The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  As much as I enjoyed being back at the White House doing my job with my hard pass back in my pocket, I knew our victory in court was never going to change Trump’s behavior. We had won the battle, but the war on the press wasn’t over. Far from it. Sarah and the folks at the White House never apologized for smearing me and attempting to destroy my career—though I never expected that anyway.

  Now, this may not please the haters, but I don’t spend much time curled up in the fetal position, crying myself to sleep every night. I welcomed Trumpworld’s hatred. Besides, I would much rather focus on the mountain of positive feedback that comes rushing in from all corners. There are the anonymous White House officials who have stopped me on the street to tell me to “keep going.” (Yes, that has happened.) Pilots on some of my flights crisscrossing the country have sent back notes from the cockpit telling me to “keep up the pressure.” Don’t let yourself think for a second that the abuse we take at the White House or at the MAGA rallies somehow tells the whole story. It doesn’t.

  I have heard from so many people from around the world, as have my colleagues in the press. Folks come up to us at train stations, supermarkets, and restaurants. They believe in this thing called a free press. They know we have a tough job cutting through the lies. They know we are sacrificing so much. They have seen all the abusive behavior. And the folks at home have told us, resoundingly, “Don’t stop.” Or, as Sam Donaldson put it, “Keep charging.”

  * * *

  NOT LONG AFTER I RETURNED TO WORK IN THE WHITE HOUSE, I WAS able to play a small role in the coverage of the passing of President George H. W. Bush. I was outside the National Cathedral in Washington. The service had just concluded. It was a moving ceremony. The entire world, it seemed, was mourning with the Bush family as they said goodbye to Bush 41. I had a chance to report on the encounter between the Bush and Trump families, describing it as “The Greatest Generation meets Make America Great Again,” a reminder that America was great long before the forty-fifth president. It felt good to report on another president besides Trump for a change. George Bush would have never called the press the enemy of the people.

  After it was all over and the movers and shakers of Washington high society were heading home, I spotted a familiar face moving toward me. It was Tom Brokaw, the legendary NBC anchor who had written the book The Greatest Generation. We had never met before.

  “Staying out of trouble?” Brokaw asked with a laugh.

  “A little,” I replied with a smile.

  Epilogue:

  America, If You’re Listening . . .

  In the weeks following the restoration of my hard pass at the White House, several of my colleagues at other news outlets, and even a few Secret Service officers, had some good fun needling me about the whole saga, part of the gallows humor of the White House beat.

  “Are they letting you back in here?” folks would ask.

  Yes, I would say, laughing.

  But I had received some warm gestures of support as well. At an awards dinner in Washington, the retiring Republican senator Jeff Flake, who had also sparred with Trump, gave me a shout-out.

  “Go get ’em, Acosta. Don’t back down,” Flake said.

  At the White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual holiday reception at the JW Marriott in Washington, Sarah Sanders and Bill Shine approached me in what appeared to be a transparently insincere attempt to lighten the mood.

  “Don’t back away,” Sarah said as she and Bill walked up to me. “We come in peace.”

  They then roped me into joining them in singing a rather half-hearted version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” with some of my counterparts in the press gathered around, watching curiously.

  “Five golden briefings,” I joked, weakly. There was strained laughter. It was all very awkward, so I took a swig from my wineglass and slipped away.

  Folks have asked me if things have gotten back to normal with the White House. No, of course not, I respond. How could they? Things were not normal at the White House before I lost my press pass.

  After the midterms, Trump continued to test America’s durable Constitution. He shut down the government to force U.S. taxpayers to build his border wall, the project that in 2016 he had vowed Mexico would finance. When he didn’t get his way during the shutdown, he declared a national emergency to circumvent Congress with a scheme to divert already appropriated funds to his border barrier quest. Some fellow Republicans accused the president of actually violating the Constitution, a rare proof of life from a party held hostage by its leader. The late senator John McCain, Trump’s longtime nemesis, would have been proud.

  But what more could Trump attempt with another term in office? At some point, I reckon, both parties will give in and let Trump have his way on the wall. But do Democrats really believe Trump will reciprocate with truly bipartisan initiatives to address, say, the epidemic of mass shootings that has ravaged communities from Newton, Connecticut; to Parkland, Florida; to Las Vegas? He obviously won’t tackle the urgent crisis of climate change, which he still sees as a hoax, despite what all the scientific evidence tells us.

  When it comes to the border, facts are sometimes not on Trump’s mind. At a news conference in the Rose Garden, where he announced his immigration emergency, he lashed out at my attempts to hold his feet to the fire. When I reminded him that respected studies show that immigrants, even the undocumented, commit crimes at lower levels than native-born Americans, he cried “fake news.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Trump said.

  “I believe in facts and statistics,” I told him during another one of our confrontations.

  One national emergency Trump appears to have ignored altogether is the potential for Russia to hack into America’s democratic process once again in 2020. For all the heated debate over whether Trump’s aides and associates colluded with Moscow, there are some clear conclusions contained in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report about Putin’s interference in 2016. Mueller found, as had the U.S. intelligence community long before Mueller’s appointment as special counsel, that the Russians had successfully carried out an operation to alter the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. Top administration officials, including the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, have warned that the Russians will try it again in 2020.

