The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  @realDonaldTrump

  CNN and others in the Fake News Business keep purposely and inaccurately reporting that I said the “Media is the Enemy of the People.” Wrong! I said that the “Fake News (Media) is the Enemy of the People,” a very big difference. When you give out false information-not good!

  Getting back to Trump’s “great anger” tweet, it’s also important to note that he was taking zero responsibility for the violent events that were terrorizing Americans across the country. Trump was claiming that better coverage of his presidency would “do much to put out the flame.” What was he saying there? That if we gave him the news he wanted, he would halt his rhetorical attacks? Talk about fake news. Does anybody really believe he would have stopped his threatening rhetoric? On that same day, Sanders happened to hold a press briefing. And I knew exactly what I wanted to ask. True to form, she was unapologetic.

  ACOSTA: Shouldn’t you reserve the term “enemy” for people who are actually the enemy of the United States rather than journalists?

  SANDERS: The president is not referencing all media. He is talking about the growing amount of fake news that exists in the country. The president is calling that out.

  ACOSTA: May I ask a follow-up, please? Since you mentioned that, the president said this morning, “The fake news media, the true enemy of the people must stop. They have a responsibility to report the news accurately and fairly.” Can you state for the record, which outlets that you and the president regard as the enemy of the people?

  SANDERS: I’m not going to walk through a list, but I think those individuals probably know who they are.

  Ah, so she was in full agreement with the concept that members of the press were somehow “the enemy.” If that sounds both ridiculous and dangerous to you, imagine how it came across from where I was sitting. But I pressed on for more.

  ACOSTA: Would that include my outlet, which received the bomb threats?

  SANDERS: I don’t think it’s specific to a generalization of a full outlet. At times there are individuals that is the president would be referencing.

  To be honest, I was pretty pissed at Sarah for calmly stating what was some of the vilest, most un-American stuff that had ever been said in the White House Briefing Room. I was appalled. I know the folks at home were appalled. So, I kept going to see where this would end up.

  ACOSTA: So you are not going to state for the record? The president is going to say the fake news media are the enemy and if you are going to continue to stand there and say that some journalists and news outlets in this country that meet that characterization, shouldn’t you have the guts, Sarah, to state which outlets and which journalists are the enemy of the people?

  SANDERS: I think it’s irresponsible of a news organization like yours to blame responsibility of a pipe bomb that was not sent by the president and not just blame the president, but members of his administration for those heinous acts. I think that is outrageous and irresponsible.

  Sanders didn’t need to specify who Trump’s “enemy” was at that briefing. It was painfully obvious before I’d asked my question. But I wanted all of this on record. I wanted it on video. Such words should be captured and memorialized for all eternity. Folks weren’t patting me on the back as I exited the Briefing Room that day, but I wasn’t looking for anybody’s approval. If people think I was showboating or grandstanding in my exchange with Sanders, they can shove it. This was all about preserving a dark chapter in our nation’s history. We need future generations to read and understand that there was a time in this country when the president and his top spokeswoman called reporters “the enemy of the people” in, of all places, the White House. It would be wrong to overlook such comments by sticking our heads in the sand. That would only sanitize Trumpworld’s behavior and rhetoric when both should be exposed, recorded, and held up to the brightest light possible. And that was what I hoped to accomplish in the Briefing Room that day. I knew Sarah would face no accountability for her actions. She wouldn’t lose her job over those comments. Indeed, they were probably acts of job preservation more than anything else. But her comments that day will outlive all of us.

