To a Narcissist, Everything Looks Like a Mirror: Trump and the Media

On Nov. 2, a week before he won the election, Donald Trump held a rally in Miami, Florida. Somewhere in the middle of it he pointed at the media huddled in their press hutch in the back and berated them once more for not turning their cameras around to show his yuge, beautiful crowds. As he did this, the camera stayed right on him, as it always does. It’s unbelievable, isn’t it? The networks show their anti-Trump bias even when Trump is calling them out right to their faces. They’re even documenting it live on their own network. They really are a bunch of libtard dopes who think we’re all stupid.

Turns out, Trump’s lying. I learned this because of something else he said that afternoon.

In the middle of calling out the phony, extremely dishonest liberal media for not covering his crowds fairly in Miami, Trump paused and then out of nowhere spoke directly to someone in particular. “Katy, you’re not reporting it, Katy! There’s something happening, Katy. There’s something happening, Katy.”

He didn’t say her last name, didn’t identify her further. It was a personal shot, from Trump straight to this Katy woman—shrapnel intended to hit the press who knew her. The crowd had no idea who she was and didn’t particularly care. They had a specific person to represent the enormous mass of anonymous lying slimeballs who were out to take down their candidate. They let it rip.

I had no idea who Katy was, either, though.

Turns out that about one year before that—Dec. 10, 2015—Trump held a rally inside an aircraft carrier in South Carolina. And like in the Miami rally he went off on the press, “Absolute scum.” And then out of nowhere: “Little Katy. Third-rate journalist.” He pointed her out to the crowd.

“Katy Tur!”

Katy Tur was a reporter for the not very well known and highly irrelevant leftist alternative media outlet NBC News. Trump singled her out because, a week before that December 10 rally, Tur reported that Trump had once left a rally “abruptly” when some protesters showed up. Trump didn’t like that reporting, so he called her out personally. The crowd turned on her, and she left the aircraft carrier “abruptly”—threatened so seriously the Secret Service had to escort her out.

And then the death threats started. @GuyScott33, for instance, tweeted: MAYBE A FEW JOURNALISTS DO NEED TO BE WHACKED. MAYBE THEN THEYD STOP BEI[N]G BIASED HACKS. KILL EM ALL STARTING W/ KATY TUR.

At a rally in February it happened again. Tur tweeted: Trump trashes press. Crowd jeers. Guy by press ‘pen’ looks at us & screams “you’re a bitch!” Other gentleman gives cameras the double bird. In fact, it’s a long-running feud. You can look it up. Well documented.

But in the course of learning about Katy Tur, I also learned about Trump’s camera/crowd trick. Turns out there’s just one “pool” camera at the rallies that stays fixed on Trump at the podium, and all the networks share that footage. This allows the networks to use their own cameras to film other things, such as, say, the crowd. But when Trump points to that one camera and it doesn’t flinch, he sure seems to make a point.

But no, he’s lying. I learned that from Little Katy Tur. Apparently Trump jokes privately with the media that he knows exactly how the pool camera works. It’s sport for him. Just having a little fun with the press! Having a little fun by inflaming my supporters and turning them against the corrupt, disgusting, clueless, crooked, weak, unfair, bad, extremely dishonest, boring, inaccurate, dopey, irrelevant, tax-scam sleazeball losers that very few people know are still in business.

Drive the price down; buy low; rebrand

There’s a special hatred reserved for the media—across the country—a primal hatred even I can feel. And if our next president isn’t outright leading the charge, he’s at least a chaperone.

But there’s immediately this cognitive dissonance. After all, Trump loves the media. He’s a TV star. He’s dominated headlines since the ’80s. He played the part of his own press agent so he could brag about himself. (Fun fact: The name he gave as his own agent was John Barron; he later named his son Barron.) Trump was in a movie. He was on WWE. Trump knows it better than anyone: No media, no Trump.

