Covering Politics in the Age of Trump

Jerry Ceppos

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780807175965
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Like politics, journalism has been turned topsy-turvy by the presidency of Donald Trump. Covering Politics in the Age of Trump takes a wide-ranging view of the relationship between the forty-fifth president and the Fourth Estate. In concise, illuminating, and often personal essays, twenty-four top journalists address topics such as growing concerns about political bias and journalistic objectivity; increasing consternation about the media's use of anonymous sources; the practices journalists employ to gain access to wary administration officials; and reporters' efforts to improve journalism in an era of twenty-four-hour cable news. Contributors include: Mark Ballard, Peter Bhatia, Rebecca Buck, Carl Cannon, Jill Colvin, Charlie Cook, McKay Coppins, Mary C. Curtis, Paul Farhi, Quint Forgey, Major Garrett, Ginger Gibson, "Fin" Gomez, Jesse J. Holland, Clark Hoyt, Sarah Isgur, Mark Leibovich, Ashley Parker, Fernando Pizarro, Tom Rosenstiel, Frank Sesno, Alexis Simendinger, Steve Thomma, and Salena Zito.
The Trump administration's contentious relationship with the media has altered the public's expectations regarding the news and national politics. In Covering Politics in the Age of Trump, top political reporters explore this dynamic, relaying stories from the campaign trail to the briefing room that illustrate the new challenges faced by journalists working in the age of "fake news."

I

WHEN THE PRESIDENT
CALLS YOU OUT

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WHEN WE ASKED top political journalists to write about their experiences covering President Trump, we had no idea that four of them would write about being criticized rudely and publicly (and one would write about being criticized privately). Most chilling was the experience of McKay Coppins of The Atlantic: “He denounced me on Twitter as a ‘slimebag reporter’ and ‘true garbage with no credibility.’ He got me blacklisted from political events where he was speaking. His secretary sent an addendum to the $850 bill for my stay at Mar-a-Lago, claiming they had forgotten to include the cost of the flight: $10,000. I even received a cryptic note late one night from a Republican opposition researcher, who told me someone had tried to hire him to investigate my personal life.”

Rebecca Buck of CNN, Ashley Parker of the Washington Post, and Jill Colvin of the Associated Press also make clear that it’s no fun to be called out by the president during fervid Trump rallies. And Mark Leibovich of the New York Times writes that even a private dressing-down can be memorable.

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REVISITING A FATEFUL TRIP
TO MAR-A-LAGO

MCKAY COPPINS

IT DIDN’T FEEL at the time like a story I would be telling for the rest of my life. It was January of 2014, and I had traveled to New Hampshire to see Donald Trump, the host of Celebrity Apprentice, deliver a speech about his supposed political aspirations. No one took him seriously, of course. Trump had been pulling this particular publicity stunt for decades, flirting with a presidential bid every time he had a book to sell or a TV show to promote. The schtick long ago had worn thin, especially with the press. When I’d e-mailed my editors at BuzzFeed News to pitch them on a Trump story, I practically could hear the weary sighs through my inbox. Fine, the response came back, but please don’t waste too much time on this.

My plan was simple: Interview Trump on the flight back to New York aboard his private jet, extract a handful of blustery quotes, and file a brief, colorful story about a celebrity billionaire playing at politics. Not my most important journalistic contribution, perhaps, but worth a day’s work.

Once Trump finished his speech, I squeezed into the back of his black SUV and we rolled through the frozen streets of Manchester toward the airstrip where his plane was waiting. A few minutes before we arrived, however, his pilot called to report that a blizzard was shutting down LaGuardia Airport. Trump called an audible: Why not skip New York and fly straight on to Palm Beach, home to his famous oceanside compound, Mar-a-Lago?

As schedules were reorganized and flight plans rerouted, one of Trump’s aides reminded him that they had a reporter in tow, and inquired as to what should be done with me. “Bring him to Florida!” the future president replied—and, before I had time to process what was happening, I was strapped into a creamy leather seat on Trump’s 757, eating pretzels as we soared southward.

I spent two surreal days at Trump’s Xanadu, during which he seemed determined to impress me. He bragged about how much better his plane was than the charter jet Mitt Romney had used for his presidential campaign. (“Total piece of shit.”) He bragged about how enlightened he was. (“I am so not a racist, it’s incredible.”) He even bragged about the beauty of Mar-a-Lago’s female patrons. (“There are a lot of good-looking women here,” he told me, leaning in as he adopted a low-pitched purr.)

But, in retrospect, there was one moment when I should have paid closer attention. We were sitting in his den, a giant Trump portrait hanging on the walnut-paneled wall above us, as he riffed on his philosophy of media combat. Trump, who had spent his career seducing and sparring with the New York City tabloids, described the role of journalism in fundamentally transactional terms. When the stories about him were nice, the journalists were to be rewarded; when they were not, they were to be punished. (Truth and accuracy were lesser concerns.)

“If I am treated unfairly,” he told me, “I will go after that reporter.”

“Are you going to come after me when this article comes out?” I asked, mostly joking.

“Maybe.”

