In late 1999, in New York in a van in the speeding, sirens-blaring motorcade of President Bill Clinton, Associated Press White House reporter Ron Fournier got an unexpected call. The voice on the other end of his phone was vaguely familiar. “This is Donald Trump.”Fournier, like most of the rest of his colleagues, was focused on the last year-plus of Clinton’s scandal-scarred second term and the pair of party primaries taking shape. Here, though, was Trump, a 53-year-old real estate developer known for his glitzy, eponymous skyscraper, his garish Atlantic City casinos and his cameos in movies and his leading roles in assorted titillations in the tabloids, dialing out of the blue one of the nation’s highest-profile political journalists. “I’m thinking seriously of running for president,” Trump said. “Why aren’t you writing about me?”“He knew that you couldn’t be a serious presidential candidate in this country at that time unless your name showed up in every newspaper in the country,” Fournier told me. “And if the AP wrote about you, that’s what would happen,” he said.Trump used to court the AP. Today he’s in court with the AP — key members of Trump’s administration are defendants in a lawsuit filed by the flagship wire service after he booted its reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One for not following his order to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. It might sound like some farcical sitcom plot, but it’s also the deadly serious front line of what’s become Trump’s all-out war on the mainstream media. And in his long, hyper-public life, this marks in Trump’s means of ascent nothing short of a massive shift.Because his relationship with the media is his most important relationship. More than his three wives — more than any business partners — Trump’s symbiotic relationship with the media helped him craft an identity that has fueled every other achievement. For going on 50 years — from mass media’s heyday of the late 20th century to the fragmented rage bait of the early 21st, from network television to reality television, from gossip columns to Twitter and Truth Social, from talk shows to talk radio to the podcasts of the “bros” of the “manosphere,” from news to entertainment and back until whatever was left of a distinction almost ceased to matter — the media has played many roles for Trump: confidant, foil and tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) partner. “I use the media,” as he himself once put it, “the way the media uses me — to attract attention.” He got the publicity he craved. They got the readers and ratings they sought. A “mutually profitable two-way relationship,” in Trump’s words — “we give each other what we need.”No longer. In the wake of his election last fall and at the outset of his second presidential term, Trump has turned his performative anti-media schtick into actual anti-media deeds. Wielding lawsuits, executive actions and the unleashing of allies and aides, he’s attempting to starve, squelch or shutter network television stations, global news agencies and reporters in Washington and beyond — a roster of targets ranging from ABC to CBS to NPR to the publication you’re reading right now. He has not of course outright shunned all or even most established mainstream media. The majority of the organizations that traditionally have had reporters at the White House or on Air Force One still do. Briefings remain regularly scheduled. He’s talked on the phone to Kristen Welker of NBC, and he’s obviously, as almost always, been a frequent presence on Fox News. He’s in many ways far more accessible and available to the media than his predecessor. But he’s also more aggressively than ever prioritized and rewarded friendlier, more acquiescent outlets and individuals — Brian Glenn of Real America’s Voice, Natalie Winters of Steve Bannon’s War Room, Rumble and Ruthless and The Gateway Pundit and The Daily Wire — while punishing or pushing aside those who are seen as less so. His aim has changed, in the estimation of Trump biographer Gwenda Blair — from “attention” to “domination,” she told me. “It’s not fun and games with reporters anymore,” a longtime Trump-aligned operative told me. “He’s not playing.”There are undeniably elements of both, but what is happening between Trump and the mainstream media is maybe better understood as a crucial shift in power in a relationship that lasted as long as it did because of a kind of equal footing. Now, however, that balance is out of whack. The mainstream media still has real power, but it used to have more. Trump, meanwhile, is arguably as powerful as he’s ever been, and he’s using that sway to take swings at the media he believes no longer serves his needs while simultaneously boosting new media more and more people are consuming instead. He’s redefining, in other words, the terms of the relationship.“He’s more determined to hurt the press this time than he was even the last time,” Marty Baron, a former executive editor of The Washington Post, told me. “He was exceptionally determined previously, but now I think it’s actually clear policy of the administration to undermine the economic sustainability of the press,” he said, “and continue to undermine public confidence in the press.”“I don’t think that Trump is trying to kill the press so much as he is trying to kill traditional press and buttress compliant press,” Jen Mercieca, an expert in political discourse and the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, told me. “He still wants to use compliant media, but he doesn’t want to be held accountable by traditional media.”“He now realizes he doesn’t need the media,” Fournier told me. “He’s got,” he said, “his own media.”
Way back in the beginning, in the ’70s, through the ’80s and into the ’90s, Trump worked to build a foundation for what was to come. And it wasn’t made of mob-controlled concrete. It was made of ink and air.Sitting in the middle of the media capital of Manhattan, Trump created a character, a potent and durable brand. He did it with and through the media. Employing the basic ballyhoo he learned from his father and the shadier strains of persuasion he picked up from fixer Roy Cohn, Trump made and maintained associations and running conversations with owners and publishers, show hosts and correspondents from the New York Post’s juicy Page Six and more. Sometimes he was his fake press agents “John Miller” or “John Barron.” Most of the time, though, Trump was just Trump — giving a little tidbit and getting a little tidbit, charming here and bullying there, but seldom not compelling. “Reporters were sometimes a bit awed when Trump himself returned their calls. He always asked about their health and their career and remembered the names of their spouses and children. He often told them they were ‘the greatest,’” Jeannette Walls, a former gossip columnist for New York, Esquire and MSNBC, would write in her bookDish: How Gossip Became the News and the News Became Just Another Show. “He would exaggerate his own personal wealth at, say, $3 billion, and what do