Trump escalates war on the press
His anger and frustration over his White House communication team’s ineptness in conveying the accurate reasons for his erratic firing of FBI Director James Comey led him to the unthinkable notion that White House press briefings should be banned in favor of written replies to reporters’ questions.
Mr. Trump made the threat early Friday morning in a tweet: “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy.” Eight minutes later, he added: “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy.”
The previous afternoon, Mr. Trump had ranted in a probing NBC News interview with anchorman Lester Holt that he was distressed that his press handlers could not relay with “total accuracy” his stated reasons for the explosive dismissal. But he himself had expressed contradictory explanations for it, and his comment left the impression he was hanging his press spokespersons out to dry.
As for the FBI investigation into possible Trump team collusion with the Russians, the president, after calling it “a total hoax” as well as a “taxpayer charade,” told Mr. Holt he wanted it to be “absolutely done properly” and to “get to the bottom” of the alleged conspiracy.
Mr. Trump told Mr. Holt that he had decided on his own to fire Mr. Comey before being so advised by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, and acted “regardless” of it. “In fact,” Mr. Trump continued, “when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russian thing with Trump and Russia is made-up story.’ It is an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”
In so saying, Mr. Trump invited comparison with the narrative of the most stunning Washington political episode since the 1973 Richard Nixon firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. In those few words, he pivoted the issue from one of presidential abuse of power to an ugly assault on press freedom.
As Mr. Holt’s persistent NBC interview revealed, the president has been consumed by personal animosity toward Mr. Comey, and by the two congressional investigations into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
The president’s personal unraveling on television also highlighted the disarray in an Oval Office staff that seems unwilling or incapable of creating an internal organization to harness, or even monitor, this most impulsive and self-destructive chief executive.
Amid indications that the president’s communications team had been blindsided on the Comey firing and couldn’t come up a credible narrative, White House deputy press secretary Sara Huckabee Sanders offered: “Nobody was left in the dark. It was a quick-moving process. We took the information we had as best we had it, and got it out to the American people as quickly as we could.”
In the first four months of his chaotic tenure, Mr. Trump relentlessly disparaged the work product of professional news media at every turn as inaccurate and biased against him, calling it “fake news.” Throughout the 2016 campaign, he also repeatedly mocked and lectured members of the press corps covering his massive rallies, and roused his faithful to verbally abuse them, particularly singling out the New York Times and the Washington Post, among his most vocal and consistent critics, for his accusations.
His threat to cancel the White House press briefings imperils not only the task of the attending reporters, but also the vested interest of the public as well. The ability of the press to probe answers in a free-flowing exchange is a powerful means to hold Mr. Trump and his administration to account for their words and deeds. That is so especially in times like these of assaults on American democracy — not only from foreign sources but also from within that democracy itself.
PREVIOUS ARTICLE
