Will the press play ball?
Trumpflation is coming. Better buy your knee pads before Donald Trump’s tariffs kick in after Jan. 20. He’ll expect us all to kowtow, dontcha know.
Greg Sargent’s Daily Blast features Margaret Sullivan, former public editor for The New York Times, regarding Trump’s recent demand that the paper apologize for unspecified bad coverage. “He actually thinks [the Times] should grovel and show submission to him now that he won,” says Sargent. Bad coverage being any story that doesn’t fluff his stuff:
Sargent: I want to read a key part of Trump’s rant about the times. He said, I don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in The New York Times for years, and yet I won in record fashion, the most consequential presidential election in decades. Where is the apology? Now, it wasn’t in record fashion, but either way, Margaret, this neatly captures how Trump understands the media. He actually thinks it should grovel and show submission to him now that he won. I don’t think he accepts on the most basic level that the press’s role is to challenge power. At least he doesn’t accept it when he’s in power. What do you think we can take from that?
Sullivan: In some ways, it’s nothing new. He’s always been very manipulative about the press and he does not understand that the press is there to help citizens hold him accountable. This never entered his mind, or if it has, he’s quickly dismissed it. But yes, he does seem to think that because he won the election and again, of course it has to be put in these superlative and false terms, that therefore, the Times should apologize to him for anything that isn’t what he terms “a good story.” And a good story, of course, is a story that flatters him and makes him look great. We know and your sophisticated listenership here knows that that is not what The New York Times should be doing in any way. He has this thing about, I have a huge mandate here, and everybody needs to get in line and bow. That is worrisome for sure.
What Trump could do to punish journalists is to use the Espionage Act to throw journalists in jail for publishing leaked classified information. He could look to make an example of someone to put the fear of the Orange God into reporters. Sullivan cites the Morning Joe hosts traveling to Mar-a-Lago to make nice with Trump as an example of preemptive submission.
This is what we have to watch for in the Trump 2.0 era as the press tries to cover it:
Sullivan: There’s a strong sense that we don’t want to alienate this huge number of 75 million people in the country who voted for him because we want a big tent. We want all the customers and all the readers and everybody we can get. And we don’t want those people to be alienated by us. That’s the push and pull. And I don’t know how it’s going to play out. The Times made a very strong endorsement of Kamala Harris to their credit. At the same time, some of the coverage of Trump has been very white glove careful. So I guess we’ll see.
I guess we’ll see, indeed.