The bizarre thing is that Trump tells us he hates the media in spite of this obvious love story. But that’s not an accurate read: Trump really doesn’t love the media. Trump loves Trump. It’s more accurate to say Trump needs the media. These needs are equally personal and professional—he needs the attention; he benefits from the promotion—so he’s kept a close relationship with the press his entire life. At the same time, those overlapping needs have been a saving grace for the media. They’ve had access to Trump. Until now.

Trump relied on free press coverage to propel his campaign. The New York Crimes estimates he received about $2 billion worth of free media over the course of the campaign. (It’s important to note the flip-side is also true: The press gave him $2 billion worth of free media. They have their agenda, too.)

But Trump didn’t just use the press for the free ads. He used the media as a foil, turned them into an outside enemy he could unite his supporters against. This allowed Trump to install himself (and the press that favors him) in the trust vacuum left behind, the one source his supporters can trust. In fact, the only institution that Trump supporters (possibly) trust less than the media is the government. And now we can see a pattern: I want to drain the swamp so I can fill the swamp. That is, Trump seems to attack the things he covets the most. Why? It’s simple: He’s a real estate man. He’s driving the price down.

So how do you get a nation to hand its government over to a pompous, lying, offensive billionaire blowhard with a penchant for conspiracies, six bankruptcies and no experience in government or baseline knowledge of policy foreign or domestic? Easy: Drive the price down; buy low; rebrand.

Who wants to live in a swamp, folks?

Trump voters despised the government, and they especially despised our illegitimate Muslim Communist President from Kenya who gave their jobs to illegals and wants ISIS to destroy America along with his crooked crony crimelord Hitlery Pneumoninton. Trump led both of those charges. He drove down the value of the presidency, and he’s driving down the value of the press. To many Americans these institutions are now worth nothing, and they’ll tell you as much. Trump has swept in to buy them up cheap. Now we’re on to the next step: Rebrand.

It’s nothing new for Republican politicians to accuse the mainstream media of a left-leaning bias. I will happily admit the mainstream media often leans left. That said, it’s hard to point you to a non-biased article about that bias because, weirdly, almost all the articles that come up are from right-leaning publications or op-eds from people with a right-wing agenda telling you things are much worse than they really are. Here are two good sources—one here and one here that discuss liberal media bias honestly and reasonably.

But also, bias is in the subconscious. Trump took a grain of truth and built a poison pearl around it, turning “bias” into a full-blown, nationwide malicious conspiracy against him. The media was actively working to get Clinton elected, which meant it was out to get him and, of course, out to get you, his supporters. There was malicious intent.

To state the obvious, there is no objective proof of this media conspiracy, but that statement can’t be taken seriously because I’m a liberal. In fact, my saying there’s no proof of a liberal agenda is proof of a liberal agenda, and I’m either blind to it or part of it. To many Trump supporters I’m wrong a priori: It’s not that my points themselves aren’t valid; my points aren’t valid before I even make them, simply because I don’t support Trump.

Read that again. Have you encountered that logic—coming from the left or from the right? That should terrify you. It’s beyond making the press an enemy of the people. The Trump movement is turning truth into an enemy. Truth is on your team. If it’s not, then it’s not the truth.

Trump isn’t just making a media bid here. He’s driving down the price of truth. Why? Well, let’s see what his reasons for hating the press really are.

Sad!

Trump mounted innumerable attacks on the media over the course of his campaign and isn’t slowing down one bit. It can be pretty entertaining until you remember it’s terrifying. His language has a loud and blunt musicality, like a trombone, and his timing and showmanship are perfectly natural.

But prolifics aside, Trump only has one criticism. His media targets are too many to print, so here’s a list of journalists and outlets that Trump and campaign affiliates have attacked, along with the text and context of the attacks themselves; it was published October 11 and includes 66 journalists and 21 media outlets. And here’s the New York Crimes’ entertaining list of the 289 nouns Donald Trump has so far insulted on Twitter, including the highly unethical New Hampshire Union Recorder, which got kicked out of the ABC News debate like a dog and will be dead in two years.

But even more importantly, we need to pay attention to who and what is not on that amazing New York Times list. Before you read the actual list, open the link and hit Cmd-F to start a page search. Type “Putin.” Delete and type “Russia.” Amazing, right? Now, with that in mind, scroll through the rest of the list.