By the time I returned home to New York, I had formed an impression of Trump as an almost tragic figure—insecure, unhappy, and thirsty for affirmation. As I wrote in what ended up being a 6,000-word profile, Trump struck me as “startled by his suddenly fading relevance and consumed by a desperate need to get it back.” Rereading the story years later, this portrait of Trump has held up reasonably well, I think. Less prescient was my confident prediction that Trump was “about as likely to run for president in his lifetime as he is to accept follicular defeat.” When the story was published in February, it carried the headline, “36 Hours On the Fake Campaign Trail With Donald Trump.”

Trump, infuriated, spent the next several weeks lashing out. He denounced me on Twitter as a “slimebag reporter” and “true garbage with no credibility.” He got me blacklisted from political events where he was speaking. His secretary sent an addendum to the $850 bill for my stay at Mar-a-Lago, claiming they had forgotten to include the cost of the flight: $10,000. I even received a cryptic note late one night from a Republican opposition researcher, who told me someone had tried to hire him to investigate my personal life.

As Trump worked to undermine my reporting, he activated a network of right-wing noisemakers to assist in the cause. A Buffalo-based PR man named Michael Caputo circulated e-mails to Republican press secretaries warning that I was a “partisan flibbertigibbet” who could not be trusted. The American Conservative’s Jeffrey Lord wrote a comically long, line-by-line takedown of my story. Breitbart News churned out wall-to-wall coverage of the fracas, complete with a 2,100-word alternate-reality version of my trip to Mar-a-Lago: “EXCLUSIVE—TRUMP: ‘SCUMBAG’ BUZZFEED BLOGGER OGLED WOMEN WHILE HE ATE BISON AT MY RESORT.” (In one particularly memorable passage, a Mar-a-Lago hostess identified as “Bianka Pop” recounted my attempts to seduce her: “He was looking at me like I was yummy . . . [like he wanted] a cup of me or something.”)

The sheer volume of the smear campaign was impressive. At one point, scrolling down Breitbart’s homepage yielded seven different stories related to my betrayal of “Mr. Trump”—photo after identical photo of my grinning face plastered across the website like “wanted” posters in the Wild West.

For the most part, I found the episode amusing. No one in my personal life believed the lies, and no real professional damage was done. If anything, the temper tantrum I’d inadvertently provoked was helpful to my career. (When I had a book come out the next year, my publisher included some of Trump’s tweets in the marketing material.)

Still, I found myself baffled by the strategy Trump and his allies had chosen to deploy. The lines of attack often seemed to contradict each other. In some stories, I was a nervous geek cowering in Trump’s presence; in others, I was an aggressive boor harassing female hostesses. One day, Trump would dismiss me as an irrelevant “blogger” to be ignored, the next he would continue his Twitter barrage. What was the point of all this noise? Was anyone actually buying this?

In the years since my accidental vacation with Donald Trump, I’ve retold this story in countless venues, often using it to illuminate some aspect of his presidency—from his obsession with conspiracy theories to his outer-borough status anxiety.

Looking back now, though, what strikes me most about the experience was how closely it foreshadowed the way Trump would deal with the press from the Oval Office. His penchant for insulting disfavored reporters on Twitter is well-documented, of course. But the strategy is more sophisticated than that.

As president, Trump erected an elaborate messaging apparatus designed to undermine fact-based journalism and flood the American information ecosystem with propaganda. Every single day, on every platform, Trump and his allies waged war against “the enemies of the people.” He led his supporters in ritualistic booing of the reporters at his rallies. He amplified attempts to discredit the press by outlets like Fox News and Breitbart. As I’ve reported for The Atlantic, pro-Trump political operatives scraped the social-media accounts belonging to hundreds of journalists and compiled the material into a dossier to be weaponized against any reporter who produces critical coverage. The Trump campaign filed libel lawsuits against the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post.

Many of the gadflies who Trump sent after me back in 2014 rose to power and prominence during his presidency. Caputo joined his campaign. Lord became a high-profile cable-news pundit. Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart at the time, went on to become chief White House strategist. When Trump was a reality-TV personality, his crusade against me seemed goofy and ham-fisted. As commander-in-chief, waging a similar crusade against the entire institution of the press, the tactics felt slightly more ominous.

The goal wasn’t to make people believe a certain set of facts. It was to exhaust and disorient them, to muddy the waters just enough that objective reality felt out of reach—whether it related to a phone call with the president of Ukraine, or the spread of a global pandemic, or a trip to Mar-a-Lago with a young reporter from BuzzFeed. “The Democrats don’t matter,” Bannon once said. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

McKAY COPPINS is a reporter for The Atlantic. He previously was a reporter for BuzzFeed News, for which he covered two presidential campaigns. He is the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• I. WHEN THE PRESIDENT CALLS YOU OUT
• II. COULD ALL OF THIS BE OUR FAULT?
• III. THE STORY ISN’T ALWAYS IN WASHINGTON
• IV. COVERING THE PRESIDENT WHEN YOU’RE A JOURNALIST OF COLOR
• V. HE DISSEMBLES, BUT HE’S AVAILABLE—AND HIS THREATS DON’T COME TRUE
• VI. IT’S BEEN BAD BEFORE, BUT NOT THIS BAD
• VII. TRUMP’S WORST HABIT
• VIII. LOOK TO THE FUTURE
• Index