Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  CNN didn’t see the humor, accusing Trump of juvenile behavior, of encouraging violence against reporters, and scolded him to do his job.

  While the video had a farcical look, others feared a more chilling message. Some journalists told me privately that they had been receiving not just obscene vitriol from Trump supporters—often sexually explicit taunts for women—but serious death threats that prompted some to contact local police agencies. Their home addresses had been published. They worried about family members. No public figure can be held responsible for what crazy followers might say or do, but the journalists under online attack were nervous.

  On his MSNBC show, Chuck Todd accused the president of dehumanizing journalists and said that if another leader was doing what Trump was doing, the State Department would be saying “that country is inching toward authoritarianism.”

  CNN commentator Ana Navarro was more succinct: “He is going to get someone killed in the media.”

  In his Times media column, Jim Rutenberg offered a historical lament: Americans could hardly enjoy the Fourth of July “when one of the pillars of our 241-year-old republic—the First Amendment—is under near-daily assault from the highest levels of the government.”

  The selective bursts of outrage seemed as phony as the WWE itself. The overheated objections were, by an order of magnitude, far more emotional than those that greeted Kathy Griffin’s severed Trump head, or Shakespeare in the Park’s bloody assassination of Trump as Julius Caesar, both of which suggested murder in a way that a bit of Wrestle-Mania did not.

  The famously self-absorbed media cast themselves as brave warriors, guardians of the nation’s independence, under siege by a rogue president. Actually, the media were Trump’s codependents, addicted to the drama of fighting him at every turn. And Trump’s presidency seemed increasingly consumed by an assault on the press that was intended to neutralize criticism of his agenda, but too often overshadowed the agenda itself.

  The speech that Donald Trump delivered in Poland—which combined the sweep of history with a nationalistic call to unite against Islamic terrorism—was described even by many detractors as the best of his presidency.

  But there was considerably more media coverage of his attacks on CNN and NBC, eclipsing his major address.

  Trump had held a news conference with the Polish president and called on David Martosko of the Daily Mail, who asked about CNN’s response to the wrestling video, including tracking down its creator on a Reddit message board and warning that the network might expose his identity if he backed off his apology for the stunt and some bigoted postings.

  “They have been fake news for a long time. They’ve been covering me in a very, very dishonest way,” Trump said.

  And then he pivoted: “NBC is equally as bad, despite the fact that I made them a fortune with The Apprentice, but they forgot that”—as if the old show would afford him immunity from critical coverage.

  The spectacle of Trump unleashing such criticism on foreign soil sparked a severe reaction. “I’m not sure that the American president should be bashing the American media when he is overseas with a foreign leader who tried to repress the free media in his own country,” Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace said.

  CNN was furious. Jeff Zucker had already declared that Trump was trying to “bully” the network and that he would not be intimidated. Now CNN’s Jim Acosta condemned Trump’s “fake news conference”—“fake” because Trump dared call on a conservative, not “someone who was going to challenge him on the issues.”

  Trump had, in fact, also taken a question from NBC’s Hallie Jackson, who asked if he would finally accept that Russian hackers interfered with the election. Trump hedged, but scolded the media for reporting that all seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had blamed Russia for the hacking, when it was only four. “Many of your compatriots had to change their reporting, or they had to apologize or they had to correct,” the president said. And he was right—the AP and New York Times were among those who had just corrected the frequently repeated but erroneous statistic.

  Spicer was often puzzled by how his boss decided who to call on at news conferences. Trump would veto one reporter who had “said some bad stuff” or approve another who had “been really good.” But when Spicer noted that USA Today correspondent David Jackson had been very fair, Trump told him: “Did you see what USA Today said about me yesterday?” Jackson hadn’t written the story, but he was made to pay the price.

  There was a huge media buildup for the next day’s meeting with Vladimir Putin, which was treated like a Cold War summit, with the focus on whether Trump would dare bring up the Russian hacking. As it happened, Trump raised the issue twice during the two-hour meeting. But Trump and Putin’s agreement to move on to other issues dismayed anti-Russia hardliners and conservative Trump critics like Steve Hayes, whose Weekly Standard piece was titled “Trump Caves to Putin.”

  Still, Putin had not steamrolled the new president, as some pundits had expected, and somehow that drained the news value from the much-hyped showdown. Since the session, which yielded a partial cease-fire in Syria, appeared to go reasonably well, the press shifted its focus.

  The Washington Post said that at the G20 meeting, “the growing international isolation of the United States under President Trump was starkly apparent.” The New York Times said Trump “found the United States isolated on everything from trade to climate change,” and that he was a nationalist who “has alienated allies and made the United States seem like its own private island.”

  But the president was doing precisely what he had promised to do during the campaign on trade, NATO, immigration, and the environment. Whether these were good policies or not, to summarily dismiss them as “isolationist” reflected a media consensus that it was wrong to tamper with the existing world order. A more neutral approach would have been to report that Trump was “challenging” our allies and adversaries rather than turning America into a pariah state.

