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It was only a small information merchandise a few seemingly mundane bureaucratic determination. But some White House reporters perceived deeper import in it final week. As CBS News reported, president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming press secretary will begin work with out one of many conventional trappings of the job: the spacious, high-ceilinged workplace within the West Wing situated steps from the Oval Office. The actual property will as a substitute go to a deputy chief of workers, bumping press secretary Karoline Leavitt to extra humble quarters within the upper-press area close by. Reporters had been fast to learn it as an indication: The president’s chief emissary to the information media was being symbolically downgraded earlier than she even formally began.
The response suggests it doesn’t take a lot to set off the individuals who cowl the president. After Trump’s chaotic first time period, and a bruising marketing campaign this previous 12 months by which he declared he was out for “retribution” towards his perceived adversaries, journalists are delicate to even small tremors. On the eve of Trump’s second time period, they’re bracing not only for his traditional rhetorical lashings however for a lot worse.
Will Trump throw disfavored reporters out of the White House briefing room? Suspend every day press briefings? Ditch the presidential press pool, or shut the White House grounds to the information media altogether? Will he proceed to sue information organizations? Will he attempt to “zero out” funding for public broadcasters akin to NPR and PBS, or monkey with business broadcasters’ TV licenses?
None of those are theoretical issues, on condition that Trump has both completed all of this stuff or threatened to do them beforehand. To be certain, Trump’s assaults towards the media have grown extra surly and intimidating since he misplaced energy in 2020. He has sued Washington Post legend Bob Woodward, Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and her employers, The Des Moines Register and Gannett, CNN, and ABC News (profitable a $16 million settlement from the latter in December). Trump demanded CBS give up its broadcasting license as punishment for its enhancing and promotion of a Kamala Harris clip from a 60 Minutes interview. Ditto ABC when its moderators fact-checked him throughout his debate with Harris. (A spokesperson for The Des Moines Register has mentioned the lawsuit is with out advantage, and attorneys for Selzer have launched an announcement asserting that it violates long-standing Constitutional ideas.)
The prospect of a second Trump time period appears particularly alarming to some White House reporters as a result of the phrases are totally different this time round. Trump might be a lame duck from day one, and thus gained’t need to average his worst tendencies to place himself for reelection. “I don’t think he intends to pack reporters off to Guantánamo, but who the hell knows,” a veteran cable information journalist instructed me this week. “My guess is that he’ll be in attack mode from day one. Why would we think otherwise?”
The journalist (who spoke on background as a result of he wasn’t licensed by his employer to talk on the document) famous that Trump has some highly effective new allies in his struggle on the information media. Elon Musk—the world’s richest man and the proprietor of X—routinely unfold pro-Trump misinformation to his 212 million followers throughout the marketing campaign (Musk might be cochair of Trump’s advert hoc budget-cutting fee, the Department of Government Efficiency). A second tech multibillionaire, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, banned Trump from his platforms after the January 6, 2021 assault on the Capitol, however has recently been Trump-friendly too. After assembly with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg introduced final week that Facebook and Instagram would dispense with unbiased fact-checking, opening wider the sluices for Trump’s distortions and outright lies.
A second broadcast journalist, a former White House bureau chief throughout Trump’s first time period, mentioned Trump may do “serious damage” by way of his management of federal companies. Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has proposed banning pharmaceutical advertisements on TV, doubtlessly undermining a serious monetary supporter of community and cable information applications. Meanwhile, a politicized Justice Department may scuttle proposed media mergers, as Trump’s Justice Department tried to do in 2018 when CNN’s mother or father Time Warner sought to merge with AT&T.
Even comparatively obscure companies can get in on this act. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Trump appointee Brendan Carr, “can cause misery” for broadcast firms like Disney and Comcast by holding up license renewals, the second broadcast journalist mentioned. During his first time period, Trump tried to control the work of federally funded Voice of America; his choose of MAGA-friendly conspiracy theorist Kari Lake as VOA director suggests he’ll strive once more.
The most harmful determine of all could also be Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to go the FBI. Patel, a Trump loyalist and holdover from his first administration, instructed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on a podcast in 2023, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” Placing Patel atop the FBI would give him full management of the federal government’s investigative equipment, doubtlessly turning his rhetoric into actuality.
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