devices and without the scrutiny of a free press, could politicize and manufacture a crisis to suit his political needs.
And just because Hillary Clinton wasn’t on the ballot didn’t mean Trump was done attacking her, either. Trump, it seemed, was still obsessed with her. He would mention her in his speeches as though 2016 had never happened. He just couldn’t let it go. He would tweet about her email controversy, repeatedly complaining that the former secretary of state should be Mueller’s target, not him. A source close to Trump revealed to me that as Trump was pulling the security clearance for another adversary, former CIA director John Brennan, in August 2018, he wanted to do the same for Clinton. The president and former White House chief of staff John Kelly got into such a heated argument over Trump’s desire to revoke the clearances of his rivals that their shouting match was audible to others. A congressional source confirmed the White House effort to go after Clinton. Trump essentially got what he wanted. Clinton went on to give up her security clearance voluntarily. In a letter to the State Department in late August, Clinton’s lawyer David Kendall, unaware of Trump’s wishes, wrote the administration to voluntarily request that the former secretary of state’s clearance be removed. The State Department carried out her request the following day, according to the letters I’ve obtained from the saga.
Neither the absence of a crisis at the border nor of Hillary Clinton’s name on the ballot were facts that mattered. And, of course, the only way to convince Trump’s base to believe his version of reality was for him to continue to attack the press as he stepped up his war on the truth. In one of the real low points of the midterms, at a rally in Missoula, Montana, Trump praised that state’s lone congressman, Greg Gianforte, for body-
slamming my friend and colleague Ben Jacobs of the newspapers the Guardian, in a fit of rage over questions he didn’t like.
“By the way, never wrestle him. Any guy that can do a body-slam, he’s my kind of guy,” Trump said about Gianforte at the rally, firing up the crowd.
It was a perfect example of why my concerns are not just about the president’s behavior. They’re about his effect on the rest of the country. That night in Missoula, after Trump lionized a congressman for attacking a reporter, I saw a group of young men in the crowd looking right at me and laughing uproariously at the president’s shout-out to Gianforte. One of these men, who appeared to be in his early twenties, started to make body-slam gestures, right before he ran his thumb across his neck as if to indicate that he wanted to slit my throat.
These are small gestures and threats, to be sure, but they are behavior that Trump has normalized and encouraged. Of greater concern is where you draw the line. It isn’t always easy to see when a threat is just someone trying to act intimidating and when a threat represents legitimate danger. Until now, the danger had been largely theoretical, but unfortunately that was all about to change.
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JUST A FEW DAYS AFTER TRUMP PRAISED GIANFORTE, THE FIRST IN A series of suspicious packages, containing devices that turned out to be pipe bombs, began to arrive at the homes and offices of various high-profile Democrats across the United States. The first device was sent to George Soros, one of Trump’s recent targets. The next day, another package was intended for Hillary Clinton. On the following day, CNN’s headquarters in New York had to be evacuated after the discovery of yet another device, mailed to former CIA director John Brennan. My CNN colleagues, including anchors Poppy Harlow and Jim Sciutto, continued to broadcast live on the air, using their cell phones, with the help of our talented producers and photographers, who made it all happen. I couldn’t be prouder of their work.
But this wasn’t a time to applaud one another. Other pipe bombs were sent to former president Barack Obama, Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and former attorney general Eric Holder. Even actor and anti-Trump activist Robert De Niro received a suspicious package. A law enforcement source forwarded to me images of alerts sent out by the Secret Service offering exclusive details about the packages and their intended targets. This was chilling stuff. The bomber, though working with crude devices, appeared to be a domestic terrorist seeking vengeance for Trump.
Journalists are supposed to be a hardened bunch, but the attempted bombing of our offices in New York, which prompted fears that other devices might be found at CNN bureaus around the country, brought the real danger of Trump’s rhetoric to our workplace. This wasn’t about getting beaten up at a Trump rally anymore. CNN staff members, who lead real lives outside of work, with families of their own, could have been killed, in part, because of the poisonous rhetoric that had fueled Trump’s rise to power. The network’s management, including CNN president Jeff Zucker, had the job of calming terrorized staff members in one of the world’s largest news operations. Yes, people were scared. This was the end result of years of Trump’s attacks on CNN. We had been called “fake news.” We had been called “the enemy of the people.” We had heard the chants of “CNN sucks” at the rallies. But this wasn’t happening just to me or any other individual CNN employee. It had suddenly become a dangerous time for all of us.
Despite those pipe bombs sent to CNN and other targets across the country, Trump and White House press secretary Sarah Sanders couldn’t find the decency to stop calling the press “the enemy of the people.” After the bomb scare at our headquarters, Sanders failed to show any sympathy for CNN in her first tweet after the explosive device was discovered. Her initial statement condemned the “attempted violent attacks” against Obama and the Clintons, but she didn’t even mention CNN. After she was denounced on Twitter for that glaring omission, she tried to clean it up with another tweet that included CNN.
Our condemnation of these dispicable [sic] acts certainly includes threats made to CNN as well as current or former public servants, she tweeted, misspelling the word despicable.
