Media Madness

by Howard Kurtz

  Wolf Blitzer said Sanders should apologize for claiming that generals were above criticism. Jake Tapper called her remarks “one of the most shocking things I’ve ever heard from that podium.” Another CNN anchor, Erin Burnett, went so far as to say “a military dictatorship—that appears to be what the United States is.”

  What Sanders was trying to say was that Kelly had an impregnable moral standing when it came to fallen soldiers, not that journalists should never question military brass. But the toxic relationship between Trump and the press had turned even condolences for a soldier’s ultimate sacrifice into political sniping.

  Steve Bannon was suddenly riding a wave of positive press.

  And the man who openly disdained the “opposition party” knew why. He was the same curmudgeon, but now he was trying to destroy something the media wanted destroyed: the Republican establishment. The press was promoting him because he was trying to blow up Mitch McConnell. He had been transformed from creep to crusader. By recruiting insurgent candidates to challenge wavering GOP lawmakers, Bannon hoped to create a Trump-centric populist party, which many pundits thought would clear a Democratic path to victory.

  The president called to congratulate Bannon after a fiery appearance on Fox, but he was growing a bit worried about him. Trump asked Sean Hannity, Rand Paul, and others the same question: “Is Steve still with me? He is, isn’t he?”

  Bannon believed he was, but he had given Trump fair warning. On the day he left the White House, he told the president: “I’m going after Mitch McConnell.” Bannon was explicit, saying the goal was “to bring him down. You can’t go after him halfway.”

  Trump said that was fine, that Bannon should go ahead.

  But now Bannon was denouncing the majority leader and some of his allies when Trump needed their votes to pass tax reform.

  After Bannon criticized Luther Strange, the appointed Republican senator in Alabama, Trump told him that Strange was his “friend.”

  “You don’t have any friends,” Bannon shot back, not unless they went to the microphones to take on his critics like Senator Bob Corker.

  Corker had pounded the president on the morning shows, saying Trump was “debasing our country,” and Arizona Senator Jeff Flake joined him in announcing his retirement, saying he could not remain silent in the face of Trump’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior” that was “dangerous to our democracy.” The media reveled in the narrative that leading Republicans were questioning Trump’s character, which justified their own dark portrait without them having to make the case.

  “Should you be more civil as the leader of this country?” a reporter asked Trump.

  “Well,” the president replied, “I think the press makes me more uncivil than I am.”

  Even as the press hailed Flake as a man of conscience, Breitbart confirmed that Bannon felt he had gotten another “scalp” in his effort to oust establishment Republicans. The party seemed to be consumed by civil war. A lead story in the Washington Post was headlined: “Republicans Target Bannon.”

  While Bannon had the luxury of being a populist purist, Trump had to practice Beltway politics. Bannon was agitated when Trump caved to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi on short-term funding for the border wall, and agreed to delay the ending of the Dreamers program. He felt Jared and Ivanka had gotten to him on protecting the Dreamers.

  He loved Trump but often found him too much of a pragmatist. When Bannon’s candidate, former judge Roy Moore, beat Trump’s man, Luther Strange, in an Alabama primary, Steve realized that the populist conservative movement was not a cult of personality focused on Trump, it was about policy. Trump, he felt, had to deliver. The president’s supporters wanted results before the 2018 elections. And the immigration issue was at the core of Trump’s political appeal.

  “Don’t think you’re getting away without building a wall,” Bannon told Trump. “You said it too many times at too many rallies. Nancy Pelosi will get the House. They’re going to swear themselves in and fucking impeach you.”

  Sarah Huckabee Sanders often questioned the credibility of the Washington Post. But when the Post delivered an evening earthquake that Sanders liked, she enthusiastically tweeted a link to the story.

  The paper confirmed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC helped fund the research that led to the salacious and unsubstantiated dossier on Donald Trump that had been published by BuzzFeed and that was a key element in the Democrats’ Russian “collusion” case against Trump.

