Is Trump’s Latest Press Attack Just Another Distraction?

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. Online, one commentator praised CNN for continuing to focus on that story amid Acostagate, warning that Sessions’ ouster could touch off a “constitutional crisis.”

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. “He’s trying to distract the public from the serious political trouble that he’s in right now,” one commentator told New York. “My concern is he’s kind of laying the groundwork to put the country through yet another constitutional crisis.”

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—addressing the latest media ban, the Times editorial board characterized the President as “a master manipulator of public attention”—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. (Asked later about the timing, Trump replied, helpfully, “No reason,” before citing “cumulative stories over the last two years.”) Other Trump advisers were reportedly blindsided by the ban, which wasn’t announced by the White House press secretary, as was the case with Acosta in 2018, in no small part because there currently isn’t one. If there had been, some have speculated, he or she may have talked Trump 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. (On Monday, at least, other, non-TV newsrooms joined in by delaying the release of still photographs of Trump events.) Some observers—Acosta included—would have liked to see the press corps go further still, by eschewing White House coverage entirely; still, as various media reporters noted, the temporary draining of the TV pool was a significant escalation, particularly given the White House press corps’ recent reputation for responding to breaking norms by breaking bread. (Exhibit A, and, indeed, B: the recent White House Correspondents’ dinners.) The boycott doesn’t mean that no one will be on hand to film Trump until it’s resolved; sure enough, on Monday, he ventured onto the South Lawn to cut the ribbon on a new helipad, and White House cameras streamed the scene. The absence of a boom mike did mean, however, that Trump’s voice was inaudible.

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.” Obviously, the President of the United States has other ways of making himself heard. (Coincidentally or not, last night the White House posted a headache-inducing smash cut of old sitcom clips that doubled as a promo for “Trump TV,” which, we were told, would be a rolling YouTube feed of “top videos, major remarks, and must-see highlights” that will surely make a mockery of those adjectives.) But I’ve long believed that the traditional media remains more relevant than many of its detractors think, in shaping and in amplifying the political agenda. 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. The danger that he posed was not trivial during his first term, but Acostagate became such a flash point because it was a relatively rare example of action following ugly rhetoric. In term two, the latest media ban already had precedent: last year, the White House limited access for the Associated Press after it refused to straightforwardly go along with his decision to Trumpify the name of the Gulf of Mexico. 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.

Then there are Trump’s relationships with the moguls who own much of the media landscape. When Trump told Acosta to stick to running CNN, back in 2018, it read as an exhortation for the network to stay in its lane and let Trump run the country. Now “You run CNN” sounds more like an instruction he might issue to a trusted ally. On that note, yesterday, while the network was busy suing Trump, news broke that it will soon have a new owner: Paramount Skydance, which is chaired by David Ellison, son of Larry, who is a friend of the President. When the company announced its intention to acquire CNN’s current parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, back in February, critics of the deal raised concerns about editorial independence: Paramount had recently taken over CBS News and been widely accused of dragging it rightward; Larry Ellison had reportedly suggested to Trump that anchors he dislikes (including Burnett) could be cleared out at CNN. The Administration green-lit the deal. A coalition of Democratic state attorneys general moved to block it—but they have now reached a settlement. The terms are mostly relevant to Hollywood types, but they also provide for the creation of an “editorial independence board” of experienced journalists responsible for insuring “objective” coverage at CBS and CNN, among other reassuring yet meaningless buzzwords. This board will be picked, in turn, by the board of the combined company. One staffer at CBS News told the Guardian that the whole arrangement “sounds like utter garbage.”

Even if this analysis is correct, and I think it probably is, the story of the merger and its likely antitrust implications is more complex than the caricatures would allow. The same can be said of the existing direction of CBS News under David Ellison—among other data points, the network has joined its partners in the boycott—and it’s too soon to say what Ellison’s CNN will look like. Still, as I wrote when the deal was announced, allowing the same billionaires to own multiple major networks—or two-fifths of the White House TV pool, by one metric—is a concerning degree of concentration, even when the motivations are pure and transparent. If, or when, CNN gets its White House access back, it will be against a backdrop of significantly murkier questions involving the Ellisons and their ties to Trump—and its coverage will be rightly scrutinized accordingly.

Trump, it should be said, didn’t just want CNN to stay in its lane in 2018—he was concerned about its owners back then, too, so much so that he reportedly ordered officials to block a prior merger between the network’s then parent company and A. T. & T. Ultimately, he didn’t get his way. The same was true with regard to Acosta, who got his pass back after two or so weeks away, though I wrote at the time that CNN’s victory in that fight might prove hollow, given the free oxygen it granted to Trump’s fake-news rhetoric, and, yes, how it distracted the media from other issues. From today’s vantage, those fears sound quaint, and 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. ♦