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Is Trump’s Latest Press Attack Just Another Distraction?

One of the most exhausting aspects of the Felon's occupancy of the White House is the never ending chaos that the Felon foments, often many believe to distract from media coverage the Felon finds unflattering or too focused on the Felon's failures. Before the Felon insanely launched his war of choice against Iran, media coverage was drifting back to the Epstein sex traffic scandal in which the Felon appears to be immersed up to his eyeballs. The war and the huge adverse impact on energy prices and consumer prices across the board has quickly become an albatross around the Felon's neck that he cannot escape. His poll numbers are the lowest ever and some Republicans are belatedly recognizing that the Felon is becoming radio active with voters other than the hard core Kool-Aid drinking MAGA base.  Hence the need for a trade war with Canada that neither Americans nor Canadians want to distract the media.  Now, as piece at The New Yorker lays out, the Felon has declared war on major news outlets whose main offense has been to accurately cover the Felon's disastrous policies and war of choice.  Here are article excerpts:

In November, 2018, the day after midterm elections that went badly for the Republican Party, Jim Acosta, then a White House correspondent at CNN, questioned President Donald Trump about his messaging on immigration. Things quickly got heated. “I think you should let me run the country—you run CNN,” Trump interjected. “If you did it well, your ratings would be much better.” Trump tried to move on, but Acosta wouldn’t yield, even as an aide walked over to take away the microphone. Trump wasn’t done insulting him yet, either. “When you report the fake news, which CNN does a lot,” he said, “you are the enemy of the people.”

Hours later, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, announced the suspension of Acosta’s press pass, and, for good measure, falsely accused him of manhandling the aide who wanted the mike back. The episode was a big deal—a veteran Times reporter said that he’d not seen anything like it in more than two decades on the beat—but some pundits argued that Trump had manufactured it as a distraction, not only from the midterms, but from his decision, earlier in the day, to fire Jeff Sessions, his first Attorney General.

Late last week, just shy of another round of midterm elections that seem poised to go badly for the Republican Party, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he would be barring all of CNN from the White House, along with MS NOW and Politico, “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” (“Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” he added.) This, too, was a big deal, but, once again, various observers suspected that Trump was trying to shift focus from more pressing problems, such as the war in Iran.

History repeats itself, each time as farce—though, of course, some things do change. Back in 2018, MS NOW was still MSNBC and Truth Social did not exist. Acosta, for his part, has since left CNN and struck out on his own, taking advantage of the fragmenting media landscape to cultivate audiences as a commentator on Substack and YouTube; indeed, it was he, in this capacity, who warned New York about Trump laying the groundwork for a constitutional crisis. And, if Trump’s latest media ban is in part a distraction tactic, Acosta suggested that a looming constitutional crisis might no longer be the thing he’s aiming to distract from. As we have learned since 2018, Trump doesn’t fear crying havoc from center stage, klieg lights on.

Hindsight is 20/20, and the perception of Trump as the distracter-in-chief has, perhaps, always been an oversimplification; he may get too much credit for his powers of misdirection, or, at least, for their deftness and intentionality. In places, this framing persists . . . and yet, increasingly, it feels as if the attentional capture that should trouble us most is his own. Over the summer, “Regime Change ,” a book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, portrayed Trump as stuck inside a warped information bubble. Natalie Harp, an aide known as the “human printer” for reasons that should be clear from context, has been identified as a key conduit to the President, and, sure enough, it was reported over the weekend (by, who else, CNN) that Harp had been showing Trump news clips—including, apparently, a displeasing graphic from Politico—right before he brought the hammer down.

Whether the ban was a masterful gambit or an unsupervised temper tantrum, its most revealing consequence—and, perhaps, point of contrast with Acostagate—has been in the strong reaction of the targets’ colleagues in the media. The response to Acostagate wasn’t tepid, exactly: CNN quickly sued to get back his press pass, in what the Times called “perhaps the most aggressive action yet by a news organization against a president,” and rival outlets—including, notably, Fox News—filed amicus briefs. The subsequent legal wrangling was a little convoluted, but a Trump-appointed judge, Timothy J. Kelly, preliminarily sided with Acosta, and the White House essentially backed down.

CNN, MS NOW, and Politico are now suing on similar grounds—citing the First Amendment, as well as failures of due process—and Kelly has been assigned to the case again. Trump has already pledged to appeal his ruling, which doesn’t convey much confidence, given that Kelly hasn’t issued one yet.

This time around, though, other news organizations have entered the fray with greater speed and force. CNN is one of five outlets in what is known as the “TV pool” that records and shares footage of Trump’s day-to-day movements; following the ban, the other four—CBS, ABC, NBC, and Fox—announced an effective boycott of their duties.

Given Trump’s recent habit of putting his foot in his mouth and the “let them eat cake” vibes of opening a new helipad amid spiralling gas prices, the networks may have done him a favor. Still, as Erin Burnett, a host on CNN, put it on Monday night, Trump “feeds off being covered by the very press he says he loathes” and “cutting his mike is akin to cutting the air he breathes.”

