Trump governs like a king, and the press is struggling on how to cover him
Over Presidents’ Day weekend last year, President Trump was criticized for posting a quote attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the French military leader and dictator: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
During his interview this week with four New York Times reporters, President Trump went even further. Asked if there were any limits on his global power, the president said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” His answer was a pronouncement worthy of another Frenchman, King Louis XIV: “L’état, c’est moi (I am the state).”
King Louis also built Versailles, which seems to be the model for Trump’s “renovations” of the White House, with its enormous new ballroom under construction and many golden adornments. Oddly, before answering a question from the Times reporters about restoring democracy in Venezuela, the president lovingly showed the model for his new White House, which was clearly of more interest to him.
Listening to the questions and answers on the Times podcast “The Daily” I thought Trump sounded drunk with power. The reporters politely followed the usual guidelines for Oval Office interviews (I’ve been at quite a few of these myself in previous administrations), asking intelligent, probing questions that were often followed by answers that were, in my opinion, outlandish.
The stories the reporters wrote off the interview were informative, well-written, and carefully edited. But they failed to convey the essence of this dangerous and deranged phase of Trump’s second term. He interprets the presidential immunity conferred on him by the Supreme Court as carte blanche to do anything he wants. He even hesitated when asked if he thought it was important to adhere to international law in wresting control of Venezuela.
“I don’t need international law,” he said, then added, “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
The interview revealed how important ownership is to Trump, who spent most of his career in real estate. (He reminded his Times visitors that he was very successful in that realm, perhaps more than politics). Though he would not get specific on new properties he is prospecting, it’s clear he wants to purchase Greenland. Too bad it already has an owner: our ally Denmark, a founding member since 1949 of NATO, an organization the president clearly has no use for.
“Ownership is very important,” Trump told the Times. “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do with, you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
The strictures of newswriting — to be accurate and unbiased — make the job of covering this president and interviewing him harder than at any time I can think of. The way he weaves from subject to subject is bizarre and, quite possibly, shows some sort of mental defect. But the conventions of journalism don’t allow reporters to plainly say so.
In their interview stories, the reporters described Trump as being more “blunt” than usual. Blunt doesn’t even begin to describe the level of bombast that drips from his every sentence.
The four reporters put it this way: “Mr. Trump’s assessment of his own freedom to use any instrument of military, economic or political power to cement American supremacy was the most blunt acknowledgment yet of his worldview.”
When I was the editor in charge of news at the Times, I tried to uphold a clear line between news and opinion. Opinion belonged in its own section, much as this column is rightly labeled “Opinion.” During the first Trump term, I heartily agreed with then-Washington Post editor Martin Baron that we journalists were not at war with Trump but “at work” covering his words and actions and their consequences. But the usual norms and strictures of covering the White House seem inadequate to covering this moment of the American presidency.
Another common description of the president’s extremism is “unprecedented,” but that’s become a shopworn word. And it seems inadequate to capture the sheer brazenness and lawlessness of the US strike on Venezuela.
Often the Trump administration does seem surreal, which is why it’s hard to cover. The president’s lies are like a waterfall, unceasing. Listening to the Times reporters ask about the fatal shooting of a Minnesota motorist by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer, I was glad to hear them press the president when he falsely claimed the video he showed exonerated the office.
We should be grateful for the Times’s thorough White House coverage, its investigations of corruption within the Trump administration, and its experienced international correspondents who report so deeply and put their lives at risk. President Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other members of the administration have tried to make working conditions as difficult as they can for reporters, especially targeting those from the Times. The president has also sued the Times and some of its reporters in a $15 billion defamation lawsuit. If reporters don’t want to be seen as being at war with the president, his litigiousness indicates that the president has no qualms about battling the press.
But we need to reexamine the normal rules of journalism. They are inadequate to these times.
It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. When the Supreme Court handed down its presidential immunity decision before the 2024 election, Justice Sonia Sotomayor read aloud her blistering dissent: “The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”
Trump is certainly governing like a king and living like royalty. The press must not bow to him.