Jones and Sun contend that in many respects, Trump is reminiscent of Richard M. Nixon:

Nixon, like Trump, accused the media of being out to get him and predicted that the press would mischaracterize his public support or the reception he received. He believed the liberal media to be biased against him personally, maintaining that he had “entered the presidency with less support from the major publications and TV networks than any president in history” and that “their whole objective in life is to bring us down.”

Unlike Trump, however, Nixon (like the country’s founders)

routinely reaffirmed to both the press and the public that he conceived of the press as central to democracy. Indeed, in his first speech to the public regarding the Watergate scandal, Nixon acknowledged that “the system that brought the facts to light and that will bring those guilty to justice” was a system that included “a vigorous free press.”

Trump stands out, according to Jones and Sun, in that his administration

has passed a threshold not approached by previous administrations in their tensions with the media. Trump is signaling — through his terminology, through his delegitimizing actions, and through his anticipatory undercutting — that the press is literally the enemy, to be distrusted, ignored, and excluded.

In response to my email, Jones replied that “war has been declared, whether they (the media) like it or not.” She noted that the instincts of the press

motivate it to want to call out the changing norms that it sees around it, and to defend the role of important democratic institutions when they are attacked. But when the press is itself one of those institutions, it finds itself a part of the story in ways that it is unaccustomed to being, and it has to weigh the potential loss of credibility that might come with an aggressive self-defense.

I asked Jonathan Ladd, a professor of public policy and government at Georgetown, what strategies he thought the media should adopt to counter negative portrayals by conservatives.

“The best way for the press to react to Trump’s undemocratic behavior is to continue trying to do their jobs the best they can,” Ladd wrote. “The press is not perfect, but Trump’s bad behavior doesn’t change what they need to do.”

Ladd specifically warned against “reacting to Trump by becoming more crusadingly anti-Trump.”

Trump has successfully “put the mainstream media in a difficult position,” according to Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago:

If the media directly address the accusations of fake news, they ironically run the risk of dignifying the accusations. But if they ignore the accusations, they miss the opportunity to prove their professionalism to those who have grown skeptical.

In the long term, Stone suggested, we could begin to remedy this problem if we improved civic education and encouraged a stronger defense of the media by politicians, especially Republicans — a prospect about which he is not optimistic.

Of the media itself, however, Stone wrote:

I don’t know that there’s really much they can do to defend themselves. Those who trust them will continue to trust them. Those who distrust them are unlikely to be brought around by anything they themselves are likely to say.

Trump’s disdain for the First Amendment is an integral part of a much longer series of developments in which both parties have demonstrated a willingness to defy democratic norms, although the Republican Party has been in the forefront.

In “Asymmetric Constitutional Hardball,” Joseph Fishkin and David E. Pozen, law professors at the University of Texas and Columbia, write:

For a quarter of a century, Republican officials have been more willing than Democratic officials to play constitutional hardball — not only or primarily on judicial nominations but across a range of spheres. Democrats have also availed themselves of hardball throughout this period, but not with the same frequency or intensity.

Fishkin and Pozen cite the work of Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, to define constitutional hardball as “political claims and practices”

that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understandings. Constitutional hardball tactics are viewed by the other side as provocative and unfair because they flout the ‘goes without saying’ assumptions that underpin working systems of constitutional government. Such tactics do not generally flout binding legal norms. But that only heightens the sense of foul play insofar as it insulates acts of hardball from judicial review.

Republicans on the far right, in particular, Fishkin and Pozen write, have been willing to engage in constitutional hardball because they are drawn to “narratives of debasement and restoration,” which suggest

that something has gone fundamentally awry in the republic, on the order of an existential crisis, and that unpatriotic liberals have allowed or caused it to happen.

The severity of the liberal threat, in the eyes of these conservatives, justifies extreme steps to restore what they see as a besieged moral order.

In an email, Fishkin wrote:

As with so many things about President Trump, it strikes me that he didn’t start the fire. He got into office because it was already burning and now he’s pouring on gasoline.

In Fishkin’s view, Trump will do all he can to make the conflict between his party and the press “sharper and more intense, in the same way that he depends on and aims to intensify partisan polarization.”