A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  The networks balked at giving the President so many free, unfettered opportunities in primetime and took to putting on panels of experts immediately afterwards, to mark, if you like, the President’s work. This drove Nixon nuts. He would deliver a live, primetime televised address – only to see its contents filleted afterwards by those smug, wise-owl commentators he saw as seeking to undermine his presidency. Nixon wasn’t going to tolerate this. The Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was sent out to bat, and the US networks were told by Nixon that it was in their interests to make sure they broadcast it live. They did, and in his speech to a Republican audience in Des Moines, Iowa, Agnew railed at the executives and reporters in charge of the editorial decisions as a ‘tiny, enclosed fraternity of privileged men elected by no one’. And with this speech came a campaign to encourage voters to complain to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the networks. That autumn, the administration circulated memorandums outlining how best to attack the networks by using the FCC, the Internal Revenue Service and the Justice Department for political ends, including challenging the operating licences of individual stations.

  But if Nixon at best mistrusted, and, at worst, hated the networks, he put a lot of effort into fostering closer relationships with local TV stations – something again that finds an echo today. Donald Trump goes out of his way to cultivate good relationships with the often privately owned local stations, such as the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Owned by a massively wealthy conservative family, Sinclair has 173 stations in 81 broadcast markets stretching from coast to coast, with TV stations just about everywhere in between – at a time when local news outlets outscore the national ones both in overall viewership and trust. There was a decidedly odd and widely ridiculed video that Sinclair put out, with each of its anchors reading an identical script, critiquing the state of modern journalism. It could have been written by Donald Trump, echoing his talking points almost exactly.

  For Nixon, to some extent the bullying worked. The networks became a little fearful. But for the most part he kept his vendettas private. Not for him the daily denunciations of the press being ‘the enemy of the people’, that are a feature of the current president. He schemed and planned his revenge. But it was only after his demise that some of the more extraordinary planned acts of revenge became public. Remember the broadcasting space of the 1960s and 1970s was a lot smaller than it is today. And with fewer broadcasters getting enormous audience share, the news anchors of the nightly broadcasts were huge stars – much more than is the case today when audiences are so much more fragmented. But Nixon did go after one of the biggest names of them all, Dan Rather. Along with Tom Brocaw at NBC and Peter Jennings at ABC, Rather was one of the big three in American broadcasting. But his tough, uncompromising reporting on Nixon in the lead-up to Watergate led to fury in the White House, so the President tried to organise covertly a ‘write in’ campaign to have him sacked from the network. Word went out to loyal Republicans that they should contact the network to demand that he be fired. It came to nothing.

  But if that smacks of clumsiness, there were more sinister efforts to silence his critics. In his book Poisoning the Press Mark Feldstein wrote: ‘Nixon’s administration wiretapped journalists, put them on enemies lists, audited their tax returns, censored their newspapers, and moved to revoke their broadcasting licenses.’ Indeed, there was one reporter who Nixon loathed above all others – Jack Anderson. He had been reporting on Nixon for twenty years, and had turned up all manner of unhelpful, muckraking facts about the President. He was now a syndicated columnist reaching millions of people across the US. So what did Nixon do? He commissioned ‘the plumbers’ – the name given to the operatives responsible for the break-in at the Watergate – to ‘take him out’; in other words, have him killed. The ‘hit’ was never carried out.

  Donald Trump may have had his run-ins with us – and there are certainly a large number of journalists who will not be featuring on his Christmas card list (it might be easier to approach it the other way round, and count the few who will be getting the Trump family card) – but he hasn’t yet resorted to ordering a ‘hit’ on anyone in particular. Or at least we don’t think he has! But he has conducted a systematic hit on the media, whose effects should not be underestimated. Theodore Roosevelt used to talk about the president having a ‘bully pulpit’, from which he could dictate the terms of the national debate, browbeat those who stood against him, and advance his own agenda. In today’s America Trump is using that bully pulpit to pummel the media unashamedly.

  Indeed, after the 2018 midterm elections when the Democratic Party regained control of the House of Representatives – and therefore control of all the key committees – one of the first things the new leadership announced they were going to look into was whether the President misused the power of his office by targeting media opponents. The President has repeatedly taken to Twitter to attack one of America’s most successful and innovative companies, Amazon. It seemed he thought Amazon should be paying the US Postal Service far more for its parcel delivery service, even though it was a contract between the two bodies that they had freely entered into. So what is it about the CEO of Amazon that Donald Trump dislikes? Simply the fact that Jeff Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post, a newspaper that has produced exclusive after exclusive on the less savoury aspects of this administration.

  At the beginning of 2019 the National Enquirer magazine had a salacious story about Bezos and his mistress. Days before publication, the Amazon owner and America’s richest man announced that he was separating from his wife. The magazine boasted that this had been the tabloid’s most extensive and expensive investigation ever. They had text messages, photos. It looked to be a classic tabloid sting. But Bezos – a man who doesn’t ever have need to say ‘I wonder whether I can afford this’ – launched his own counter-investigation into how the publisher had got hold of personal text messages and photos. That alarmed the parent company of the Enquirer so much that they threated Bezos with even greater humiliation. A lawyer from AMI wrote to threaten the billionaire that they would publish ‘dick pix’ in their possession (the legal phrasing, describing the state of the Bezos manhood, was quite something).