Read every single one of the attacks and insults on those two lists. Dig into what prompted him to say them. It’s the same criticism, over and over: They didn’t say nice things about Donald Trump.

This criticism is so pathological it’s endured for decades. In December, Trump issued forth a tweet out of the blue attacking Vanity Fair: “Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!”

That one must have puzzled even the most die-hard Trump supporters. Vanity Fair? Graydon Carter? Did he mean Grayson? Did I miss some big newsworthy event that Trump is responding to? Wasn’t he supposed to say something about what he was planning on doing with his businesses? (He was!)

Alas. Earlier that week Vanity Fair ripped the Trump Grill in a review, saying among other things it “could be the worst restaurant in America.” It could not go unpunished. But in his tweet, Trump took care to call out Graydon Carter by name. Carter is currently the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, but back in 1988 he ran a satirical publication called Spy Magazine. At Spy, Carter went after Trump relentlessly, coining the phrase “short-fingered vulgarian,” which haunts Trump to this day. Carter got under Trump’s skin so well that over the years Trump would regularly send Carter newspaper and magazine clippings of himself with his hands circled. “Not so short!” he scrawled on the latest, sent a month before he launched his presidential campaign and 27 years after Carter’s joke.

This is what we see in all of Trump’s criticisms. It’s what we see with Katy Tur. With the press pool camera that ironically won’t turn away from Trump. His criticisms aren’t objective and well-supported assessments of the press. No matter the merit, they all boil down to the fact that someone wasn’t fair to him.

If Trump were simply a reality-show celebrity or tabloid billionaire this wouldn’t be a big deal. It’d just be entertaining and a little sad. But now that Trump is a definitive American political figure, his deep and personal petty outrage has coincided with a national narrative.

I do wish Trump supporters would recognize this. When Trump attacks the press, he isn’t complaining about disservices done to America or the people. Read more closely: It’s all about him. If we can’t see see that or be honest with ourselves about it, we’re in trouble. We means you, too.

You’re overreacting, snowflake

No, I don’t believe Donald Trump wants to create an autocracy or establish martial law or install himself as dictator. But we might see something along those lines develop as a consequence of what Trump does want: Trump wants, more than anything, to be universally loved. And when you give a man like that the power of the American Presidency, things can get tricky.

Trump has had to keep a working relationship with the media out of necessity, to get the attention and promotion he needed. But now that he’s president, the press doesn’t serve his needs anymore. In ten days (!!!) Donald J. Trump will be able to say anything he wants from a bully pulpit backed by the billion-dollar communications apparatus of the U.S. government. Who needs the media when you can talk straight to people?

Does this mean more rallies? Indeed. At one of Trump’s “victory rallies” in states that he won—this one in Alabama—he said that even though the campaign is over, the rallies would continue: “They’re saying, ‘As president, he shouldn’t be doing rallies.’ But I think we should, right? We’ve done everything else the opposite. This is the way you get an honest word out.”

We have to understand that these rallies aren’t FDR’s fireside chats or the national radio and TV addresses that all presidents give regularly. There is a crucial difference here: Those addresses didn’t have a live audience, let alone a stadium full of screaming people. This is pure propaganda: The message Trump wants to deliver at these rallies isn’t what he’s saying, it’s about what he’s saying. He’s an icon, and it doesn’t matter what he says—in this moment it’s the truth.

No more fake news about Russia influencing the U.S. elections coming from the election-rigging, communist U.S. press. No more gotcha questions at press conferences (for instance, during Trump’s last presser—July 27—he asked Russia to help him take down his political opponent). No annoying liberal fact-checkers or interviewers to hold you to a topic when you want to move on to another one.

Trump must feel great. He no longer has to rely on the media to create his image: Now he can create a media in his image. Bring on Bannon, bring on Ailes. Tweet at random about global geopolitics or petty personal grievances. No more interviews. No more pressers. Hold victory rallies in states I won. Withhold press access and make them beg for every scrap at dinner party photo-ops like the bitches those very photos will show them to be. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to get an honest word out.