you know, the next day, according to the papers, he was worth $3 billion, and the banks would come knocking on his door to do business. He could make something come true,” as Walls put it, “by telling it to reporters.”It worked in print. TheNew York Times in 1976 (“dazzling white teeth”) led to The Wall Street Journal in 1982 (“a huckster’s flair”) led to the cover of GQ in 1984 (“Donald Trump Gets What He Wants”) led to The Art of the Deal. Trump’s seminal 1987 autobiography had “a crassness I like,” Tina Brown, then the editor of Vanity Fair, wrote that fall in her journal. There was, she thought, “something authentic about Trump’s bullshit.” She was planning on running an excerpt. “Very glad I got it for the mag,” she said. “On some level, sorry to say, I’ve helped contribute to his profile,” Susan Mulcahy, then a reporter for Page Six, wrote in 1988 in her book My Lips Are Sealed, “but he is so outrageous as to be irresistible gossip column copy.” Any quid pro quo was so reflexive it didn’t register as unusual. “The quid pro quo,” Jerry Nachman, a former editor of the New York Post, once said, “was you would promote his gig, and he was always good copy.”It worked, too, on TV. Tom Brokaw on The Today Show in 1980 led to 60 Minutes in 1985 led to merry-go-round appearances on The Phil Donahue Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show and Late Night with David Letterman. Trump’s executive assistant kept in Trump Tower a cache of VHS tapes for him to watch and rewatch — “a form of ego sustenance,” in the framing of Michael D’Antonio, another of Trump’s biographers. “Without TV,” in the words of James Poniewozik, the chief TV critic of The New York Times and the author of Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America, “there’s no Trump.”No matter the medium, though, Trump knew nothing got and kept attention like controversy and conflict. So he picked public fights — with architecture critics, with fellow businesspeople, with politicians, with investment analysts who (correctly) questioned his investment decisions. He sued and threatened to sue. He had reporter Wayne Barretthandcuffed and charged with trespassing for reporting inside his Trump’s Castle casino. “The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial,” he outlined in The Art of the Deal, “the press is going to write about you.”He proved his theory in 1990. His marriage was failing on account of his infidelities, and his finances were a shambles. The business whiz was deep in debt. The tsunami of coverage of both, though, made for a new, pivotal wrinkle in Trump’s relationship with the media. What for most anybody would have been a source of personal shame or reputational stain was for Trump something else — validation, perhaps, of a kind of core conviction: There was no such thing as bad publicity. Because viewership soared and readership spiked and the breakup of his marriage to the mother of his first three children and his fling with the woman with whom he was having an affair was on the front of the New York Post and the Daily News for 11 days straight — superseding stories such as the reunification of Germany and the release from prison in South Africa of Nelson Mandela. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump marveled. “Nelson Mandela’s probably calling up, ‘Who is this guy? He blew me off the front page.’”The legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin bewailed the state of his industry. “Donald Trump handled these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery,” Breslin wrote in New York Newsday in 1990. “He uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle: there are five stories in the morning papers leading into 11 minutes of television at night,” he said. “‘I just talked to Donald!’ I heard somebody say in the place where I work. … ‘I have to get off. Donald is on the other phone,’ a friend of mine at NBC said one day.” The Art of the Deal? “Trump,” Breslin wrote, “took over news reporters in this city with the art of the return phone call.”The inverse relationship between Trump’s cratering fortunes — his massive personal debts, his casino bankruptcies, his forfeited assets — and the relentless coverage he received was a reason for some soul searching.Howard Kurtz, now the host of “Media Buzz” on Fox News, back then was the New York bureau chief for TheWashington Post. In 1994 in his book Media Circus he lamented “the magnitude of the media’s failure” across parts of three decades in the “seemingly insatiable appetite for Trump-o-mania.”“It is a bit embarrassing to recall how wild we all went over ‘The Donald,’ how eagerly we gushed over his antics, and how utterly inconsequential it all seems now,” Kurtz wrote. “How,” he asked, “can we avoid being dazzled by the next Donald Trump?”We couldn’t.Donald Trump was going to work to make sure of that.The “next Donald Trump” was going to be Donald Trump.For the rest of the 1990s, and for the first half of the 2000s, he built a bridge — from relative irrelevance to utter resurrection. He built the bridge the same way he’d built the foundation.“At that point he was doing all sorts of things in New York to try to get back on his feet,” the gossip reporter A.J. Benza said. “He gave up dirt on people and information that fleshed out other stories, so we didn’t mind dropping in the story about him with so-and-so at the Knicks game,” Benza said. He went on Howard Stern’s raunchy and popular radio show. He stoked feuds with reporters and editors and writers of books about his rise and his fall. He put out his own book. It was called (still largely aspirational) The Art of the Comeback.“One of my biggest fears concerns how I’ll be perceived after I’m gone,” Trump wrote. “While I’m alive I can protect myself pretty well, but the fact is, even when I’m here, the press writes distorted and untruthful things about me almost daily.” Trump, in truth, was as responsible as anyone for such distortions — an environment in which he thrived, which fed a growing taste for politics. “It seems every so often there’s some unfounded rumor that I’m considering seeking office — sometimes even the presidency!”But as much as he was a user of the media, and the media a user of him, Trump was also a voracious and intuitive student of the same. “Donald Trump,” former Page Six reporter Corynne Steindler once said, “understands the media almost better than the media itself.” The strange ways ideas move. How fantasies and fibs can come to feel like facts. So he had to have felt the tectonic shifts: In the media, and therefore in politics, too, news, information, entertainment, gossip, celebrity — all of it was getting closer to one and the same in a 24-7 ether. CNN, which started in 1980, spawned Fox News and MSNBC, which started in 1996. Talk radio on the right was on the rise. The internet was on the way. And all the while an outsider businessman made a credible, meaningful run for the White House, a professional wrestler got elected governor, and the president was the star in a sex scandal. This was a world in which