On one level, Trump and some of his advisers blatantly antagonize the press, more so than any administration since Nixon or earlier. He has called the media “FAKE NEWS” and “the enemy,” while Steve Bannon, his chief strategist, called the press “the opposition party,” language that is unprecedented from a modern administration. But on another level, Trump is great business for the news organizations he attacks, and his “war” against critical news outlets often reveals itself to be something more like a solicitation of approval.

Indeed, Trump is as critical of large media organizations as he is dependent on them. He calls the Times and the Post fake news, but when his health-care bill failed last month, two of his first calls went to Maggie Haberman and Robert Costa—correspondents for the the Times and Post, respectively. His administration initially seemed intent on denying access to traditional news outlets, as when Press Secretary Sean Spicer initially ignored front-row reporters to elevate fringe networks and sites that were more favorable to the president’s message. But journalists have had wide access to Trump’s White House, thanks to a steady flow of leaks to major news organizations. Nothing summed up this surreality quiet so aptly as when the White House gathered Trump staffers to renovate the pro-Trump messaging strategy and six of them immediately leaked the subject of the meeting and the game plan to Politico. On television, the White House is at war with reporters. But off television, those same reporters essentially serve as a 24-hour anxiety-treatment hotline for a beleaguered White House staff.

The financial success of the country’s largest news organizations is, by and large, a good thing. Failing national newspapers and shrinking reporting staffs at news networks weaken coverage and diminish public accountability. Indeed, Donald Trump’s war on the media has not been similarly profitable for the many regional papers that were gutted in the last decade with the demise of classifieds and other advertising. But even the Trump stimulus in national news is a tenuous, and even troubling, trend for several reasons.

First, the press has figured out how to profit from Trump’s presidency faster than it’s learned how to properly cover it. As the journalism professor and media analyst Jay Rosen has written, the normal descriptors of presidential politics fail to do justice to a leader who is fundamentally abnormal—he is a fount of public falsehoods and his ideology is not a fixed vision but rather a kaleidoscope of self-scrambling particles. The debates within the Wall Street Journal and other news outlets over using the word “lie”—a word that implies an intent to deceive rather than mere ignorance—highlight the fact that many editors and reporters are uncomfortable using explicit language to describe a president whose relationship with the truth is, at best, estranged.