The inaudible helipad footage was, at least, an on-the-nose metaphor for this idea, and for the broader impression that Trump’s grip on power is weakening. The very fact of the pool boycott strengthens this impression, too; it’s hard to imagine such resolve being shown, say, a year ago. I’ve argued before that seeking to accommodate Trump’s unreasonable behavior is a mistake, as he simply pushes and pushes until his targets eventually fight back. The line, apparently, has finally been drawn.

So far, so welcome. But even if Trump backs down on the ban or loses in court, his threats to the free press will persist. . . . This second Administration is taking other, more insidious steps, too: systematically restricting critical coverage of the Pentagon; detaining and deporting immigrant journalists in enforcement sweeps; aggressively seizing reporters’ data and electronic devices in leak probes; flexing once obscure arms of the administrative state, not least the Federal Communications Commission, to create a hostile climate for anti-Trump speech.

[A] victory for CNN, MS NOW, and Politico would be significant. But Trump probably has more paths to winning than does the press. The bans may or may not be a distraction tactic. Either way, they’re just one more thing to worry about. 

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The Press Is Not the Root of Trump’s Problems

All his life the Felon has sought media coverage and attention in order to satiate his narcissism and delicate ego.  However, the Felon always wants coverage to be flattering, always depicting him as a "winner", and never expose his errors since he views himself as a "genius" and smarter than everyone else. Now, with the media increasingly covering the Felon's failures in the Iran war and inability - or perhaps total indifference - to address or empathize with the concerns of voters (e.g., affordability and inflation), the Felon has declared war on the free press. A column in the New York Times argues that the current assaults on the free press are to distract the media from his many failures with the Iran war being perhaps at the top of the list of what the Felon wants the media to ignore. The Felon in reality has no one to blame for the adverse coverage because his own decisions and policies - think tariffs and trade wars and war of choice - have driven consumer prices ever higher even before soaring energy prices are factored in. In the real world, the Felon needs to grasp the reality that such media coverage may only worsen as laid out in a piece at The Atlantic:

[The Felon] 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.

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.

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. . . . . 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.

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The Felon and the End of American Exceptionalism

To be honest, I have never been a fan of what I view as the myth of American exceptionalism.  Under the Felon's second regime, the reality that America is not exceptional has been writ large and worldwide opinions of America have plummeted even as the Felon claims other nations respect him and his faux "golden age" of America.  Yes, America has done good things in the world, but it has much that is ugly in its history - slavery and genocide against Native Americans to name but two.  Under the Felon, the perception of America and the Felon have changed in very negative ways. As a piece in New York Times reports, America's image has cratered and while individual Americans traveling overseas may still receive friendly and respectful treatment in most countries, perhaps the majority of the world now views America as a threat rather than a "shining city on a hill":

Last spring, Pew Research Center released its annual survey comparing how Americans and others around the world view the United States’ global role. It wasn’t pretty. They reported, “In most countries, majorities say the United States does not promote peace and stability around the world and does not take other countries’ interests into account on matters of international policy.” Views within America’s traditional allies, the countries whose leaders Trump claims “stand up” to honor him, are particularly negative. The Pew poll registered huge declines in the belief that the U.S. is a reliable partner since Trump took office for the second time.

Results were even more devastating when it came to global views of Donald Trump in particular. In the countries surveyed, 76% of respondents said they had no confidence in his leadership of world affairs. Majorities above 70% disapprove of his policies on immigration, Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, Greenland and tariffs. Maybe Trump believes that equals respect.

Driving this perception are the Felon's assault on democracy on the home front while decades long allies are maligned and undermined and brutal dictators - think Vladimir Putin in particular - are coddled and given deference. The days of America leading and inspiring others by example are over - at least until America is rid of the Felon.   A long piece at The Atlantic by a professor of international affairs looks at the erosion of any basis for the claim of American exceptionalism. Here are highlights:

America’s days as the exceptional nation seem to be over. At home, President Donald Trump is weakening the foundations of representative government. In the rest of the world, he has set aside democracy promotion and seems more inclined to work with autocracies like China and Russia than with America’s traditional democratic allies.

While Mr. Trump’s assault on American democracy is both without precedent and dangerous, he is right to hold off on the promotion of democracy abroad and to reach across ideological dividing lines. Improving relations with China, as Mr. Trump will aim to do at his summit with its leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday, is a must in an interdependent world.

Yet Mr. Trump’s dismissal of democracy promotion is flawed and out of step with U.S. history in one critical respect: By compromising America’s own democracy, and backing illiberal populists in other democracies, he is extinguishing the nation’s founding mission to change the world by example. The version of exceptionalism that long guided the nation mandated pragmatism abroad so that Americans could focus on advancing their democratic experiment at home. The settlers of the New World were to build a “city upon a hill,” as the Puritan leader John Winthrop put it in 1630, ultimately changing the world, but only by serving as a democratic model that others would follow. This is the version of U.S. statecraft that urgently needs to be resuscitated.

