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Since the nation’s founding, the nationwide press has performed a significant position within the system of checks and balances that undergirds American democracy. John F. Kennedy famously extolled the significance of journalism as a corrective to dangerous policymaking after he approved the disastrous CIA mission to invade Cuba in 1961. “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake,” Kennedy later advised New York Times managing editor Turner Catledge.
Then got here the Donald Trump period.
Call it Trump’s legislation of political antigravity. In his second time period, unfavorable information reviews are motivating Trump to double down moderately than reasonable. This dynamic had its most outstanding show but when Trump hosted El Salvador’s strongman president, Nayib Bukele, within the Oval Office on Monday. For weeks the media has reported on the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the administration admitted to having mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center. The Supreme Court dominated final week that the administration wanted to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Trump, with Bukele at his facet, mocked a CNN reporter who requested if he was planning to adjust to that order. Microphones later captured Trump telling Bukele he wanted to construct 5 extra prisons in order that El Salvador might lock up American residents convicted of violent crimes.
Trump appears to be utilizing Abrego Garcia’s case to ship a much bigger message: The mainstream media won’t ever affect what he does. (Whether the courts can compel him is one other, even perhaps darker query.) Or moderately: The depth of reporting on Trump’s breaking of a rule or norm dictates his intuition to proceed doing so. This technique is a part of the MAGA motion’s authoritarian challenge to delegitimize the media—a truth these in its sway aren’t notably shy about.
“No one cares what The New York Times says. Or any of you guys. None of this bullshit and none of the lies are going to make a difference,” a outstanding Republican near the White House advised me.
One of the principal objectives of Trump’s second time period is to right what the president views because the errors of his first. Trump has reportedly advised those who one in every of his first-term regrets was forcing his first nationwide safety adviser, Michael Flynn, to resign after it was revealed that Flynn had lied about conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. This might assist to clarify why Trump stood by Pete Hegseth, his embattled protection secretary, even after reviews detailed episodes of alleged extreme ingesting and that he had paid a $50,000 settlement to a girl who had accused him of sexual assault. (Hegseth has denied the allegations.)
Trump’s ignore-the-media technique additionally influenced his choice to publicly assist his present nationwide safety adviser, Michael Waltz, after Waltz mistakenly added Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group by which administration officers have been texting about navy strikes in Yemen. Another Republican near the White House advised me Waltz was saved as a result of Trump has a post-Flynn “no-scalps policy,” because the supply described it.
The dynamic has confirmed outstanding for even seasoned presidential reporters.
“This is a president who doesn’t believe in admitting mistakes—period. And that trickles down to the people who work for him,” New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker advised me this week. “So when a news outlet points out something that went wrong or corrects inaccurate statements, the default setting is not to fix the error, as other presidents might do, but to double down. Taking action in response to a news report would be seen as an admission of weakness, and nothing is a bigger cardinal sin in Trump’s mind.”
It quantities to a poisonous cycle of escalation that doesn’t present a lot signal of abating anytime quickly. Authoritarian regimes typically fail as a result of their leaders refuse to course-correct when introduced with exterior info. In an interview greater than a yr after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy lauded the position journalism might play in stopping future crises.
“It is never pleasant to be reading things that are not agreeable news, but I would say that it is an invaluable arm of the presidency, as a check, really, on what is going on in the administration,” he mentioned.