  A lawyer for the Clinton camp and the Democratic National Committee had hired opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which in turn hired a former British spy to gather Russian dirt on Trump. While it was not clear that Hillary and her top aides knew about the dossier, the story said, the Democratic payments were an embarrassment that linked the party to the radioactive dossier. The president told reporters near Marine One that this was a “disgrace,” that “it’s very sad what they’ve done with this fake dossier.”

  One allegation in the dossier suffered a blow when word leaked to NBC about House testimony by Trump’s longtime security director Keith Schiller. He said that during their 2013 trip to Moscow for Trump’s Miss Universe pageant, a stranger with a foreign accent had offered to send five women to Trump’s room, but Schiller had immediately dismissed the idea and considered it a joke. As the Washington Post piece got widespread coverage, Trump had finally caught a break. Thanks to the mainstream media, the Russian collusion plot line had just been turned on its head, with the Democrats shown to be colluding with a sleazy attempt to link Trump to misconduct in Russia.

  But that fleeting story was blown off the radar by another leak, this one disclosed by CNN. Anderson Cooper’s show reported that Robert Mueller had delivered his first indictment, but one rather crucial detail was missing: who was the mystery target? That didn’t stop CNN, and MSNBC, from devoting endless hours of speculative analysis to this “landmark development.”

  Throughout the weekend it was a metaphor for the media’s pursuit of the probe: One of Trump’s people must have been involved in something terrible with Russia—but we’re not quite sure who it is.

  Early Monday morning, Trump aides got news alerts on their phones: Paul Manafort had been indicted. Bob Mueller had hit the president’s former campaign chairman with twelve counts of conspiracy to launder money, tax evasion, lying, and illegal lobbying—all over a decade-long period ending in 2015, before he had any involvement with the Trump campaign. His business associate, former campaign aide Rick Gates, had been charged as well, and both men pleaded not guilty.

  While the press had to concede that the charges had nothing to do with Russian collusion, pundits and reporters said the special counsel could be trying to flip Manafort against Trump—which assumed Manafort had incriminating evidence to offer.

  “Why was Paul Manafort involved in this campaign,” Jeff Toobin asked on CNN, when he was “doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding in Ukraine.”

  The opposing spin was framed by @RealDonaldTrump himself: “Sorry, but this is years ago, before Paul Manafort was part of the Trump campaign. But why aren’t Crooked Hillary & the Dems the focus?????” And, he said, “the Fake News is working overtime.”

  Commentators sympathetic to the president brushed off the charges, questioned Mueller’s credibility or, as in a number of Fox segments, changed the subject to Hillary Clinton’s past controversies. Sean Hannity, who had regained the top spot in cable news, called the indictments “the best evidence yet that the Russiagate witch hunt has come up pretty empty.”

  One complicating factor was the unsealing of a guilty plea by an obscure figure named George Papadopoulos, described by the press as a Trump campaign adviser. He admitted lying to the FBI about his contacts with people linked to Russian officials in floating a possible meeting between Trump and Putin. One such contact told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary, including “thousands of emails,” but despite the initial encouragement of a campaign sup
ervisor, he never met with the Russians involved.

  “How is it not collusion,” Jim Acosta demanded at the White House press briefing, when Papadopoulos was in touch with people “promising dirt on Hillary Clinton and a series of events that closely mirrors what occurred with the president’s own son?”

  Sarah Sanders minimized the importance of Papadopoulos, as Sean Spicer once did when he was asked about Manafort.

  “This individual,” Sanders told the CNN reporter, “was a member of a volunteer council that met one time over the course of a year.”

  Corey Lewandowski was grilled on the Today show, repeatedly calling Papadopoulos a “low-level volunteer” and saying that as a constantly swamped campaign manager he didn’t recall any emails or conversations with him about potential contacts with Russia. “I have nothing to hide,” he said.