  But Bezos didn’t blink. In a lengthy blog post he turned the tables on the National Enquirer to reveal what he said were AMI’s attempts to use blackmail and extortion. The unsavoury methods of this celebrity mag were laid bare. This is all remarkable enough, but there was another level of murkiness. The owner of the National Enquirer is one David Pecker, and longstanding close personal friend of Donald Trump, who had already carried out ‘special ops’ to protect the President. (It was Pecker who had paid $150,000 for the story of the former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who wanted to go public with her claims that she and Mr Trump had had a longstanding affair. Pecker bought the exclusive rights to the story; in return McDougal had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, preventing her from telling anyone else. But Pecker never published the story – a practice known as ‘catch and kill’.) This now begged a very big question – was this a simple tabloid story, or was this a targeted ‘hit’ on a Trump enemy? Whichever, it was a lesson that you don’t take on the world’s richest man lightly. Bezos had come out on top. Or as the New York Post headlined it, with admirable brevity, ‘Bezos exposes Pecker.’

  Another issue that the President involved himself in was the planned merger between the telecommunications company AT&T and media giant Time Warner. Trump made clear that he wanted to block the deal because it would raise prices for households and stifle competition. A court rejected that, but Donald Trump wouldn’t let it go, saying that the proposed deal would lead to ‘too much concentration of power in the hands of too few’. Of course, the fact that Time Warner is the parent company of his broadcasting nemesis, CNN, had nothing to do with it. House Democrats promised their first investigation into Trump following the November 2018 elections would be into whether the President used ‘the instruments of state power to punish the p
ress’.

  There is one other news organisation that the President obsesses about, though he might try to pretend otherwise – and that is the New York Times, or the ‘failing’ New York Times as he would have it. I am never sure whether it’s a newspaper he loves to hate, or one that he hates to love. But it’s his hometown paper, and it is clear he craves their acceptance. It is also clear that it’s the newspaper he monitors most closely. There have been tweets where he has disparaged the paper’s indefatigable White House correspondent, Maggie Haberman – calling her third rate. Yet, when a documentary was made about the NYT, who was it who we saw ringing up Haberman to discuss coverage, but the President. When I now read her articles and see the line ‘sources close to the president’, I am pretty certain the ‘source’ is a white guy in his seventies with an orange tinge to his skin and an extravagantly coiffured hairstyle.

  It was an encounter that took place at the beginning of 2019 that was most interesting, in what it revealed about Trump’s attitude to the press in general and the New York Times in particular. He had invited the paper’s publisher, A.G. Sultzberger, to the White House for an off-the-record dinner. Sultzberger declined, saying he wanted it to be on the record and he wanted to bring along Haberman and another top Times reporter, Peter Baker. Trump acquiesced. The two journalists went along too, and conducted a pretty conventional news interview with the President; but afterwards Sultzberger engaged the President on his anti-press rhetoric and its consequences. ‘We’ve seen around the world an unprecedented rise in attacks on journalists, threats to journalists, censorship of journalists, jailing of journalists and murders of journalists,’ the New York Times publisher told him. His language was creating a climate in which dictators and tyrants were able to employ the President’s words in suppressing a free press, he went on. What is striking as you read the transcript of their conversation is the extent to which the President really seems to listen, asking questions about what he’s being told by Sultzberger. He does not dismiss it out of hand, as might have been expected. Nor, it should be added, does he promise to curb his ‘fake news’ and ‘enemies of the people’ chants at rallies, but there emerges from the exchanges a hint of a reflective president.

  At the first rally he held after this conversation, it made no difference. The attack on the media was as full-throated and uncompromising as ever. It was in El Paso in Texas, where the President was whipping up support for his border wall with Mexico. Except, on this occasion, at least one member in the audience took Donald Trump’s anti-media rhetoric to heart, and attacked one of the cameramen in the press area. It was a BBC cameraman, Ron Skeans, whom I work with every day at the White House. He was attacked from behind and was sent flying. So obvious was it that the President interrupted his speech to check whether Ron was OK. He wasn’t hurt, thankfully – but as A.G. Sultzberger had been trying to impress on the President, words have consequences.

  During the conversation with Sultzberger at the White House, Trump invariably turns the conversation back to his own treatment, and his deep sense of grievance that he is treated unfairly, meanly even. Of the press in general, he complains, ‘What amazes me, because I have great respect for the press, it amazes me that I can be treated so badly and I won. And we’re doing well. You know, it is pretty hard to believe actually.’

  But when it comes to talking about how the New York Times covers him you can just see it’s personal. It clearly hurts, and it is almost like a child endlessly and tearfully seeking the approval of a strict parent. Though Sultzberger points out that it is the newspaper’s job to hold to account whoever the occupant of the White House is, the President isn’t buying it. ‘I just think, honestly, I’m enti—I came from New York, I love New York, I’ll be back there someday, and I do, I love the place. And I sort of am entitled to a good story … I came from Jamaica, Queens, Jamaica Estates and I became President of the United States. I’m sort of entitled to a great story from my – just one – from my newspaper.’