  On April 18, 2019, Special Counsel Robert Mueller released his report on the Russia investigation. While Trump was not charged with conspiring with the Russian government in 2016, he was notably not cleared of obstructing justice. The Mueller report stated Trump ordered White House counsel Don McGahn to fire the special counsel. McGahn ignored the order. Trump was alarmed by Mueller’s appointment, remarking to aides, “This is the end of my presidency.” It was also revealed that Sarah Sanders admitted to investigators that she had lied about Comey’s firing.

  It’s worth noting that after Democrats captured the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms, Trump began to express concerns that he could be impeached, I was told. He saw it as a “real possibility.” My sources said White House officials believed the accusations of campaign finance violations, tied to the payments of hush money to Trump’s alleged mistresses, were most problematic.

  When taking stock of the Trump effect on the world, we should think bigger than the Russian threat. Perhaps we should assess the damage we are doing to ourselves in betraying the values that have always stood America in good stead. Consider the case of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who resided in Virginia, whose children are U.S. citizens, and who was assassinated inside a Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The assessment from the U.S. intelligence community was that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, likely at the direction of Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman, orchestrated the murder of Khashoggi in retaliation for his commentary about the government in Riyadh.

  In their defense, the Saudis at first said that Khashoggi had left the consulate alive; in fact, there was closed-circuit video showing as much. Bu
t as CNN’s exceptional reporting of the journalist’s murder demonstrated, it was a body double dressed in Khashoggi’s clothing who made the videotaped exit from the consulate. Khashoggi, we later learned, never left the building. Instead, the journalist was detained inside, where, U.S. and Turkish governments assert, Saudi operatives murdered him and then dismembered him with a bone saw.

  The Saudis attempted to mislead the world about what had happened to Khashoggi, at one point blaming his assassination on “rogue killers,” a lie repeated by Trump to the press. It was as if O. J. Simpson were writing the kingdom’s press releases. The Riyadh government’s shameful and amateurish attempt at a cover-up, exposed in part by dedicated journalists but also by their geopolitical rivals in Turkey, underlined the danger of handing the world over to autocrats like the Saudi royal family.

  When the American president ultimately sided with the Saudis instead of with the press, he made it clear that the kingdom would not be held accountable in any meaningful way for the murder of a journalist. The life of an “enemy of the people,” it seemed, was not worth defending, the Trump team figured, if it meant sacrificing the cozy relationship the United States enjoyed with Riyadh. This all but gave the green light to other governments around the world to target the press—not that Vladimir Putin needed the go-ahead; still, other tyrants big and small were watching. Now foreign leaders call stories they want to smother “fake news.” Trump’s anti-truth virus is spreading.

  A free press is surely a vital element of the democratic vaccine against assaults on the truth. Still, it’s almost impossible to look at our situation heading into 2020 without asking how much worse things could get for journalists.

  I thought about the high price journalists now pay for asking hard questions during the weekend after my press pass was returned. There I was, standing in the street tossing a football with my son (as we often do), and about fifty feet away from us stood a man with a gun on his belt: a security guard assigned to my family and me in response to the death threats that had been pouring in as part of the backlash to the judge’s ruling in CNN’s favor. There had been other attempts at harassment. A “swatter” sent police to my home to frighten my family, claiming there was a violent incident taking place there. The police arrived in the middle of the night, guns drawn. Fortunately, my children slept through it all.

  I ask my fellow journalists and my fellow Americans: is this to be our fate?

  The dangers cannot be ignored. When the so-called MAGA bomber, Cesar Sayoc, pleaded guilty in federal court in March 2019, he expressed remorse for endangering journalists and Trump critics, but he later insisted to the judge that he never intended for the devices to explode.

  “The intention was to only intimidate and scare,” Sayoc said in a letter to the judge.

  The MAGA bomber’s arrest didn’t press Pause on the threat to journalists covering Trump. In February 2019, a MAGA hat–wearing Trump supporter attacked a BBC cameraman at one of the president’s rallies in El Paso.

  Journalists must continue to speak out against these acts of violence against the press. We should not be bullied into silence.

  By 2020, we will have reached year five of Trump’s war on the press and on the truth. By that point, America will have changed in profound ways, ways that even now we cannot predict. A free society, I would argue, cannot sustain the collective weight of the kind of abuse we’ve endured without its institutions, and its people, undergoing a profound metamorphosis. Across the country, people will have come of age exposed to a dangerous rhetoric that distorts our collective sense of reality and that will have consequences we cannot yet fully appreciate.

  To better understand the gravity of this moment in our nation’s history, I consulted a handful of presidential historians and scholars. If you share the view that this is a perilous time for America, take heart. You are not alone.

  “We are in very dangerous waters right now,” Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley told me. “A key part of authoritarianism is to smother a free press,” he continued. “If [Trump] can turn the press into ‘fake news’ and ‘the enemy of the people,’ that really takes away his biggest roadblock to authoritarian government,” he added.

