Every president wants favorable press coverage. Most feel a surprising level of grievance when they don’t get it. Donald Trump is singular in using the powers of his office to force news organizations to bend to his will. But when is it beyond friendly or fawning coverage, or always giving the president the benefit of the doubt? At the gym a couple days ago I watched the soon-to-be-gobbled-up CNN doing a news segment on gas prices with an energy industry analyst. They’re not the only ones talking about gas prices. But the tone of the segment seemed out of sync with a lot of other press coverage. It occurred to me that what Trump wants, distinctly if not uniquely, is a kind of spell preservation as much as good coverage or fawning per se. He governs the country by a kind of manic coaxing which is at war with short-term memory and thrives on the ability to keep as many people fixated on the super dramatic crisis of the moment without remembering that it was preceded by an endless litany of other crises with similar branding.
In yesterday’s post, I noted a TPM reader asked whether she was missing something in thinking that Iran didn’t seem to be presenting any particular threat at all when we attacked the country two weeks ago. It is demonstrably the case that the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran now because it’s weak rather than strong, stumbling and punch drunk rather than about to go on the attack. And yet most commentators, and not just the Trumpy ones, are examining the question through the prism of just how much of a threat Iran posed and whether now was the right time to confront it. Looking at gas prices, the part of the equation that voters feel first and most closely, is another example. These questions take us out of what we might call the war and crisis posture to questions that are more like, Why are we doing this? Did we need to get into this situation?
These kinds of off-message discussions can break the spell.
Here’s what I mean by “the spell’.” Before it was Trump’s Iran war, it was the Epstein files. And before Epstein it was the ICE wilding sprees in Chicago and Minneapolis. Before that it was tariffs. And Epstein came in a few other times during intermissions. This isn’t just a lot of news with one big story succeeding the one before that. Each one is really a crisis of the president’s own making, and one that the president and his aides lean into as a crisis. So ICE was fighting a civilizational battle against criminal non-white hordes and their woke antifa domestic terrorist allies. Sure, you think it looks bad when government agents unload their weapons into non-threatening civilians. But that’s only because you don’t understand the true stakes, how late in the day it is to save America, let alone to make it great again. You’re asking WTF? is really just a measure of your naivete. Trump attacked Iran not because he was bored and feeling emasculated but because no president had the guts to do so in 50 years, or according to several Republican congressmen, since 1947, to do what Trump did. If you’re even asking you don’t understand the threat. In each of these cases, we have the very Trumpian climate of drama and crisis.
It’s all a bit like a friend with borderline personality disorder. The first time it’s a crisis and you want to help or get out of the way. The second time you wonder why your friend is having such a rough run of luck. The fifth time you get the bigger picture: your friend is pure drama. It’s them. They’re the source of the drama. Living in a climate of crisis helps them self regulate. Trump is like your friend or relative who’s borderline. You need compliant news organizations (though they don’t all have to be fawning) who will keep their coverage within the drama and not stepping back from the crisis du jour to look at this bigger context, which is that Trump is crisis after crisis, that these situations are almost always of Trump’s own making, and consistently inflamed by his administration’s incompetence. That last point is key. The coverage doesn’t necessarily have to be positive, or not consistently so. It just needs to be speaking within the crisis and treating it as somehow new and out of the blue and not like anything that was going on before, despite the fact that the before was a succession of similar high-drama crises before it.