  For nearly three years, I had endured the taunts, the name-calling, and the abuse at countless Trump rallies. Trump had whipped up millions of Americans into a full-blown frenzy of hatred for the press. I had felt it all firsthand, whether by standing on the press riser at a Trump rally or simply looking down at my phone to read the latest death threat posted on one of my social media accounts. Now, during these last days before the midterms, I was beginning to speak by phone with FBI agents and local police detectives who were beginning to investigate the various threats aimed at this reporter and some of my colleagues. The law enforcement community was beginning to take all of it very seriously. There were worries, of course, that Cesar Sayoc was far from the only loose cannon out there and that somebody was going to get hurt. I wasn’t sleeping much those days. I was looking around corners as I walked home at night. My producer Matt Hoye and I began to discuss whether we should wear bulletproof vests to the rallies, something the Secret Service probably would not allow. Should I carry a taser gun? I wondered.

  As a veteran reporter, I saw it as a bit ridiculous, but the reality was none of us knew just how serious the risks really were.

  * * *

  WITH SAYOC BEHIND BARS, CNN STILL HAD AN ELECTION TO COVER. We had to move beyond our clash with the White House over the man dubbed the “MAGA bomber.” With just a week to go before Trump found out whether his assaults on immigrants and the media would pay dividends with voters, the president was ratcheting up the rhetoric during a busy rally schedule down the home stretch. I traveled down to Florida for one of his final rallies, in support of GOP Senate candidate Rick Scott and Republican gubernatorial contender Ron DeSantis. We were nervous, as Florida rallies often featured the rowdiest crowds we would encounter. But we had a plan.

  Given what had just happened with Sayoc, CNN was not taking any chances with my security. At the Fort Myers rally, I was surrounded by a group of four off-duty police officers from the Miami area. They were big and intimidating, and frankly, I was a bit embarrassed. CNN was doing right by me in offering all that protection, but as anybody who knows me will tell you, I really don’t like being fussed over. And this was a lot of fussing.

  When we made our way inside the venue, it was like moths to a flame. Trump supporters made their way up to the press cage to ask me all sorts of questions. One woman asked me if I had been paid by George Soros to ask questions of Trump. No, I politely told her, “George Soros is not paying me.” Another man asked me if I was “on the CIA’s payroll.” These were some of the more bizarre examples, but they illustrate a critical point: too many Trump supporters have been so misled by conspiracy theorists, fringe websites, and conservative news outlets that it seemed normal to them that a reporter for the mainstream press could be paid by George Soros or the CIA.

  It wasn’t all bad that night. After the rally, an elderly gentleman named Merlin approached me with an incredibly kind gesture. He told me he had been at that rally in Tampa back in August and had given me a hard time. If you look at the video of all those folks yelling and giving me the middle finger, you can spot Merlin flipping me off in the crowd. Ever since then, Merlin told me, he had felt bad about what he’d done. He wanted to apologize. I couldn’t believe my ears. Honestly, I thought I was starting to tear up. So, I asked him if it would be okay to record his apology on my iPhone. He said he didn’t mind at all.

  “I just wanted to apologize for flipping you off in Tampa. I got carried away,” Merlin said, with his wife at his side, all smiles. “You know, it’s like I was asking for facts and not opinions. That’s all we want. I do get carried away so I just wanted to apologize.” And with that he was gone.

  I was touched by what he had done. After all those rallies and all those shouting Trump supporters and, yes, all those middle fingers, it felt good to talk to somebody who had had a change of heart. I
understand that Trump supporters don’t want to watch me or CNN. I get that. They can find much of what they want to hear on Fox News or conservative websites. What mattered to me was that Merlin had realized something bigger than all that: we are still in this thing together. He understood that we are not enemies. We are on the same team. We are all Americans. He knew exactly how we are supposed to treat one another, with dignity and respect.

  I thought about this a lot that night and over the next few days, and when Trump got his clock cleaned on Election Night, I was still thinking about Merlin. Yes, there was a blue wave that night: House Republicans were swept out of power, and Trump and the GOP held on to the Senate only by the skin of their teeth. Judgment Day had come for Trump. He was in for a whole new world as soon as the new Democratic House was sworn in. The hearings and investigations were all coming soon. The news cycle was dominated by that discussion. A former senior Trump White House official had put his finger on why Trump lost. The energy that had propelled Trump to power from conservatives had been matched by a rising enthusiasm on the left. “A hundred and thirteen million people came out to vote. Want to know why? They were passionate about getting the fuck rid of Donald Fucking Trump,” the official said.