We are in a worldwide battle for hearts and minds. The future of republican government in the United States, and globally, hangs in the balance. As Mr. Trump oversteps executive authority, weaponizes the Justice Department and tries to cow the media, private sector and universities, the citizens of China, Iran, Russia and other autocracies are watching America’s democratic beacon flicker. . . . .The United States is squandering its ability to bend the arc of history toward more freedom.

Americans embraced a democratic messianism from the get-go. As Thomas Paine put it in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But for the next century-plus, the United States sought to foster the spread of republican government by serving as an exemplar rather than by intervening abroad.

This patient approach to spreading democracy was the product of three main considerations. First, Americans were acutely aware of the fragility of their own experiment in self-government. President George Washington explicitly warned in his 1796 Farewell Address that ambition abroad, by centralizing power and requiring an oversize military, risked compromising freedom at home. Adams was also concerned that foreign wars, even if fought for the republican cause, risked changing “the fundamental maxims of her policy … from liberty to force,” tempting the nation to become “the dictatress of the world.”

Second, the nation’s leaders believed that republican government had to emerge organically and could not be imposed from outside. As Americans in the 1820s decided not to intervene in Latin America to support countries breaking away from European empires, Adams asserted that he saw “no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government” — a view that would prevail for decades.

Third, America’s leaders appreciated the need to navigate the world as it was, not as they might like it to be. As President James Monroe explained in 1823, U.S. policy toward Europe’s monarchies was “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it.”

By the late nineteenth century, this pragmatic and transactional brand of statecraft contributed to impressive results at home; Americans not only kept their republic, they turned it into a world power. The results abroad were more modest; only a handful of countries were beating a path toward liberal democracy by the turn of the century. But as the founders had hoped, the success of the American experiment set an example that others were starting to follow.

Beginning in 1898, America’s growing power and ambition lured it into the trap that Adams had warned against: Its idealist aspirations began to outstrip its strategic interests.

President William McKinley launched a war to expel Spain from Cuba and went on to annex Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, asserting that he was acting “in the cause of humanity.” Less than two decades later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered a succession of military interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America, reportedly vowing that he would teach “the South American republics to elect good men.” He also guided the nation into World War I, declaring that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

Americans quickly soured on these more costly efforts to export their ideals. The annexation of Spanish territories turned the nation into a colonial empire; the United States became an occupier, not a liberator. And despite victory in World War I, many Americans regretted entanglement in Old World rivalries, and the Senate rejected U.S. participation in the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild to keep the postwar peace. So began America’s interwar retreat and the abandonment of its idealist aspirations in favor of a stubborn isolationism.

During World War II and the Cold War, the United States finally arrived at a stable equilibrium between its strategic interests and its lofty ideals. To do battle with the Axis powers, Washington set aside its ideological misgivings to ally with the Soviet Union, but after vanquishing Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it went on to democratize both countries.

Amid the Cold War, Washington formed sturdy alliances with fellow democracies while also working with autocracies as needed to contain communism, at times compromising its ideals. Yet the West ultimately prevailed not by defeating the Soviet Union on the battlefield, but by demonstrating the superiority of free societies and open markets, patiently waiting for the Soviet bloc to collapse from within.

As had happened roughly a century earlier, America’s idealist ambitions again began to outstrip its strategic interests after the Cold War ended. . . . At the same time, the triumph of capitalism stoked excessive confidence in the benefits of the unfettered marketplace.

These idealist illusions produced a succession of major setbacks for the United States. After 9/11, regime-change missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya cost trillions of dollars and produced little good. The United States integrated Russia and China into global markets, expecting the expansion of their middle classes to liberalize their politics and tame their foreign policies. Nothing of the sort happened. Both countries have become more autocratic and more hostile to the United States.

In the meantime, a combination of automation and free trade has undermined the industrial-era social contract, hollowing out middle classes and political centrism across Western democracies. Mr. Trump and the world’s many other populists are a symptom more than a cause of the resulting anti-establishment anger.

We have come full circle. As during the founding era, American democracy is under threat from within. Meanwhile, republican ideals are in retreat; the world is becoming decidedly less free. And since managing an interdependent globe necessitates broad international cooperation, the United States again needs to navigate the world as it is, not as it would like it to be. . . . Mr. Trump’s Iran debacle will hopefully reinforce the due caution that Washington should exercise when it comes to trying to change regimes by force.

[I]n threatening democracy at home and supporting illiberal populists abroad, Mr. Trump is corrupting, not reviving, the original version of American exceptionalism. By imperiling the American experiment, and encouraging fellow travelers to do the same in their own democracies, Mr. Trump is certainly setting an example, but one that will decidedly darken the course of history.

Americans must urgently rescue their democratic experiment. Their ability to do so is critical to reversing the illiberal tide that is rising globally. Only if Americans get their own democratic house in order and demonstrate that democracy can outperform autocracy will they be able to ensure the arc of history again bends toward more freedom.

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