The Press Is Not The Root Of Trump’s Problems
Source: The Atlantic Daily, David A. Graham
Photo: Donald Trump puts his arm up walking away from the press (Kent Nishimura/AFP/Getty)
President Trump seems to believe that banning certain news outlets is the answer to his political problems, but his unpopularity with voters is a predicament of his own creation.
President Trump is going through a rough patch—in foreign relations, in the economy, in the courts, and in election outlook—and he believes that he has found the culprits: CNN, MS NOW, and Politico. On Friday, Trump said he was banning the three outlets from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS” and warned that more bans could come. When he feels beleaguered, he tends to lash out at familiar enemies, especially reporters. The idea that negative coverage is to blame for his predicament is perversely flattering. But Trump’s true scourge is reality, not how the news is covering it.
Although the decision is part of a gradually intensifying attack on free speech, as I noted last month, it has drawn particular pushback. This morning, five major TV networks (including Fox News) agreed to suspend pool coverage of the president and White House events after CNN was blocked from its previously assigned spot in a pool rotation today. The three banned outlets also sued over their exclusion. How such a suit will fare is unclear; Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool last year after it refused to adopt his renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, and a lawsuit challenging the ban is still pending.
After Trump committed a Kinsley gaffe on Friday by calling his move “the ban on the free press,” he tried to clean up his spin this morning. “The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS,” he wrote, claiming that it “is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!” This is nonsense. Trump has every right to hate the way he’s covered, but if the government has the power to decide what is fake and what is true, then the press is not free.
Trump’s post demonstrates his talismanic belief in the power of news coverage. The president himself has been obsessed with attention—how to get it and how to shape it—for his entire life, and he is a relic from an era when the media were so dominant, and had such control over the means of reaching an audience, that they seemed to shape reality. They are much diminished today, occupying a strange, unstable role: strong enough to be blamed for both Trump’s rise and his downfall, yet weak enough that they can be threatened with relative impunity. Though Trump’s attacks on free speech are unlike any in living memory, his is not the first administration to believe that its problems are about messaging and coverage. In 2012, Barack Obama said that the biggest mistake of his first term “was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right,” because “the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people.” A decade later, Joe Biden’s administration was convinced that negative coverage of inflation and Biden’s age were bigger problems than inflation or the president’s evident frailty.
Now Trump is making the same misjudgment. He is not unpopular because of Politico, an outlet that focuses largely on Washington machinations, or because of MS NOW or CNN, two cable channels that—as he is fond of pointing out—have relatively small audiences for television. The media cannot be “failing” and all-powerful at the same time. Trump is unpopular because (to name a few big reasons) he is losing a war of choice to Iran, making inflation worse without seeming to care how voters feel, overreaching with draconian immigration enforcement, and focusing on vanity projects that don’t matter to voters.
Ironically, Trump is committing the same error as many liberal critics of the press, who seem to believe that popular support for the president would have collapsed long ago if the media had used harsher words to describe him. But the idea that tougher coverage would have stopped him is fantasy. Although the press has made many mistakes in how it has reported on the president, including giving him hours of uninterrupted TV air time in 2016, downplaying bigoted remarks, and “sanewashing” some statements, Trump has also received more intensive investigation and negative coverage than any president in American history.
Some of that coverage has surely been hackish partisanship—which is protected by the First Amendment too—but much of it has been earned. Newspapers, magazines, wire services, and TV networks have turned out a series of scoops about the chaos inside the administration, Trump’s policy errors, and the pervasive corruption around him. In late 2023, The Atlantic published a set of prescient essays considering what would happen if Trump won back the White House. Voters had even lived through one Trump presidency already. They had access to the relevant information before they voted him in again.
Believing that Americans might have chosen differently if only The New York Times had abandoned its obtuse headline conventions is comforting to some Trump critics, because it puts the blame on the press rather than acknowledging that a majority of those who voted wanted Trump. By the same token, Trump would rather blame news outlets he does not like than confront the reality that some of those same voters are rejecting him because of his choices.
The president faces an additional risk in trying to ban these three outlets. He detests adversarial coverage, but he desperately desires attention. This afternoon, Trump spoke with reporters outside the White House. Usually, his comments are captured by the boom mics from the pool TV team, but without their presence today, he was inaudible. Censorship can silence anyone, it turns out—even the censor.