  But reflecting on my own experience covering the midterms and all those crazy rallies, I was more impressed by the wave of decency that had swept over Merlin. I knew there must be others like him out there, feeling the same way. Fear and hatred had lost that day. So, I was feeling hopeful about America, not because Trump had been defeated, but because racism and xenophobia, in the form of Trump’s attacks on immigrants, had been defeated; paranoia and scapegoating, in the form of Trump’s attacks on the media, had been defeated.

  At least for today.

  13

  A White House Smear

  By the time the post-midterms press conference rolled around in November 2018, I suppose I should have seen it coming. After all, Trump had suffered a stinging defeat in the House, which was about to be controlled by the Democrats once again. The Republicans did make some gains in the Senate, but to look at it clinically, those gains were modest; they’d also lost a key Senate seat in Arizona, where former senator Jeff Flake had decided not to run for reelection, making Kyrsten Sinema the first Democrat to be elected to the Senate in Arizona since the 1990s. Needless to say, for a man who hated to lose as much as Trump did, this press conference was almost guaranteed to be messy.

  As it turned out, I didn’t know the half of it.

  Truth be told, I had prepared myself mentally for the day the White House would seize my press pass. It had long been a possibility in the back of my mind, even before Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale suggested on Twitter that I have my credentials yanked. I knew there was precedent for Trump doing something like it. At one event early on in the 2016 campaign, he had tossed out Jorge Ramos of Univision for pressing him on his blatantly racist comment that many Mexican immigrants were rapists and drug dealers. Ejecting a reporter from a presidential campaign function was just about unthinkable prior to Trump’s run for office. But candidate Trump was crossing lines that no one imagined capable of being crossed before.

  While my credentials were never threatened during the campaign, there were moments throughout the 2016 cycle when reporters from other outlets were denied access to Trump events. Jenna Johnson from the Washington Post and journalists from BuzzFeed were occasionally blocked from sitting in the press cage at Trump’s rallies. It was the campaign’s way of sending a message about stories they didn’t like. CNN was in a different category in 2016. During the primaries, the Trump people counted on us. Those were the days when we offered live, usually uninterrupted coverage of Trump’s rallies, something the other campaigns could only watch on their laptops, phones, and TVs with envy. The Trump campaign was not going to jeopardize that kind of free advertising by retaliating against our journalists. In fact, many of the advance people for the campaign bent over backward to make sure my crews and I made it into the rallies on time for our live shots, often escorting us to the head of the security line for the press when we were running late.

  Obviously though, things changed dramatically once CNN and I were dubbed “fake news” at that infamous press conference in January 2017. And then there were, of course, the many confrontations I had had with Trump and Spicer and Sanders. Looking back, I suppose that things had been approaching critical mass for some time.

  During the fight in the fall over Trump’s second Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, I challenged Sanders to defend the president’s shameful mockery of Christine Blasey Ford (a woman who had accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while they were both in high school) at a campaign rally in Mississippi. By the time Sanders called on me, she had repeatedly delivered the same talking point: that Trump was not mocking Dr. Ford, but was instead just stating facts. Yeah, right. The video speaks for itself. He was mocking a woman alleging sexual assault. And per usual at Trump rallies, his supporters were laughing and egging him on.

  I asked Sarah if she had any problem defending Trump. Her response was predictable and awful.

  “I don’t have any problem stating facts, no . . . I know that’s probably something you do have a problem with but we don’t,” she said acidly.

  Usually, a reporter would take a jab like that and absorb it. Instead, I responded, politely but pointedly.

  “Actually, Sarah, we do state the facts,” I fired back, “and I think there have been many occasions when you don’t state the facts, if I may respond.”