  NBC’s Andrea Mitchell called it the worst summit since 1986, charging that Trump was “too chicken” to hold a closing news conference. The Wall Street Journal’s Eli Stokols said on MSNBC that Trump’s discussion of Russia was “Kremlinesque propaganda.”

  And then there was Ivanka. She had been edging into a more public role, giving a speech at the State Department to unveil a report on human trafficking, joining a women’s roundtable in Saudi Arabia, discussing her job with the Washington Post, and writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed on family leave.

  But then came a fateful moment. When her father asked her to sit in for him at a session in Germany, Ivanka declined. He asked again. No way, Ivanka said; she knew full well the media would lose their minds if she sat in for the president of the United States.

  Two minutes after the president left, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin approached her and said her father really wanted her to take the seat. She gave in, and Angela Merkel gave her a fist bump. Ivanka knew what would happen.

  There were instantaneous headlines around the globe, such as this one in the Washington Post: “Ivanka Trump Takes Her Father’s Seat at World Leaders’ Table During a G-20 Meeting.”

  Liberal New York Times columnist Charles Blow erupted: “Why the hell is Ivanka Trump sitting in for daddy at G20 meetings? What are her qualifications? Who voted for her?”

  Columnist Nick Kristof, also of the Times, wrote, “Yes, she’s beautiful—but unqualified. When Caligula tried to appoint his horse Consul of Rome, it was a beautiful horse.”

  A columnist for London’s Independent harrumphed that “the president runs things like America is just the new family business.”

  World leaders took the meaningless incident in stride, but Trump had managed to embroil his daughter in yet another media furor.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE SECRET RUSSIA MEETING

  For nearly a year, the bitter battle between the president and the media turned on his fierce insistence that he had done absolutely nothing to collude wi
th Russia and their unyielding determination to prove that he had.

  There had been so many eye-glazing stories about this or that previously private contact between a Trump associate and a Russian official that it had become the background music of his administration, a constant hum that was easy to ignore.

  The constant billowing of smoke, with no visible fire, was continuing because the White House had chosen not to release all the information, no matter how damaging, to snuff out the story.

  And then, on July 9, came a New York Times piece that could not be easily waved away, given the stunning admission that came from Donald Trump Jr. himself. The president’s son had taken a first step toward attempted collusion with the Russians, its sting lessened only because the effort apparently went nowhere. He had also pulled Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, then the campaign chairman, into the June 2016 session with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.

  Don Jr. gave a statement to the New York Times that was so incomplete as to be blatantly misleading. Don had wanted to put out more details, but White House officials pushed the idea of what was called a “surgical” statement with minimal information. They drafted it on the plane ride back from the G20 summit, the statement saying that “we primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children.”

  The next day, the Times reporters came back with more information, and the White House told Don Jr. he would have to respond with a fuller statement. He was furious, because that was what he had wanted to do in the first place; now he looked evasive. In the second statement, Don Jr. said that Veselnitskaya indicated she had information on Russians funding the DNC and supporting Hillary Clinton, but she offered only “vague” and “ambiguous” comments. She then turned to her “true agenda”—an effort to change an American sanctions law aimed at Moscow that prompted Putin to end an adoption program—and Don realized “that the claims of potentially helpful information were a pretext for the meeting.”

  He abruptly ended the sit-down, because his only interest had been whether this Russian had any dirt on Hillary. There was no need for complicated media analysis; these were his own words.

  The second New York Times story cited “three advisers to the White House briefed on the meeting” between Don and Veselnitskaya “and two others with knowledge of it.” These sources were either engaged in damage control or trying to damage the president’s son.

  Political campaigns, of course, were often on the hunt for “opposition research.” Don dismissed the “nonsense meeting,” tweeting, “Media & Dems are extremely invested in the Russia story…I understand the desperation!”

  On the third day, when the Times told Don Jr. that it was about to publish the emails setting up the meeting, he preempted the paper by posting them on Twitter. And they were explicit. A British publicist and former tabloid reporter conveyed an offer from Russia’s top prosecutor, through an intermediary, “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” And this was part of “its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Don Jr.’s response made headlines everywhere: “I love it.”

  Don made a unilateral decision to sit down with a sympathetic interviewer, Sean Hannity. He defended the meeting as a routine search for opposition research but admitted to Hannity that in retrospect he “probably would have done things a little differently.”

  Kellyanne Conway was sent off to Good Morning America, New Day, and Fox & Friends to defend the embarrassing disclosures. George Stephanopoulos wanted to know who had misled Conway, since she had previously insisted there were no Russian meetings related to the campaign.

  Conway parried by saying the officials involved had amended their disclosure forms, but the best she could offer was that the meeting was a bust: “No information was received that was meaningful or helpful and no action was taken.”

  Kellyanne wound up in a thirty-five-minute debate with Chris Cuomo on CNN, asking him: “Aren’t you the least bit reluctant, if not embarrassed that you now talk about Russia more than you talk about America?”

  “No!” Cuomo replied. “Kellyanne, this matters.” He tried to score a point for the press, saying viewers “shouldn’t believe all of the White House and the surrogates and your alt-right friends that want to destroy the responsible media.”