  On one of the most challenging days of his presidency, the White House proved to be as leaky as ever. Trump spent the morning in the residence stewing over the television coverage, refusing to come to the Oval Office until almost noon. He was “playing fuming media critic,” unnamed officials and friends told the Washington Post, watching his flat screen with “rising irritation” that turned to visible “anger.”

  The president was so annoyed by the story that he called Maggie Haberman at the Times to say that “I’m actually not angry at anybody,” and besides, “I’m not under investigation.”

  Steve Bannon urged Trump to disregard his lawyers’ advice and take a far more aggressive stance against Bob Mueller.

  “You’re not going to be able to fire Mueller,” Bannon warned. “They’ll impeach you. They’ll have tons of Republican votes.” But, he added, “you have to contest his budget. You have to contest his mandate.”

  “You know me, I can be aggressive,” Trump said. He explained that he just wanted to play things out and get his “letter.”

  Bannon thought it was a fantasy that the special counsel would wrap things up quickly and cough up a letter saying Trump wasn’t under investigation. He believed the president didn’t fully grasp the magnitude of the challenge.

  “This must be the new Trump,” Bannon scoffed. “I don’t remember you being passive on these things.”

  Trump said there was no problem because he didn’t know any Russians.

  Bannon said Mueller had twenty all-star assassins and they had to come up with a scalp.

  Trump said they didn’t have any evidence of collusion.

  Bannon said that witnesses trying to save their skin would make stuff up.

  Now that he was no longer in the West Wing, Bannon felt, all he could do was sound the alarm.

  The Mueller investigation had a long way to go. But as Paul Manafort posted bail, the media were split into all-too-familiar warring camps, one side defending the president regardless of inconvenient facts, the other trashing him despite a pair of indictments that literally failed to mention his campaign. The truth was once again elusive.

  On the morning of November 1, after an Uzbek supporter of ISIS used a truck to kill eight people on a Manhattan bike path, Trump echoed a commentator on Fox & Friends by appearing to blame the attack on “a Chuck Schumer beauty.” The media were apoplectic over this partisan tweet right after the tragedy, because Trump was referring to the alleged killer’s admission to America under a 1990 “diversity visa” program—Schumer was one of many bipartisan sponsors—signed into law by George H. W. Bush.

  Journalists were within their rights to accuse Trump of politicizing a tragedy, but there was a double standard at work. Trump “now has the world record for injecting politics into the aftermath of a terror attack,” said CNN’s Jim Acosta, who had chided Trump for not talking about gun control right after the Las Vegas massacre. That, in the media’s view, wasn’t injecting politics, while assailing lax immigration policy most certainly was. And front-page stories accused the president of jeopardizing the prosecution by saying the attacker should get the death penalty.

  Next Trump repeatedly insisted that the Justice Department should be investigating Hillary Clinton and the Democrats over such controversies as a possible link between donations to the Clinton Foundation and Obama administration approval of a Russian agency’s purchase of American uranium assets—even as the president admitted “the saddest thing” was his frustration that he couldn’t just order Jeff Sessions to do so. Instead he told reporters that “a lot of people are disappointed in the Justice Department, including me,” and tweeted that “everybody is asking” why the DOJ “isn’t looking into all of the dishonesty going on with Crooked Hillary.”

  Trump may have merely been venting, but since he was urging agencies that worked for him to investigate his former opponent, the media revolted against what they saw as an abuse of power. On CNN, Jake Tapper decried “President Trump’s shocking statements on the rule of law in the United States of America.” MSNBC host Ari Melber said that orchestrating prosecutions of political enemies “is what authoritarian regimes do.”

  The president was again playing to his strongest supporters, some of whom had chanted “lock her up” during the campaign. But the renewed attacks on Hillary allowed the press to depict Trump as fostering a banana republic atmosphere.

  On the first anniversary of Trump’s election, the media seized an opportunity to declare him a political failure. When Republicans lost gubernatorial races in New Jersey and especially in Virginia—where former Republican Party chairman Ed Gillespie had distanced himself from the president—much of the coverage had an enthusiastic tone.