Trump might work and work well.And so Ron Fournier’s phone rang in the van in Bill Clinton’s motorcade and it was Donald Trump. “Everybody wants me to run,” Trump told Fournier in September. It rang again in October. “The only thing that could interest me is if I could win. … I’m talking about the whole megillah.” And in November. “I think I’m taken seriously. A lot of people are saying so and I can tell. … Geraldo Rivera says I’m a hot guest.”He told the New York tabloids he was thinking about Oprah Winfrey as his vice president. He went on MSNBC. He went on Stern while he was in bed with the woman who would become his third wife. He welcomed a reporter from The New York Times to his office in Trump Tower. Adam Nagourney called him “a rogue” and a “proudly public womanizer.” But Trump, Nagourney wrote, “was prepared with evidence to validate his potential candidacy … a poll conducted by the National Enquirer of 100 Americans.” It was, Nagourney pointed out, one-tenth the sample size of a typical poll. No matter. “Those are real people,” Trump said of readers of the Enquirer. “That,” said his longtime political adviser Roger Stone, “is the Trump constituency.”“Here is the central question when it comes to Trump’s candidacy,” Stone told Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle that December at a quasi-campaign event in Beverly Hills. “Is pop culture more influential in this country than the old institutions? In the old days, a developer from Queens could not get elected president, because the institutions in this country would not allow it. We kind of think in the age of mass communications, the institutions are losing their power and the people are making their own decisions.” Trump wasn’t technically a candidate. He had formed an exploratory committee. But he and Stone were saying it to make it so — and specifically using traditional media to trumpet other less traditional forms. “You can laugh at the Entertainment Tonights and the Hard Copies if you want … but millions of people are watching those things, and forming opinions based on what they see,” Stone said.Trump didn’t run. His formation as a national political figure was incomplete. It was too soon. But then The Apprentice debuted Jan. 8, 2004, and it averaged in its first season more than 20 million viewers — and it was the other side of the bridge. “He needed the show,” Bill Pruitt, a co-producer of The Apprentice, once said. “We needed him, but he needed that show.”The Apprentice transformed Trump from fallible tabloid fodder to commanding boardroom sage. Creator and producer Mark Burnett and Jeff Zucker-led NBC sort of supercharged an old Trump trick. They made fake real. The Apprentice was the runway to a run.On New Year’s Eve of 2005 in Florida at Mar-a-Lago, Trump was with NBC’s public relations man for The Apprentice, musing about the White House.“Jimmy,” Trump said to Jim Dowd, “would you be my press secretary?”“Well, Mr. Trump,” Dowd said, “if you’re very serious about it, we should definitely have a conversation.”The Apprentice gave him the platform. Even an odd kind of latent political power. What it didn’t give him was a political message per se. But at the urging in particular of Sam Nunberg, then a new political adviser, Trump turned to emerging media. He listened, he called in, he logged on. WorldNetDaily and The Daily Caller and Breitbart. InfoWars. Rush Limbaugh. Sean Hannity and Michael Savage and Mark Levin. “Donald Trump,” Nunberg once told me, “would never have happened without Mark Levin.”More than anything else, though, the tell was on TV — using the perch that he had to fuse the far-right web with more mainstream air. That March, on ABC’s Good Morning America, he floated for the first time the racist, conspiracist lie that President Barack Obama had been born in Kenya. It was a huge story. He talked about it on NBC. He talked about it on CNN. He talked about it pretty much everywhere else. “He served as nothing more than a ratings ploy,” said Melinda Arons, a former producer for ABC News (and later the director of broadcast media for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign). “There was this other feeling,” she said, “that the media was sort of in on it, but also kind of turned off by it, but also kind of in on it.” And so Trump talked about it so much that Obama himself had to talk about it, too. He talked about it at the White House. And he joked about it in 2011 at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — at which Trump was a guest of Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post. That spring was the premier of the fourth season of The Celebrity Apprentice. It was also the premiere of a new weekly segment on Fox News’ Fox and Friends — “Mondays with Trump.” It was official. Fox News “provided material for Trump as much as he provided material for it,” Poniewozik wrote. “It was,” he said, “perfect symbiosis.” The last “Mondays with Trump” was June 15, 2015. The next day he announced he was running for president.“Once I have that attention, it’s up to me to use it to my advantage,” Trump said in his campaign book Crippled America, which came out in November of 2015. The implicit quid pro quo with the media was what it always had been. Promote his gig. Always good copy. Leveraging lessons gleaned from five decades, Trump turned the election into a story the likes of which American politics had never seen. He got overall the equivalent of $5.6 billion in free media of coverage — more than the other top candidates from both parties combined. He was the main character — but the media was a character, too. He made the media amplify his message of their own demise. At his rallies and elsewhere, he called reporters “disgusting,” “dishonest” and “scum.” Reporters were “central to the event itself, and they were not allowed to fade into the background as simply a conduit between the event and the audience,” journalism professors Matt Carlson, Sue Robinson and Seth Lewis wrote in their book about Trump and the media. “Journalists became part of Trump’s rallies.” Here they were, after all these years, still linked to each other but no longer so amicably so.