  And then there were the many moments with the White House that fell somewhere between petty and harassing. In June 2018, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway attempted to demonstrate that I was being unpatriotic because I was typing on my iPhone while a crowd of people were singing “God Bless America” during a “Celebration of America” convened by Trump on the South Lawn. You may remember that event, as it was hastily organized to replace a celebration for the Super Bowl champions the Philadelphia Eagles. Trump was so furious that so many Eagles had declined the invitation to come to the White House that he canceled the whole thing and threw a faux-patriotic spectacle instead. This was part of Trump’s culture war against the small number of NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem at league games in protest of police brutality in communities across the United States.

  As I was typing up a note about the event on my phone and posting a tweet, Conway turned to me and accused me of failing Trumpworld’s patriotism test. She held up her phone and started to record me, or at least pretend to.

  “Oh look, it’s Jim Acosta on his phone instead of singing ‘God Bless America,’” she said snarkily.

  So, I held up my phone to start recording Kellyanne, as she, too, was not singing along. Yes, this is but a peek through the window into the silly sideshows that play out on a daily basis at the Trump White House.

  Moments like these, combined with my later confrontations with Sarah Sanders over the White House reaction to Cesar Sayoc and his pipe bombs, only cemented in my mind that my relationship with the White House was on increasingly shaky ground. My relationship with many of the Trump people, if you want to call it that, had turned toxic well before the midterms. Still, I had a plan in place in case they came for my pass. The moment they tried to grab it, I was going to record the whole thing on my phone to make sure it was documented. I had no idea if or when I’d actually have to use that recording.

  On the morning after the midterms, there was no shortage of questions for Trump. At that point, he had not fired Sessions, but many of us figured that would happen in short order. There was also the issue of the Democrats seizing control of Congress. Could Trump work with the incoming House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi? What did he make of the calls for investigations into his tax returns, and so on, coming from so many Democrats on the verging of taking power? These were all key questions.

  It seemed that the best way to take Trump’s temperature at that moment was to confront h
im on the migrant caravan. During the run-up to the midterms he had used some of the most racially loaded rhetoric I had ever heard from an American president. He had claimed, without evidence, that “unknown Middle Easterners” had infiltrated the caravan. His campaign had also run a TV ad on the caravan that was rejected by the networks, including CNN (Fox News had been running the ad before taking it down). CNN labeled the ad as “racist.” Sure, it was just a continuation of his incendiary rhetoric aimed at immigrants that began the day he announced his run for the presidency. But just because race-baiting was his original sin as a politician didn’t mean the caravan remarks should go unchallenged. For years, I’d been listening as he took his hateful language to new lows, finding a variety of ways to paint immigrants in the worst possible light. He’d made fear of the caravan the cornerstone of his midterm strategy, but the American people hadn’t bought his manufactured crisis, and now his party had lost the House. Yes, on the day after the election, the caravan wasn’t just a fair question; it was the right question.

  Trump began the press conference, predictably, by calling on Fox News. Their reporter asked about a possible shakeup in Trump’s Cabinet and the potential for investigations. All fine questions. Next came a question on the border wall, one of Trump’s obsessions. Then came one on his tax returns. Trump was getting testy already. He scolded the next reporter, Brian Karem, for his questions about Trump’s tax returns and whether the president could separate his upcoming fights with the Democrats from his professed desired to work on a bipartisan basis. Trump repeatedly interrupted Karem, calling him a “comedian.” Then Trump, minutes later and in a bit of a surprise to me, called on me for the fifth question of the news conference.

  Almost from the start of our exchange, it was clear I was heading into territory he wasn’t happy about—not because of his actual words but because he also repeatedly interrupted my line of questioning. Interruption is a ploy Trump uses regularly to sidestep giving clear answers to questions. “Excuse me. Excuse me,” he will say when he doesn’t like a line of inquiry. Here’s a rule of thumb: if he’s interrupting you, you’re on to something, so keep going—which is what I did.