  “Democratic Wins Are Stinging Rebuke of Trump One Year after His Election,” a Washington Post headline declared. The New York Times called it “the first forceful rebuke of President Trump.”

  There was no question, based on exit polls, that Trump was a factor in the Virginia contest as energized Democrats turned out to cast a protest vote. But many pundits were quick to extrapolate that because Republicans had lost in a state carried by Clinton and Obama, their hold on the House, where many red-state seats were in play, was threatened in 2018. That, of course, depended on the state of the Trump presidency twelve months down the road, whether he could pass tax reform after the Senate joined the House in handing him a long-sought victory with a sweeping bill approved in a two a.m. party-line vote.

  Still, the mainstream media finally had their preferred narrative, that one year after the election that had shocked them, Donald Trump was a flop, just as they had been insisting, and the voters were finally catching on.

  If the media’s measurement was legislative victories and poll standing, Trump had largely fallen short. But the press failed to grasp that many voters gave Trump credit for a record-breaking stock market, for slashing regulations, and for a cultural crusade on issues ranging from illegal immigration to football protests. Journalists were far more consumed with the Mueller probe, especially when Mike Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador, triggering waves of media speculation about whether he could implicate his former boss. The chasm that had blinded most journalists to Trump’s appeal during the long campaign had grown even wider.

  The president’s attacks on the media were delivered with such clockwork precision that they became, in a sense, less newsworthy even as they intensified. He suggested awarding a “fake news trophy” to the network that was “the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me).” After his Asia trip, he complained that “CNN International is still a major source of (Fake) news, and they represent our Nation to the WORLD very poorly”—prompting pushback because its foreign correspondents operated in hostile areas and giving an opening to Jake Tapper. Trump, he declared, acutally “hates that which is honest and precise.” CNN decided to express its disgust by boycotting the White House Christmas party for the press on December 1—a snub that seemed to parallel Trump having thumbed his nose at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Even social occasions were now v
erboten.

  When the New York Times and the New Yorker disclosed graphic allegations of sexual assault and harassment against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, the story seemed far removed from the Trump presidency. But that didn’t last long.

  As the press dug up more accusations of sexual misconduct against actors, producers, entertainers, and journalists—from Kevin Spacey and Louis C. K. and Charlie Rose to Glenn Thrush, who was suspended by the New York Times over allegations of harassment—there was a cultural explosion that, for once, had nothing to do with the White House. When the president told reporters that he had known Weinstein for a long time and was “not at all surprised” by the allegations, a CNN correspondent followed up by asking how Weinstein’s behavior differed from Trump’s raunchy comments on the Access Hollywood tape.

  “That’s locker room,” the president replied. The media hadn’t waited long to make the connection. The Washington Post interviewed some of the dozen women who had accused Trump during the campaign of unwanted touching or kissing—allegations the candidate had dismissed as “pure fiction”—and quoted one of them as saying that “my pain is every day.” The headline: “After Weinstein’s Fall, Trump Accusers Wonder: Why Not Him?”

  A Chicago Tribune columnist questioned whether “the election of Donald Trump” had in part “led to this avalanche of sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations against powerful men.” For some in the media, the president was somehow responsible for abusive behavior toward women, from Hollywood to Silicon Valley to the nation’s newsrooms.

  On November 9, the Washington Post quoted a woman named Leigh Corfman as saying that Roy Moore, the Senate candidate from Alabama, had befriended and sexually molested her when she was fourteen. Moore vehemently denied the allegations, which were alleged to have occurred nearly four decades earlier, when he was a thirty-two-year-old prosecutor, and said he was the victim of “liberal media lapdogs.” Another woman, Beverly Young Nelson, said at a televised news conference that Moore had sexually accosted her in a car when she was sixteen. Seven more female accusers spoke to reporters.