“Donald J. Trump is going to be the executive producer of a thing called the American government,” Newt Gingrich said on Fox News in December of 2016, a month after Trump’s stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton. “He’s going to have this huge TV show called ‘leading the world.’” His anti-media rhetoric almost immediately ramped up. He used the term “fake news” for the first time in his first press conference as president-elect. He said he was in “a running war with the media” on his first full day as president in a visit to the CIA. Less than a month later he started calling the media “the enemy of the people.” His administration confiscated the White House press pass of CNN reporter Jim Acosta. CNN sued successfully to get it back. And he kept talking about weakening the country’s libel laws. Many fretted openly about Trump’s consistent anti-press posture. But there were beneficial trade-offs.TV ratings boomed. The Washington Postturned a profit for the first time in years. The New York Times went from less than 2 million digital subscriptions in 2016 to 4 million in 2018 to more than 6 million in 2020. “The Trump presidency was a major force behind the business transformation; his election riveted a divided nation, drawing millions of new subscribers and a surge in revenues,” Adam Nagourney wrote in his book about the Times. “The paradox of Trump’s view of the media only deepened after his election,” Jill Abramson wrote in her book Merchants of Truth. “Courtesy of Trump, they were more threatened than ever, but also more vital.” He was a menace — and he was a boon. The relationship had become a kind of kabuki ritual. Each side had its role. But no one was trying to end the performance.And then he lost. And then he incited an insurrection, and Twitter disabled his account because of Jan. 6 and so did Facebook, and reporters started not only shifting to covering his would-be successors but casting him as something existentially dangerous. He was no longer just a chaos agent who was exhausting and disorienting but nonetheless good copy — bad for the country, to paraphrase former CEO of CBS Les Moonves, but not bad for the business. He had finally done something unforgivable and for which he was asking no forgiveness. The media along with many others in politics were ready to dump him. “I want to be careful here in how I’m saying this because I don’t want to sit here and blame the victim,” Chuck Todd, the former host of NBC’s Meet the Press, told me. “But the fact of the matter is, in Donald Trump’s head, mainstream media de-platformed him.”Trump’s response was what he took to calling during his 2024 campaign a “revenge tour.” He said at a rally in Pennsylvania he wouldn’t mind if journalists got shot. He started talking about throwing reporters in jail. He started talking about charging TV stations with treason. And he started doing sometimes hours-long podcasts and conversations and livestreams with Joe Rogan and Theo Von and the Nelk Boys and Adin Ross and Andrew Schulz and others of their ilk. “He’s doing to the podcast community what he did for cable TV between 2010 and 2015,” said Todd. “‘Hey, I’m here. You want to interview me?’ He was so available ...
Then he won again.And now it’s over.“The only monogamous relationship,” Bryan Curtis, the host of the Press Box podcast, told me, “in Donald Trump’s life.”“I think he’s almost completely unmoored from any sense of responsibility to the media that gave birth to him, whether that’s NBC or the New York Post or anybody else,” Allen Salkin, a former reporter for the New York Post and the New York Times and the author of The Method to the Madness, told me. “It’s different now.”It’s clear which tools to him are no longer useful. Last month, for instance, in remarks at the Department of Justice, he said what CNN and MSNBC do is “illegal” because they “literally write 97.6 percent bad about me” and are “political arms” of the Democrats. (It’s not.) He said what the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal do “just cannot be legal.” (It is. In fact, it’s constitutionally protected.) On Truth Social he berated by name reporters from the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Atlantic. “There’s something really wrong with these people, and their SICK, TRUMP DERANGED EDITORS,” the president wrote. “They did everything within their power to help rig the Election against me. How did that work out??? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” This past Sunday night he said on Truth Social after watching 60 Minutes that CBS was a “Political Operative” and “should lose their license” and be subject to “maximum fines and punishment.” On Monday in the Oval Office with Trump and the president of El Salvador he hectored CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “Do you plan to ask President Bukele to help return the man who your administration was mistakenly deported to El Salvador?” she asked. “Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’ Why can’t you just say that? That’s why nobody watches you anymore.” Trump, in the comfortable company of a dictatorial foreign leader, called the media of his own country “sick people.”More salient, though, and democratically destructive, isn’t even what he’s saying. It’s what he’s doing. He’s coaxed from ABC News a costly settlement in a libel suit and he’s trying a version of the same with CBS. He’s sued the Des Moines Register for “election interference” on account of a pollster’s mistaken survey showing him losing in Iowa. He’s ordered government agencies to terminate subscriptions to POLITICO Pro that he and his administration miscast as government subsidies. He’s ordered essentially the extinction of the government-backed Voice of America. He’s dispatched the head of the Federal Communications Commission to launch investigations into CBS, NBC and ABC. He’s deputized Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to hold hearings about the alleged bias of NPR and PBS and is set to ask Congress to cancel billions of already approved funding. “The NPR, PBS Grift Has Ripped Us Off for Too Long,” the White House said this week in a news release. He’s wrested from the White House Correspondents’ Association control of the White House press pool — asserting considerably more say in who covers him and how. He’s kicked a HuffPost reporter out of the pool. He’s denied access to a cabinet meeting to a reporter from Reuters and others. His White House just this week announced the three main wire services — Reuters, Bloomberg and the AP — will no longer share a rotating spot in the pool, lessening their access and cutting into their business models. He’s generally opened the pool instead to more conservative and at times highly non-traditional outlets, running the gamut from The Washington Times to The Daily Signal to the controversial Zero Hedge. And he banned reporters and photographers from the AP from the Oval Office and Air Force One and continued to ban them in defiance of a court order his administration is appealing — a court order in which a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that the efforts of his White House were not only unconstitutional but “brazen.” The specter of the gutting of the nation’s foundational libel law looms.It’s a series of battles in Trump’s ongoing war. People around Trump say he’s not killing the mainstream media so much as the mainstream media is dying on its own or killing itself — with what they rate as a roundly anti-Trump bent along with what they saw as generally shamefully soft coverage of the obvious aging and diminishing capacity of Joe Biden during his presidential years. The media “has snuffed themselves out,” said the operative who told me it’s not “fun and games” with reporters anymore. “The president and his team are just recognizing that fact.” Some publications are experiencing an uptick with Trump back in the White House in subscriptions, donations, ratings or traffic — Vox, the Guardian, the Atlantic, POLITICO, cable news but especially Fox — but for the most part the so-called “Trump bump” the second time around isn’t quite what it was the first.