First Lady Melania Trump also neglected to mention CNN in her initial statement on what had occurred, as she condemned “attempted attacks on President Clinton, President Obama, their families, public officials, individuals and organizations.”
It was yet another stunning signal from the West Wing to the East Wing that Trumpworld’s hatred for CNN had become cancerous. So, it was no surprise when CNN finally responded. Jeff Zucker, who had spent months biting his tongue and resisting the urge to spend much time weighing in on Trump’s almost daily attacks on the press, had simply had enough.
“The president, and especially the White House press secretary, should understand their words matter,” Zucker said in a statement issued by CNN.
Six hours later, Sanders fired back at CNN in a tweet, insisting that Trump had asked Americans “to come together and send one very clear, strong, unmistakable message that acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the USA.” Yet you chose to attack and divide. America should unite against all political violence. Sanders’s tweet overlooked the fact that it was the president’s rhetoric and the hostility he stoked at his events that had inspired the mail bomber in the first place. It was another shameful moment for Sanders, who had once again lost sight of her role in working with the press.
By the end of the week, the toxic Trump effect on our national discourse became clear when FBI agents captured fifty-six-year-old Cesar Sayoc, charging the fanatical Trump supporter with sending thirteen pipe bombs to CNN and Democratic targets around the country. Sayoc’s white van, as the country could plainly see on the day of his arrest, was covered in antimedia signage, with much of his fury directed at CNN. One sticker on the van featured one of the favorite chants of Trump rally-goers: “CNN Sucks.” Pictures of CNN commentator Van Jones and filmmaker Michael Moore could also be seen on the sides of Sayoc’s MAGA van. Both men had red targets or crosshairs over their faces, as did a photo of Hillary Clinton.
Sayoc, who was living out of his van after being kicked out of his parents’ home, had been a regular at Trump rallies in Florida. The former pizza delivery driver and bodybuilder had also used social media to direct threatening messages to a variety of targets, including this reporter.
@CNN @Acosta You over enemy of America CNN. Your [sic] next, read one tweet aimed at me.
Acosta your [sic] next. See you at next rally, read another.
A total of nine tweets appeared to threaten me and CNN. The most disturbing tweet, aimed at my Twitter handle, @Acosta, featured images of a decapitated goat and its severed head. These images were apparently used by Sayoc to threaten other Trump critics. Several of his tweets were posted during that first week in August, after I had been heckled by that angry mob of Trump supporters in Tampa, the same night Trump and his son Eric posted their own tweets giving the thumbs-up to all those middle fingers.
I never knew about Sayoc’s threatening tweets until after his arrest. CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski had screen-grabbed a number of them before the alleged pipe bomber’s accounts were shut down. The fact that I didn’t see these messages highlights one of the problems with social media these days: the near invisibility of what should be bright red flags pointing to dangerous behavior. Popular apps such as Twitter and Instagram are so large that these companies can’t possibly see or stop every threatening message posted on their sites, thus creating a safe space for maniacs such as Cesar Sayoc to violently troll journalists in plain view. Trump was Sayoc’s hero. We were his enemy.
Sayoc is exactly the kind of person we had been warning the Trump people about. We didn’t worry about all Trump supporters at all Trump rallies. We feared people like Sayoc. Yes, he was clearly not playing with a full deck, but that’s what worried us. He was the living, breathing embodiment of the tiny fraction of deranged Trump supporters some of us feared, a person who wasn’t fully in control of his impulse
s but who had been radicalized to the point of carrying out acts of violence. We knew it would take only one of these folks to push things too far.
Now, you would think the arrest of Cesar Sayoc would have slowed Trump’s roll. But you’d be mistaken. Not a chance. Five days after CNN’s exchange of tweets and statements with Sanders the day the pipe bombs appeared at our headquarters, she and Trump resumed their attacks on the press. In the war on CNN and the rest of the news media, there would be no cease-fire. With one week before the mid-terms, Trump had a base to energize. Pipe bombs or no pipe bombs, he returned to calling the press the enemy:
@realDonaldTrump
There is great anger in our Country caused in part by inaccurate, and even fraudulent, reporting of the news. The Fake News Media, the true Enemy of the People, must stop the open & obvious hostility & report the news accurately & fairly. That will do much to put out the flame . . .
Trump’s “great anger” tweet, incredibly, was aimed at assigning responsibility for a terrible attack that had happened just days after the pipe bomb mailings. A mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh had left eleven people dead. Police said the gunman, Robert Bowers, had made anti-Semitic comments both on social media and during the massacre. In one of his rants on social media, Bowers falsely complained that Jews were somehow part of the effort to transport migrants in the caravan to the border. Sound familiar? It was a disgusting lie, but one that appeared to be fueled in part by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, some of which had been aimed at George Soros, who had been falsely accused of somehow bankrolling the caravan. Trump obviously didn’t like this aspect of our reporting on the Tree of Life shooting. So, of course, he revved up his attacks on the media, pouring more gasoline on his burning pile of “enemy of the people” nonsense.