  Other historians I consulted weren’t quite ready to say we are on the road to authoritarianism, but they were equally worried about the sorry state of affairs in the nation’s capital and its impact on the rest of America. Princeton University presidential historian Julian Zelizer assigned the blame for much of the nation’s current woes on an outbreak of hyperpartisanship being exploited by Trump. Let’s hope that’s all this is. But Larry Sabato, from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, went further than that, saying that Trump “can fairly be described as a cult leader; millions of his followers believe anything he tells them, and the truth be damned.” Sabato continued: “Since Nixon’s final days in 1974, I’ve never wondered whether a president would consider leading a coup to retain power—until now.”

  I asked Larry if he was okay with my using these quotes. His response? “Use any of it you want, Jim. . . . Give ’em hell.” (I will.)

  At the conclusion of the testimony of Trump’s former personal attorney Michael Cohen, arguably the most profound moment came when the committee’s chairman, Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, delivered an impassioned speech about the state of American politics.

  “We have got to get back to normal,” he shouted. “When we’re dancing with the angels, the question we’ll be asked: In 2019, what did we do to make sure we kept our democracy intact? Did we stand on the sidelines and say nothing?” Cummings added.

  I think the chairman is on to something. If we stay on this path of abnormality, there almost surely will be consequences. If we continue down this road, it is not a stretch to say that, here in America, we will have witnessed a sad transformation. Tens of millions of Trump supporters may no longer believe what is written or reported by journalists working for major news outlets. Further, Trump has demonstrated time and again that he will stoke animosity toward the mainstream press inside his base to benefit his sympathizers and apologists in conservative media. The question is: how much can the system take before there is a crash? After all, you can’t speak truth to power if those in power can crush the truth.

  Having traveled to every corner of the country and attended those raucous rallies and absorbed all that hostility and venom, I’m less worried about what Trump is doing to America than I am about what we have done to ourselves. If a politician’s supporters are so blinded by their own passions that they can walk up to a journalist at a political event and scream that she’s a traitor, or anonymously threaten a reporter’s life on social media, then we, as a society, are surrendering something far greater than politics. We are surrendering our decency, and perhaps our humanity. It is perfectly fair to ask how does this end without suffering.

  In the final analysis, there is only so much blame that should be shouldered by the president of the United States. Citizens still have the ability to sort right from wrong, to recognize the difference between real and fake news. Don’t let the truth die in a tweet. That would be a horrible way for it to go.

  When I speak to groups of people who want to know what it’s like covering the White House these days, the thing I’m asked perhaps most often is how we see our way out of these dark times for our country. I certainly don’t have all the answers. But the first thing I tell folks is that I am less concerned about “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” as some of the president’s supporters describe the outrage among his critics, than I am about what I call “Trump Depression Syndrome.” Too many people are feeling dejected, even defeated, based on the news of the day, or the tweets in the morning. Will this moment pass? I believe it will. But how do we get there? Here’s my thought on that: We are simply going to have to have more faith, not just in the facts, but in each other. We need to have more faith that we still can count on our neighbors, even the strangers in the red MAGA hats or the
pink #RESIST T-shirts, to form that more perfect union. We are divided, but not irreparably, in my view. Despite what’s happened, I still have faith in all of us.

  Getting to that place of a more lasting unity will be a difficult task. There must be a common understanding that words matter. They have meaning. Words have power. I believe the term “the enemy of the people” will come to help define this era, when one group of people was pitted against another in ways that I had not seen in my lifetime. Before the sun sets on this democracy—and may that day never come—it must be said that the press is not the enemy. We are defenders of the people. Some of us, not I, have sacrificed everything for this profession, from war zones to, unfortunately, newsrooms. Journalists have done this out of a deep devotion to the people. It is a devotion born out of a love for all people. That is a truth worth defending, as journalists are people too.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the help of some truly special people in my life. I especially want to thank my entire family for their patience during the writing process. The wonderful folks at CNN have also been very supportive. So, I’d like to acknowledge Jeff Zucker, Michael Bass, Allison Gollust, Rick Davis, David Vigilante (and the rest of CNN’s legal team!), Sam Feist, Virginia Moseley, Antoine Sanfuentes, Steve Brusk, and Matt Hoye. There are so many other show producers and anchors who’ve invited me onto their programs over the course of my twelve years at CNN. I’m immensely grateful to all of you.

  Additionally, I would like to recognize my colleagues in CNN’s White House unit, past and present: Laura Bernardini, Brianna Keilar, Dan Lothian, Jeff Zeleny, Pam Brown, Sara Murray, Kaitlan Collins, Joe Johns, Athena Jones, Abby Phillip, Boris Sanchez, Michelle Kosinski, Kevin Liptak, Allie Malloy, Jeremy Diamond, Dan Merica, Sarah Westwood, Meghan Vasquez, Betsy Klein, Noah Gray, Kristen Holmes, Becky Brittain Rieksts, Bonney Kapp, and Elizabeth Landers. New York–based producers Laura Dolan and Julian Cummings, as well as former colleagues Jon Klein, James Kraft (now with NBC), and Edith Chapin (now with NPR), were also very supportive during my time at CNN.