“He wants to kill you (1) because he thinks that’s what his base wants and (2) because he can,” Alan Marcus, a former Trump publicist and consultant, told me. “He now thinks, ‘I’m bigger than the media.’” Trump’s relationship used to involve some give and take. The long symbiosis was a function of some uncomfortable balance of power. With publicity came some bad publicity. But now he no longer even needs to put up with the jabs and the snark of Page Six let alone the serious accountability provided by some of the best reporters in the world. What he used to use Twitter for he now has Truth Social. What he used to have to go on Howard Stern to do he now has Joe Rogan and Theo Von and Charlie Kirk. As the 2024 campaign continued, according to reporting in my former colleague Alex Isenstadt’s recently released book called Revenge, Trump was “just as interested in the number of social media views his podcast appearances got as he was in TV ratings.” Ever media-savvy and zero-sum, whether strategically or consciously or not, Trump is trying to banish or extinguish some outlets while elevating others — others that don’t criticize him at all or do a great deal less. The quid pro quo is similar — they get numbers, he gets votes — but the pushback is not.And the mainstream media?What to do?“Do their job,” Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, told me. “I think the most powerful thing that we have available to us is the reporting — finding out what’s actually happening in this administration and telling the public what’s going on. I think that’s what we should do and keep doing,” he said. “He can be at war. But I don’t think we have to be at war. Because I don’t think it does us any good.”“Last time around I was sympathetic to Marty Baron’s comments that we don’t want to be … at war,” Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, told me. “But I think that time has passed. This is so much worse … just unmistakably anti-democratic and repulsive,” she said. “You don’t have to write that, but you can show it.”Ron Fournier, the AP reporter who got the calls from Trump back in 1999, is now a Detroit-based consultant. He writes when he writes for his newsletter on Substack. “First they came for the Associated Press, and not enough people spoke out,” he wrote recently in his newsletter on Substack. “A reporter with the Washington Post just asked me, ‘How far can Trump go?’” he said. “As far as the public lets him go.”“He has now gone from just treating the press as a foil to now treating the press as an enemy that literally needs to be stomped out,” Fournier told me the last time we talked.“My warning to all Americans,” he said, “is this is just a step.”
CONTINUE READING
Way back in the beginning, in the ’70s, through the ’80s and into the ’90s, Trump worked to build a foundation for what was to come. And it wasn’t made of mob-controlled concrete. It was made of ink and air.Sitting in the middle of the media capital of Manhattan, Trump created a character, a potent and durable brand. He did it with and through the media. Employing the basic ballyhoo he learned from his father and the shadier strains of persuasion he picked up from fixer Roy Cohn, Trump made and maintained associations and running conversations with owners and publishers, show hosts and correspondents from the New York Post’s juicy Page Six and more. Sometimes he was his fake press agents “John Miller” or “John Barron.” Most of the time, though, Trump was just Trump — giving a little tidbit and getting a little tidbit, charming here and bullying there, but seldom not compelling. “Reporters were sometimes a bit awed when Trump himself returned their calls. He always asked about their health and their career and remembered the names of their spouses and children. He often told them they were ‘the greatest,’” Jeannette Walls, a former gossip columnist for New York, Esquire and MSNBC, would write in her bookDish: How Gossip Became the News and the News Became Just Another Show. “He would exaggerate his own personal wealth at, say, $3 billion, and what do you know, the next day, according to the papers, he was worth $3 billion, and the banks would come knocking on his door to do business. He could make something come true,” as Walls put it, “by telling it to reporters.”It worked in print. TheNew York Times in 1976 (“dazzling white teeth”) led to The Wall Street Journal in 1982 (“a huckster’s flair”) led to the cover of GQ in 1984 (“Donald Trump Gets What He Wants”) led to The Art of the Deal. Trump’s seminal 1987 autobiography had “a crassness I like,” Tina Brown, then the editor of Vanity Fair, wrote that fall in her journal. There was, she thought, “something authentic about Trump’s bullshit.” She was planning on running an excerpt. “Very glad I got it for the mag,” she said. “On some level, sorry to say, I’ve helped contribute to his profile,” Susan Mulcahy, then a reporter for Page Six, wrote in 1988 in her book My Lips Are Sealed, “but he is so outrageous as to be irresistible gossip column copy.” Any quid pro quo was so reflexive it didn’t register as unusual. “The quid pro quo,” Jerry Nachman, a former editor of the New York Post, once said, “was you would promote his gig, and he was always good copy.”It worked, too, on TV. Tom Brokaw on The Today Show in 1980 led to 60 Minutes in 1985 led to merry-go-round appearances on The Phil Donahue Show and The Oprah Winfrey Show and Late Night with David Letterman. Trump’s executive assistant kept in Trump Tower a cache of VHS tapes for him to watch and rewatch — “a form of ego sustenance,” in the framing of Michael D’Antonio, another of Trump’s biographers. “Without TV,” in the words of James Poniewozik, the chief TV critic of The New York Times and the author of Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television and the Fracturing of America, “there’s no Trump.”No matter the medium, though, Trump knew nothing got and kept attention like controversy and conflict. So he picked public fights — with architecture critics, with fellow businesspeople, with politicians, with investment analysts who (correctly) questioned his investment decisions. He sued and threatened to sue. He had reporter Wayne Barretthandcuffed and charged with trespassing for reporting inside his Trump’s Castle casino. “The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial,” he outlined in The Art of the Deal, “the press is going to write about you.”He proved his theory in 1990. His marriage was failing on account of his infidelities, and his finances were a shambles. The business whiz was deep in debt. The tsunami of coverage of both, though, made for a new, pivotal wrinkle in Trump’s relationship with the media. What for most anybody would have been a source of personal shame or reputational stain was for Trump something else — validation, perhaps, of a kind of core conviction: There was no such thing as bad publicity. Because viewership soared and readership spiked and the breakup of his marriage to the mother of his first three children and his fling with the woman with whom he was having an affair was on the front of the New York Post and the Daily News for 11 days straight — superseding stories such as the reunification of Germany and the release from prison in South Africa of Nelson Mandela. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump marveled. “Nelson Mandela’s probably calling up, ‘Who is this guy? He blew me off the front page.’”The legendary columnist Jimmy Breslin bewailed the state of his industry. “Donald Trump handled these nitwit reporters with a new and most disgraceful form of bribery,” Breslin wrote in New York Newsday in 1990. “He uses the reporters to create a razzle dazzle: there are five stories in the morning papers leading into 11 minutes of television at night,” he said. “‘I just talked to Donald!’ I heard somebody say in the place where I work. … ‘I have to get off. Donald is on the other phone,’ a friend of mine at NBC said one day.” The Art of the Deal? “Trump,” Breslin wrote, “took over news reporters in this city with the art of the return phone call.”The inverse relationship between Trump’s cratering fortunes — his massive personal debts, his casino bankruptcies, his forfeited assets — and the relentless coverage he received was a reason for some soul searching.Howard Kurtz, now the host of “Media Buzz” on Fox News, back then was the New York bureau chief for TheWashington Post. In 1994 in his book Media Circus he lamented “the magnitude of the media’s failure” across parts of three decades in the “seemingly insatiable appetite for Trump-o-mania.”“It is a bit embarrassing to recall how wild we all went over ‘The Donald,’ how eagerly we gushed over his antics, and how utterly inconsequential it all seems now,” Kurtz wrote. “How,” he asked, “can we avoid being dazzled by the next Donald Trump?”We couldn’t.Donald Trump was going to work to make sure of that.The “next Donald Trump” was going to be Donald Trump.For the rest of the 1990s, and for the first half of the 2000s, he built a bridge — from relative irrelevance to utter resurrection. He built the bridge the same way he’d built the foundation.“At that point he was doing all sorts of things in New York to try to get back on his feet,” the gossip reporter A.J. Benza said. “He gave up dirt on people and information that fleshed out other stories, so we didn’t mind dropping in the story about him with so-and-so at the Knicks game,” Benza said. He went on Howard Stern’s raunchy and popular radio show. He stoked feuds with reporters and editors and writers of books about his rise and his fall. He put out his own book. It was called (still largely aspirational) The Art of the Comeback.“One of my biggest fears concerns how I’ll be perceived after I’m gone,” Trump wrote. “While I’m alive I can protect myself pretty well, but the fact is, even when I’m here, the press writes distorted and untruthful things about me almost daily.” Trump, in truth, was as responsible as anyone for such distortions — an environment in which he thrived, which fed a growing taste for politics. “It seems every so often there’s some unfounded rumor that I’m considering seeking office — sometimes even the presidency!”But as much as he was a user of the media, and the media a user of him, Trump was also a voracious and intuitive student of the same. “Donald Trump,” former Page Six reporter Corynne Steindler once said, “understands the media almost better than the media itself.” The strange ways ideas move. How fantasies and fibs can come to feel like facts. So he had to have felt the tectonic shifts: In the media, and therefore in politics, too, news, information, entertainment, gossip, celebrity — all of it was getting closer to one and the same in a 24-7 ether. CNN, which started in 1980, spawned Fox News and MSNBC, which started in 1996. Talk radio on the right was on the rise. The internet was on the way. And all the while an outsider businessman made a credible, meaningful run for the White House, a professional wrestler got elected governor, and the president was the star in a sex scandal. This was a world in which Trump might work and work well.And so Ron Fournier’s phone rang in the van in Bill Clinton’s motorcade and it was Donald Trump. “Everybody wants me to run,” Trump told Fournier in September. It rang again in October. “The only thing that could interest me is if I could win. … I’m talking about the whole megillah.” And in November. “I think I’m taken seriously. A lot of people are saying so and I can tell. … Geraldo Rivera says I’m a hot guest.”He told the New York tabloids he was thinking about Oprah Winfrey as his vice president. He went on MSNBC. He went on Stern while he was in bed with the woman who would become his third wife. He welcomed a reporter from The New York Times to his office in Trump Tower. Adam Nagourney called him “a rogue” and a “proudly public womanizer.” But Trump, Nagourney wrote, “was prepared with evidence to validate his potential candidacy … a poll conducted by the National Enquirer of 100 Americans.” It was, Nagourney pointed out, one-tenth the sample size of a typical poll. No matter. “Those are real people,” Trump said of readers of the Enquirer. “That,” said his longtime political adviser Roger Stone, “is the Trump constituency.”“Here is the central question when it comes to Trump’s candidacy,” Stone told Carla Marinucci of the San Francisco Chronicle that December at a quasi-campaign event in Beverly Hills. “Is pop culture more influential in this country than the old institutions? In the old days, a developer from Queens could not get elected president, because the institutions in this country would not allow it. We kind of think in the age of mass communications, the institutions are losing their power and the people are making their own decisions.” Trump wasn’t technically a candidate. He had formed an exploratory committee. But he and Stone were saying it to make it so — and specifically using traditional media to trumpet other less traditional forms. “You can laugh at the Entertainment Tonights and the Hard Copies if you want … but millions of people are watching those things, and forming opinions based on what they see,” Stone said.Trump didn’t run. His formation as a national political figure was incomplete. It was too soon. But then The Apprentice debuted Jan. 8, 2004, and it averaged in its first season more than 20 million viewers — and it was the other side of the bridge. “He needed the show,” Bill Pruitt, a co-producer of The Apprentice, once said. “We needed him, but he needed that show.”The Apprentice transformed Trump from fallible tabloid fodder to commanding boardroom sage. Creator and producer Mark Burnett and Jeff Zucker-led NBC sort of supercharged an old Trump trick. They made fake real. The Apprentice was the runway to a run.On New Year’s Eve of 2005 in Florida at Mar-a-Lago, Trump was with NBC’s public relations man for The Apprentice, musing about the White House.