AP Images Fourth Estate Trump Hates the Press? Take a Number.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Baby Donald’s gallivanting press conference left the normally erudite Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd so bent that he posted his shockingly ahistorical sentiments to Twitter Thursday. “This not a laughing matter. I’m sorry, delegitimizing the press is un-American,” he wrote, eyebrows furrowed, I suspect. Later, he returned to Twitter to type, “Press bashing may feel good to folks but when it’s done by people in power, it’s corrosive. Take off your partisan hats for a second.”

So, untrue, Chuck! There is no more consistent political tradition in America than presidents delegitimizing the press. In 1798, against the background of a possible war, President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts to criminalize his critics’ speech, notably that of newspaper and pamphlet proprietors who opposed him. President Thomas Jefferson, whose love-hate relationship with the press must have stressed his analyst, wrote in 1807, “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” President Ulysses S. Grant had the press in mind when he concluded his second inaugural address this way: “Throughout the war, and from my candidacy for my present office in 1868 to the close of the last presidential campaign, I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history.”


President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who carried on a longitudinal war with Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. McCormick, once admonished a reporter by giving him a dunce hat and instructing him to sit in the corner. At the close of a 1942 press conference, FDR handed a Nazi Iron Cross to a reporter and asked him to award it to a New York Daily News columnist who was in attendance and whose work he disliked. President Richard M. Nixon fashioned Vice President Spiro Agnew into his weapon against the press, dispatching him to assail the instant analyses the East-Coast-centric television monopolies directed against Nixon’s speeches.

No White House has ever loved the press corps, and its current resident isn’t about to change that. Agnew could have filled an issue of the Columbia Journalism Review with his denunciations, judging from the work of scholar Norman P. Lewis. The press was publicizing protesters, who were really “tragic segments of our community that need therapy, not publicity.” It is “a sad comment that the headlines are won by those who attack our nation,” he said. Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block was a “master of sick invective,” Agnew averred, and “the liberal Eastern press” was “the organ grinders of the old elite.” He envied Mississippi Republicans because, he said, they resided “outside the first strike capability of the Washington Post and the New York Times.”

At his Thursday presser, the president professed with a devilish smile, “I love this. I’m having a good time doing it.” Agnew, likewise, gloried in the combat, relishing “the rough and tumble of public debate.” His fulminations connected with listeners—just as Trump’s do—because, as David Halberstam wrote, they articulated the “long-harbored middle-American grievances against the press and those people back East.” People who have never seen a copy of the Post or the Times have always been able to regale anybody who will listen with a detailed list of crimes those newspapers have allegedly committed against humanity. It has been the genius of modern Republicans to fuse the press with the Democratic Party, maintaining that one assists the other the way your left leg abets your right in propelling you down the sidewalk.

Journalists, most of whom do tilt blue if they have any politics, rarely offer an effective response to this charge that they’re in the tank for the Democrats. No bibliography documenting their critical work on Democratic candidates, policies or administrations will ever placate the accusers, perhaps because it’s not so much content analysis that drives the you’re-in-the-tank critique but social analysis. Depending on where your education ended or your address in the socio-economic pyramid or the state of your ego, the elite press typified by such outlets as the Post, the Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, NPR and even Politico, can sound superior and off-putting. Republicans like Agnew and Trump believe in the permanent campaign, and every campaign needs an opposition to pillory. Trump knows that modern Democrats, a whipped and whining minority in both chambers, make a target scarcely big enough to hit. But the press—the noisy, insulting, probing, relentless press—is nothing but bull’s eyes for the politician who wishes to open fire.

We journalists make a good target, but politicians don’t understand that we all wear Ghost Shirts that protect us from the sharpest jabs. Good reporters know how to take a punch, how to recover from the humiliations handed out by politicians and pick themselves back up and return to their digging. Tell a reporter, “Shame on you,” and see what happens—even if he should be ashamed of himself, he’ll merely blush and restart the interview. We’re shameless that way, like door-to-door salesmen, inured to insults and only encouraged by a door slammed in the face.

What Trump has yet to realize is that while short-term gains can be reaped from attacking the press—see the Agnew example—in the long run yelling at the press only focuses the public’s attention on the very reporting the yeller wants erased. It also invigorates reporters, and makes them feel important. No matter how grievous the sins of the press may be—and as a press critic, let me tell you, they are grievous—a president can’t forever blame everything on “dishonest reporters,” the “mess” the previous president left behind or the dug-in elites. Reckonings tend to take a while to form, as Nixon and Agnew learned. Trump’s will come.

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Here’s media scholar Michael Socolow on how Agnew’s speech led to a softening of the news. Slam a door in my face with an email to [email protected]. My email alerts stand accused of being “liberal,” even though my Twitter feed can tell you I’ve never voted for one—and my RSS feed would kill me if I did.