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.