On Tuesday morning, the New York Times editorial board condemned the silence of Donald Trump after a gathering of Trump supporters—charming folk who fancy themselves to be the intellectual vanguard of a rebranded white-supremacist movement—showed off their best Nazi salutes during an anti-Semitic stemwinder on Saturday night by their de facto leader, Richard Spencer.

Trump subsequently, abruptly canceled—via Twitter, of course—a scheduled meeting with editors and writers from the Times. He blamed the paper for demanding new ground rules, which its editors denied they had done. Then the president-elect reversed himself and put the meeting back on his schedule.

Once again, whether by design or disorganization, Trump had members of the media sitting on the edge of their seats—arguably the position in which the president-elect best likes to see them. And it’s a good bet that Richard Spencer was following every turn of the day’s mini-drama. The front man of the “alt-right,” the hipsterish brand name adopted by Spencer for his basket of deplorables, has shown himself to be a remarkably adept student of Trump’s media manipulations.

In its editorial, the Times’s collective voice asked a valid question: Why would the next president take to his keyboard to condemn the cast members of the Broadway show Hamilton for imploring Vice President-elect Mike Pence, during the recent performance he attended, to protect the rights of all Americans and celebrate the country’s diversity—but fail to condemn the hatred spewed by his own alt-right followers at a conference sponsored by Spencer’s National Policy Institute?

For Spencer, the whole episode had to be sweet. If The New York Times and the president-elect were sparring over an NPI event, then his rag-tag movement of 200 politely dressed bigots had clearly made it into big-league media. And they’d done it by following the formula Donald Trump demonstrated during his presidential campaign: not simply by being outrageous, but by being strategic about it—meting out outrageous acts over a 12-hour period, for instance, ensuring an extra day of media attention for one little conference. (Meanwhile, some 3,000 progressives had gathered for a convention that received comparatively little coverage.)