“Jimmy,” Trump said to Jim Dowd, “would you be my press secretary?”“Well, Mr. Trump,” Dowd said, “if you’re very serious about it, we should definitely have a conversation.”The Apprentice gave him the platform. Even an odd kind of latent political power. What it didn’t give him was a political message per se. But at the urging in particular of Sam Nunberg, then a new political adviser, Trump turned to emerging media. He listened, he called in, he logged on. WorldNetDaily and The Daily Caller and Breitbart. InfoWars. Rush Limbaugh. Sean Hannity and Michael Savage and Mark Levin. “Donald Trump,” Nunberg once told me, “would never have happened without Mark Levin.”More than anything else, though, the tell was on TV — using the perch that he had to fuse the far-right web with more mainstream air. That March, on ABC’s Good Morning America, he floated for the first time the racist, conspiracist lie that President Barack Obama had been born in Kenya. It was a huge story. He talked about it on NBC. He talked about it on CNN. He talked about it pretty much everywhere else. “He served as nothing more than a ratings ploy,” said Melinda Arons, a former producer for ABC News (and later the director of broadcast media for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign). “There was this other feeling,” she said, “that the media was sort of in on it, but also kind of turned off by it, but also kind of in on it.” And so Trump talked about it so much that Obama himself had to talk about it, too. He talked about it at the White House. And he joked about it in 2011 at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner — at which Trump was a guest of Lally Weymouth of the Washington Post. That spring was the premier of the fourth season of The Celebrity Apprentice. It was also the premiere of a new weekly segment on Fox News’ Fox and Friends — “Mondays with Trump.” It was official. Fox News “provided material for Trump as much as he provided material for it,” Poniewozik wrote. “It was,” he said, “perfect symbiosis.” The last “Mondays with Trump” was June 15, 2015. The next day he announced he was running for president.“Once I have that attention, it’s up to me to use it to my advantage,” Trump said in his campaign book Crippled America, which came out in November of 2015. The implicit quid pro quo with the media was what it always had been. Promote his gig. Always good copy. Leveraging lessons gleaned from five decades, Trump turned the election into a story the likes of which American politics had never seen. He got overall the equivalent of $5.6 billion in free media of coverage — more than the other top candidates from both parties combined. He was the main character — but the media was a character, too. He made the media amplify his message of their own demise. At his rallies and elsewhere, he called reporters “disgusting,” “dishonest” and “scum.” Reporters were “central to the event itself, and they were not allowed to fade into the background as simply a conduit between the event and the audience,” journalism professors Matt Carlson, Sue Robinson and Seth Lewis wrote in their book about Trump and the media. “Journalists became part of Trump’s rallies.” Here they were, after all these years, still linked to each other but no longer so amicably so.“Donald J. Trump is going to be the executive producer of a thing called the American government,” Newt Gingrich said on Fox News in December of 2016, a month after Trump’s stunning defeat of Hillary Clinton. “He’s going to have this huge TV show called ‘leading the world.’” His anti-media rhetoric almost immediately ramped up. He used the term “fake news” for the first time in his first press conference as president-elect. He said he was in “a running war with the media” on his first full day as president in a visit to the CIA. Less than a month later he started calling the media “the enemy of the people.” His administration confiscated the White House press pass of CNN reporter Jim Acosta. CNN sued successfully to get it back. And he kept talking about weakening the country’s libel laws. Many fretted openly about Trump’s consistent anti-press posture. But there were beneficial trade-offs.TV ratings boomed. The Washington Postturned a profit for the first time in years. The New York Times went from less than 2 million digital subscriptions in 2016 to 4 million in 2018 to more than 6 million in 2020. “The Trump presidency was a major force behind the business transformation; his election riveted a divided nation, drawing millions of new subscribers and a surge in revenues,” Adam Nagourney wrote in his book about the Times. “The paradox of Trump’s view of the media only deepened after his election,” Jill Abramson wrote in her book Merchants of Truth. “Courtesy of Trump, they were more threatened than ever, but also more vital.” He was a menace — and he was a boon. The relationship had become a kind of kabuki ritual. Each side had its role. But no one was trying to end the performance.And then he lost. And then he incited an insurrection, and Twitter disabled his account because of Jan. 6 and so did Facebook, and reporters started not only shifting to covering his would-be successors but casting him as something existentially dangerous. He was no longer just a chaos agent who was exhausting and disorienting but nonetheless good copy — bad for the country, to paraphrase former CEO of CBS Les Moonves, but not bad for the business. He had finally done something unforgivable and for which he was asking no forgiveness. The media along with many others in politics were ready to dump him. “I want to be careful here in how I’m saying this because I don’t want to sit here and blame the victim,” Chuck Todd, the former host of NBC’s Meet the Press, told me. “But the fact of the matter is, in Donald Trump’s head, mainstream media de-platformed him.”Trump’s response was what he took to calling during his 2024 campaign a “revenge tour.” He said at a rally in Pennsylvania he wouldn’t mind if journalists got shot. He started talking about throwing reporters in jail. He started talking about charging TV stations with treason. And he started doing sometimes hours-long podcasts and conversations and livestreams with Joe Rogan and Theo Von and the Nelk Boys and Adin Ross and Andrew Schulz and others of their ilk. “He’s doing to the podcast community what he did for cable TV between 2010 and 2015,” said Todd. “‘Hey, I’m here. You want to interview me?’ He was so available ...
