AP Photo Fourth Estate Why Baby Donald’s Media Threats Don’t Scare Me

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Let’s call Donald Trump’s bluff.

For better than two years, he’s mauled reporters at every turn, herding them into pens during campaign stops and heckling them collectively, name-calling them individually (“third-rate reporter”; “dope”; “underachieving”; “dummy”; “no talent”; “wacky”; “dishonest”), and even castigating the profession as an “enemy of the people.”


He’s issued threats, promising to “open up“ libel laws to make it easier to sue news organizations and end White House press briefings. He’s vowed to have NBC’s broadcast licenses revoked. His press secretary has selectively blocked outlets from White House briefings and prevented live broadcasts. His strategist Steve Bannon famously said the media should “keep its mouth shut and listen for a while” and called the press “the opposition party.” Before firing FBI Director James Comey, Trump urged him to jail reporters who published leaks. And like a GIF playing in a loop, Trump has repeatedly derided news that displeased him as “fake.”

But as we approach the first anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, we discover that the president’s gibbering about the alleged menace posed by the press has been followed by no action. He threatened to sue the New York Times in October 2016 over its story about two women who said he touched them inappropriately, but he backed down after the paper told his attorney it welcomed “the opportunity to have a court set him straight.” He’s pressed no member of Congress to “open up” the libel laws (plus, good luck with that—libel law is a state issue, defined by state courts and legislatures). Journalist Timothy O’Brien, whom Trump did sue for libel and lost over his 2005 book TrumpNation, says we needn’t worry about his lawsuits. “He’s a bully who is easily cowed. He’s not particularly bright. And he’s never surrounded himself with top legal advice,” O’Brien tells me.

For somebody who seems to want to declare war on the press, Trump appears to have gone AWOL. In some cases, he appears to have joined with the enemy! For example, he nominated ardent deregulationist Ajit Pai to head the FCC, thereby signaling that he has no genuine intention to police TV news content by pulling broadcast licenses. He did the same with the courts by nominating Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch’s First Amendment jurisprudence stands four-square behind the freedom of the press. If Trump plans a press crackdown, he’s going about it the wrong way.

Journalists who work the White House beat and have felt the brunt of Trump’s insults may not share my sanguine view. He has slighted and inconvenienced reporters by ducking the press pool and barring the U.S. news media—but not the Russian—from covering his meeting with Russian dignitaries. He has mocked reporters and slagged the press as being part of a globalist conspiracy. His press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, berates them daily like schoolchildren as she burns through the minutes like a bored hourly worker.

And yet the White House press briefings continue. Trump has made no move to jail a single reporter or change the First Amendment. Even CNN’s Jim Acosta, Trump’s least favorite reporter, has yet to be banned from the White House, proving the emptiness of the president's intimidations. When it comes to the press, the president is a paper tiger dressed in a cowardly lion’s costume.

If Trump really wanted to wound the press, he could end the briefings, exile reporters from the White House and stop talking to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and other reporters. He would dissolve the White House press pool that follows him around town or to the golf course when he decides to shoot a round. No law requires him to associate with reporters. But he hasn’t done any of these simple things.

He could direct Attorney General Jeff Sessions to prosecute reporters in leak cases. But again, there’s been no action aside from lip music. If Trump were feeling especially lucky, he would order the foot-soldiers of the intelligence community to monitor and surveil the press. But he’s too timid for that. First, it’s not likely that the members of the Deep State would carry out such a potentially illegal order: Washington’s entrenched bureaucracy has its own ideas about the press, and while it might not like reporters, it likes Trump even less and appreciates reporters as a hedge against Trump’s overreaching.

Trump could also enlist the anti-trust machine to punish big media organizations to reduce their power. The government’s current case against AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner sort of looks like retaliation against Time Warner subsidiary CNN, doesn’t it? But stopping the AT&T-Time Warner marriage won’t do much to reduce CNN’s profitability, nor will it block the network’s aggressive reporting on the White House. As anti-press gambits go, it’s toothless—that is, if it’s even his idea.

I won’t pretend that Trump’s taunting of the press is harmless. He compromises the safety of reporters with his affronts, making their work harder to do. The recent bomb he threw at CNN International is especially destructive. Its correspondents report from the fire of the battleground—they don’t need a draft-dodging baby-boomer denigrating their bravery. Some Trump critics add that his trash-talking emboldens despots in the Philippines, Turkey and Russia who are already leading press crackdowns.

But Trump won’t suppress the press because he loves it too much. He loves the give-and-take of the interview, of seeing his face on the cover of magazines (hence his recent tweets showcasing his disappointment over probably not being named Time magazine’s person of the year), of appearing on television and of being the center of attention. If he ever did get angry enough to jail the press corps, he’d have to furlough a few reporters once a week to get his personalized media fix.

Viewed from the vantage point of Trump’s insatiable ego, though, his press attacks are simply his way of handing out assignments on the Trump story. He knows exactly what to say to commence a full fire drill by the press, one that fills the media maw for a couple of days until his ego screams for more.

Will Trump ever crack down on the press in a meaningful way? No. He can’t quit us.

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Send press crackdown ideas to [email protected]. My email alerts urge the return of the Fairness Doctrine. My Twitter feed believes the beginning of the First Amendment should read “Congress shall make yes law. …” My RSS feed subscribes to Christopher Hitchens’ sentiment that “The right of others to free expression is part of my own.”