  Kellyanne wasn’t having it, complaining about “the snarky looks, the furrowed brows, the rolling eyes from so many people on your panels. And you know it. You guys have made a business decision to be anti-Trump.”

  The press tried to tar Jared Kushner with the latest revelations, even though everyone agreed he had left the meeting within minutes. The pundits started saying without evidence that Kushner could be in legal jeopardy and questioned whether his security clearance should be revoked. The New York Times asked whether Kushner had been “forthcoming” in describing the meeting to the president. On MSNBC, Lawrence O’Donnell suggested Jared leaked the story to make Don Jr. look bad. And to make such sabotage sound plausible, he invoked the criminal case in which Kushner’s father had entrapped his brother-in-law in a prostitute sting. That was a truly low blow.

  Kushner was frustrated that Sean Spicer wasn’t defending him and Don Jr. more aggressively. But Steve Bannon wanted all comments on the Russian investigations to come from lawyers or their spokesmen. He didn’t want the president’s aides sucked back into the Russian morass, as had happened on the plane; otherwise, Spicer and Sanders would have to fight that battle every day.

  Kushner’s lawyers had discovered the emails setting up the meeting, and Bannon suspected that his team had leaked the story. Bannon thought it mind-boggling that Don Jr. and Jared had taken the meeting. Bannon had spent years on a Navy destroyer, hunting Soviet subs from the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf; he didn’t need to be told that the Russians could still be an enemy. Besides, he had all the opposition research he needed from newspaper stories on the Clinton Foundation and the book Clinton Cash. When Bannon got to the campaign, it wasn’t research they were short of, it was manpower. Trump’s skeletal staff, he felt, couldn’t even “collude” with the RNC on a ground game.

  Bannon realized the Russia probe had become a media soap opera. Before the Don Jr. revelation, the scandal had become so arcane that even anti-Trump journalists were getting tired of it. But now you had these colorful characters: attractive Russian women, an eccentric British publicist, a pop star, quirky billionaires. It had become The Americans, the FX drama in which two Soviet agents pose as a married couple to spy on the U.S. government.

  Once the special counsel was appointed, Bannon mounted a serious effort to persuade Republicans to shut down the House and Senate investigations as unnecessary. But the lawmakers argued that their inquiries were too far down the road and refused. Bannon felt their egos wouldn’t allow them to pass up all that free television exposure.

  Bannon’s focus was pushing the president’s agenda on health care, trade, taxes, and immigration. He didn’t want any part of the Russian debacle. He hadn’t felt the need to hire a lawyer, and he wanted to keep it that way.

  But the press was casting a wide dragnet. Mike Pence’s spokesman, for example, made a simple statement of fact—that the vice president was not focused on “stories about the time before he joined the ticket”—which got spun into “Pence Aide Won’t Say If Boss Met with Russia,” (a Huffington Post lead story). Pence, who was offended by the media chatter, had his spokesman clarify that there were no such meetings.

  The administration took stinging criticism from both sides of the spectrum. The Weekly Standard declared that “the Trump team has lost all credibility on the question of Russia.” National Review slammed “Don Jr.’s Disgraceful Meeting,” saying that after “a journalistic season of hype, innuendo and flat-out error…the New York Times finally hit paydirt.”

  The New York Times editorial page accused the president of fostering “a culture of dishonesty.” Tim
e magazine put Don Jr.’s face on the cover with the headline “RED HANDED.” Even the usually supportive New York Post declared: “Donald Trump Jr. is an idiot.”

  Jake Tapper said Don Jr.’s meeting with Veselnitskaya was “staggering” because it was “evidence of willingness to commit collusion,” and “can’t be dismissed as people out to get Donald J. Trump Jr. or fake news.”

  Fox News anchor Shepard Smith said that the administration’s previous denials of any campaign contacts with the Russians were “mind-boggling”: “If there’s nothing there, and that’s what they tell us…then why all these lies? Why is it lie after lie after lie?” He said the people out there “who believe we’re making it up” would one day realize they were not. (The Washington Post hailed Shep for a “Cronkite moment,” because, well, he went after Trump.)

  “The White House has been thrust into chaos,” the Washington Post announced, with Jared, Ivanka, and Melania pushing for a staff shake-up that would oust Reince Priebus.

  The president, however, put the blame on the media, rather than his chief of staff or his son, tweeting that with “highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country.” This rang a bit hollow, for it was hardly fraudulent to report information confirmed by his son.

  Sean Spicer pushed the White House line with reporters, saying that “there was nothing, as far as we know, that would lead anyone to believe that there was anything except for a discussion about adoption.” But that assertion was directly contradicted by the emails to Don Jr., offering Russian dirt on Hillary. What Spicer meant was that even if Don Jr. had been enticed into the meeting by a desire for opposition research, the meeting itself, as it turned out, was a lobbying effort by Natalia Veselnitskaya to encourage the Trump team to support lifting the Magnitsky Act sanctions on Russia in return for an end to Moscow’s ban on American adoptions of Russian children. Spicer believed that was the bottom line, and the press was just nitpicking. But CNN’s Anderson Cooper called Spicer’s answer “flat-out false.”