Then he won again.And now it’s over.“The only monogamous relationship,” Bryan Curtis, the host of the Press Box podcast, told me, “in Donald Trump’s life.”“I think he’s almost completely unmoored from any sense of responsibility to the media that gave birth to him, whether that’s NBC or the New York Post or anybody else,” Allen Salkin, a former reporter for the New York Post and the New York Times and the author of The Method to the Madness, told me. “It’s different now.”It’s clear which tools to him are no longer useful. Last month, for instance, in remarks at the Department of Justice, he said what CNN and MSNBC do is “illegal” because they “literally write 97.6 percent bad about me” and are “political arms” of the Democrats. (It’s not.) He said what the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal do “just cannot be legal.” (It is. In fact, it’s constitutionally protected.) On Truth Social he berated by name reporters from the New York Times, the New Yorker and the Atlantic. “There’s something really wrong with these people, and their SICK, TRUMP DERANGED EDITORS,” the president wrote. “They did everything within their power to help rig the Election against me. How did that work out??? MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!” This past Sunday night he said on Truth Social after watching 60 Minutes that CBS was a “Political Operative” and “should lose their license” and be subject to “maximum fines and punishment.” On Monday in the Oval Office with Trump and the president of El Salvador he hectored CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “Do you plan to ask President Bukele to help return the man who your administration was mistakenly deported to El Salvador?” she asked. “Why don’t you just say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’ Why can’t you just say that? That’s why nobody watches you anymore.” Trump, in the comfortable company of a dictatorial foreign leader, called the media of his own country “sick people.”More salient, though, and democratically destructive, isn’t even what he’s saying. It’s what he’s doing. He’s coaxed from ABC News a costly settlement in a libel suit and he’s trying a version of the same with CBS. He’s sued the Des Moines Register for “election interference” on account of a pollster’s mistaken survey showing him losing in Iowa. He’s ordered government agencies to terminate subscriptions to POLITICO Pro that he and his administration miscast as government subsidies. He’s ordered essentially the extinction of the government-backed Voice of America. He’s dispatched the head of the Federal Communications Commission to launch investigations into CBS, NBC and ABC. He’s deputized Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to hold hearings about the alleged bias of NPR and PBS and is set to ask Congress to cancel billions of already approved funding. “The NPR, PBS Grift Has Ripped Us Off for Too Long,” the White House said this week in a news release. He’s wrested from the White House Correspondents’ Association control of the White House press pool — asserting considerably more say in who covers him and how. He’s kicked a HuffPost reporter out of the pool. He’s denied access to a cabinet meeting to a reporter from Reuters and others. His White House just this week announced the three main wire services — Reuters, Bloomberg and the AP — will no longer share a rotating spot in the pool, lessening their access and cutting into their business models. He’s generally opened the pool instead to more conservative and at times highly non-traditional outlets, running the gamut from The Washington Times to The Daily Signal to the controversial Zero Hedge. And he banned reporters and photographers from the AP from the Oval Office and Air Force One and continued to ban them in defiance of a court order his administration is appealing — a court order in which a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled that the efforts of his White House were not only unconstitutional but “brazen.” The specter of the gutting of the nation’s foundational libel law looms.It’s a series of battles in Trump’s ongoing war. People around Trump say he’s not killing the mainstream media so much as the mainstream media is dying on its own or killing itself — with what they rate as a roundly anti-Trump bent along with what they saw as generally shamefully soft coverage of the obvious aging and diminishing capacity of Joe Biden during his presidential years. The media “has snuffed themselves out,” said the operative who told me it’s not “fun and games” with reporters anymore. “The president and his team are just recognizing that fact.” Some publications are experiencing an uptick with Trump back in the White House in subscriptions, donations, ratings or traffic — Vox, the Guardian, the Atlantic, POLITICO, cable news but especially Fox — but for the most part the so-called “Trump bump” the second time around isn’t quite what it was the first.“He wants to kill you (1) because he thinks that’s what his base wants and (2) because he can,” Alan Marcus, a former Trump publicist and consultant, told me. “He now thinks, ‘I’m bigger than the media.’” Trump’s relationship used to involve some give and take. The long symbiosis was a function of some uncomfortable balance of power. With publicity came some bad publicity. But now he no longer even needs to put up with the jabs and the snark of Page Six let alone the serious accountability provided by some of the best reporters in the world. What he used to use Twitter for he now has Truth Social. What he used to have to go on Howard Stern to do he now has Joe Rogan and Theo Von and Charlie Kirk. As the 2024 campaign continued, according to reporting in my former colleague Alex Isenstadt’s recently released book called Revenge, Trump was “just as interested in the number of social media views his podcast appearances got as he was in TV ratings.” Ever media-savvy and zero-sum, whether strategically or consciously or not, Trump is trying to banish or extinguish some outlets while elevating others — others that don’t criticize him at all or do a great deal less. The quid pro quo is similar — they get numbers, he gets votes — but the pushback is not.And the mainstream media?What to do?“Do their job,” Baron, the former executive editor of the Washington Post, told me. “I think the most powerful thing that we have available to us is the reporting — finding out what’s actually happening in this administration and telling the public what’s going on. I think that’s what we should do and keep doing,” he said. “He can be at war. But I don’t think we have to be at war. Because I don’t think it does us any good.”“Last time around I was sympathetic to Marty Baron’s comments that we don’t want to be … at war,” Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, told me. “But I think that time has passed. This is so much worse … just unmistakably anti-democratic and repulsive,” she said. “You don’t have to write that, but you can show it.”Ron Fournier, the AP reporter who got the calls from Trump back in 1999, is now a Detroit-based consultant. He writes when he writes for his newsletter on Substack. “First they came for the Associated Press, and not enough people spoke out,” he wrote recently in his newsletter on Substack. “A reporter with the Washington Post just asked me, ‘How far can Trump go?’” he said. “As far as the public lets him go.”“He has now gone from just treating the press as a foil to now treating the press as an enemy that literally needs to be stomped out,” Fournier told me the last time we talked.“My warning to all Americans,” he said, “is this is just a step.”