  There is one other room that I contemplated writing a chapter about, and that is the private dining room in the West Wing. It wasn’t much used by Obama, but has become the place where this president likes to ‘hang’. It is the room where he has made the most alterations. He has installed a fancy chandelier, but his pride and joy is the 60-inch, flat screen TV that he has installed above the fireplace in the room, just a couple of offices along from the Oval Office.

  At the beginning of 2019 there was an extraordinary leak of his daily schedules. What they showed, if you were being unkind, is that this president does next to no work. If you were being generous, you would say he allows himself to benefit from plenty of unstructured thinking time. ‘Executive time’ is the euphemism that is used. And a lot of each day is ring-fenced executive time. If anyone doubts this, just after the leak of these schedules there was a faintly hilarious episode where one of the cable news anchors accused Trump of being the laziest president ever. Within 45 seconds of the presenter saying this, Trump went onto Twitter to say, ‘No president ever worked harder than me.’ He hadn’t thought this through. If the intention had been to convince us that he doesn’t sit about watching television, hadn’t he proved the complete opposite? This downtime is invariably spent in the private dining room watching the television and tweeting. Piles of newspapers, cuttings and files sit on the table. He records huge amounts of material too, so he can critique who’s doing well and slap down anyone performing badly. And he likes to watch himself. A lot.

  Donald Trump has a profound belief that the most effective communicator in his administration is Donald Trump; that the best strategist in his administration is Donald Trump; that the only person who can be trusted to get his message across is Donald Trump, and the only person who really knows how to play the media game is – darn, you guessed it – Donald Trump. And like so much that Donald Trump believes, there is more than a grain of truth to it – and a hot air balloon’s worth of warm air.

  After all, he has been in the self-promotion and branding game all his life. Prior to his entering politics people remember him for two things. OK, maybe three. First, he was a wealthy property developer in New York. Secondly, he was the long-time presenter of The Apprentice. And the third thing was his lifestyle, as the swaggering man about town – according to his own carefully cultivated lore he was the man women wanted, and the man that men wanted to be. Veterans of New York news media still laugh at how Trump would call them up, pretending to be a publicist named John Barron, or sometimes John Miller, in order to offer titbits of Trump’s glamorous personal life – the leggy models who were on his arm, which actresses were pursuing him, the A-list celebrities all begging to hang out with him. All aimed at creating one image: Donald Trump as a master of the universe.

  He could be brilliant. And he could be his own worst enemy. For brilliance, read this, in September 2018. It was the height of the drama about getting Brett Kavanaugh appointed to the Supreme Court, despite a series of sexual assault claims against him – and it was to be the most electric day in Washington, with him giving evidence, and his accuser Christine Blasey Ford also before the Senate Judiciary Committee. On that same Friday, meanwhile, Trump was due to see his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, who was overseeing the Mueller investigation, amid speculation that the President was about to fire him. But Trump announced the Rosenstein meeting would be postponed. I am sure it was instinctive rather than strategic, but he was like a TV exec who just knew you don’t win a ratings battle if you schedule your two top dramas against each other on the same day. The show starring Rod Rosenstein and the President would have to wait for another day.

  But there were times when we were left wondering whether the President had the faintest idea what he was doing. I remember sitting in the Rose Garden on a beautiful end of summer, start of autumn day, and the President had called us together to celebrate his renegotiation of the NAFTA trade deal. It was a big success story. A big deal. Something you would guess the communications team i
n the White House hoped would be running as the lead story on cable and the nightly news shows that evening. But Donald Trump allowed himself to be side-tracked by another far less positive story, which he could have easily stonewalled.

  Often it has seemed that the one thing this president can’t abide is the notion that he is not the centre of the conversation. Not the headline on the nightly news. It often seems that on quiet news days he will simply create a story out of thin air. A propos of nothing a tweet will appear, waging war on someone or something. And like taking a match to tinder dry grass – whoosh – you have created a fire. He boasted at one point how he could often be the subject of four different front-page stories in the New York Times or Wall Street Journal – not distinguishing whether the story was good or bad for him. It is as though he lives by the maxim attributed to P.T. Barnum: there is no such thing as bad publicity.

  That is not how the rest of the communications shop at the White House saw it. Can you imagine how exasperating it must be to create a press strategy, only to have your principal actor shred it on a whim as he relies on his own gut instincts to wing it, whatever the consequences. At various times efforts have been made to tamp down the open hostility that the President shows to the press. A friend of mine was approached to become White House communications director. He has an impeccable record of public service, and sits at the highest level of the private sector. He is a loyal Republican and a proud patriot. He met members of the family, and the most senior White House officials. But astonishingly for this devoted citizen, nearly all the advice he received was to give it a wide berth. The job was undoable. The President would not listen to advice. He would go his own way, and all your job would consist of was to be like the street cleaners who follow the horses once the State Coach and the Sovereign’s escort have passed down Whitehall for the State Opening of Parliament – aka shit shoveller.