What’s the big deal? It’s not like anyone’s getting hurt

Journalists are worried, and in my opinion rightly so. First, there are the professional concerns. Will the press be able to operate freely? On the campaign trail Trump threatened repeatedly to “open up” national libel laws “so when [journalists] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” (We?!)

Trump threatened the failing New York Times directly: “If I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re gonna have such problems.” And indeed, this fall, when the New York Slimes published women’s accounts of Trump sexually assaulting them, he threatened to sue them for libel. Then when NYT reporter Megan Twohey interviewed Trump by phone about that story, he shouted at her and called her “a disgusting human being.” The Times responded to Trump’s libel threat with a scathing letter from its chief lawyer explaining to Trump what “libel” really means and daring him to file the suit. It never happened.

And it likely won’t. Trump can’t do much about libel law—it’s a state thing. And if he wants to change the definition of libel he’d either have to get the Supreme Court to throw out a precedent (New York Times v. Sullivan) or pass an amendment to the Constitution. Neither of those things are likely.

But the truly worrisome thing is that Trump will just go hard in the opposite direction.

Every politician wants to control the message, but Trump and his advisers want to go beyond that—they want to be able to say whatever they want whenever they want without the media mucking it all up. Tweet n rally is one way to put it. Another is that Trump is subverting the First Amendment: If the press is allowed to say anything, how can we believe anything they say?

This is my biggest fear for 2017. The Trump administration will try to create a new media sphere in his image and split the nation’s media population in two. He didn’t start that fire, but it’s been burning for so long that I don’t think it would take much to finish the job. The press, then might collapse on itself. Political conversation will become incoherent and eventually impossible.

Sure, truth has always been relative. Lies, however, have not. Debating the truth of a statement is one thing, and it’s healthy. Reporters often get things wrong. But that isn’t fake news—that isn’t lying. Lying implies intent. Trump’s camera trick, for instance, is a lie. When we start to cite poor reporting or honest mistakes or incomplete reporting of a developing story as reasons to be skeptical not of the reporting itself—which is healthy—but of the intentions of the people doing the reporting, we’re in a lot of trouble. If we cynically peddle and buy lies as “competing truths” simply because oh hell I guess anything is possible (such as the 400-pound guy in New Jersey hacking Podesta from his bed), that will be so deeply corrosive to our culture that I’m not sure the damage could be repaired in my lifetime. I’m not sure we’re aware yet of just how bad that will be.

But what are you so worried about, snowflakes? Death tweets? Well, there’s Katy Tur… And there’s Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski getting arrested and charged with battery when at a Trump rally he grabbed the arm of Michelle Fields (a Breitbart reporter—the charges were dropped). And there’s the fact the press has been infamously harassed at rallies. And the Committee to Protect Journalists said Trump poses “an unprecedented threat to the rights of journalists,” has “insulted and vilified the press” and “refused to condemn attacks on journalists by his supporters.” And Megyn Kelly was repeatedly stalked at home.

But Katy Tur, acknowledging the fact that most threats are empty, said, “It only takes one person to take it one step further, and that is what is scary.”

Democracy depends on a free press to check power. But how free would a journalist feel to write something unpopular but true after being publicly ridiculed, intimidated, and censured by the President of the United States? And then threats pour in from people who have no idea who you are—they only know that you said something Trump didn’t approve of. KILL EM ALL.

The point isn’t how likely it was someone was actually going to kill Katy Tur. The point is her life was threatened because in the course of doing her job she said something Donald Trump didn’t like. Who would want that job?

It’s not unusual for politicians, and Republicans in particular, to blast the media for being biased to the left. In 2008 Sarah Palin took the phrase “lamestream media” mainstream. But a reporter needing Secret Service protection? Maimstream media doesn’t sound quite as cute.

“I hate some of these people, but I would never kill them,” Trump said at a rally a few weeks after he first called Katy Tur to the world’s attention. “I would never kill them. But I do hate them.”