On Monday, the White House requested that the country's news networks set aside eight minutes for a primetime speech from Donald Trump, thereby presenting television executives with the age-old question: When an aspiring authoritarian whose repeated attacks on the free press are central components of his strategy for consolidating power suddenly asks for something, do you object in any meaningful way, or just nod and hope that this time, he won't do all the awful things he's done to you over and over and over again?

After pondering the issue for a few hours, every major network decided that, yes, they will carry what is expected to be a series of loud, frothy demands that taxpayers finance the construction of a $5 billion glorified fence along the U.S.-Mexico border. (And, possibly, a threat that he'll declare a national emergency to build the aforementioned glorified fence if Democrats on Capitol Hill do not fulfill his campaign promise for him.) The rationale, as distilled in a text from an unnamed suit to CNN's Brian Stelter, is that they are in a double bind: Trump will either take advantage of their largesse or blast them for their reticence, as the case may be.

Thus, the uneasily-arrived-at decision is to put Trump on the air as he demanded—but hopefully, as Stelter noted, with his face surrounded by robust fact-checking graphics.

It is astonishing that after nearly four years, the media still insists on pretending that Trump is a rational actor who operates in good faith. All this performative "damned if we do, damned if we don't" handwringing actually contains the best answer to the question with which they are wrestling: There is nothing journalists can ever say or do that will make him stop attacking them, and every additional olive branch they extend is more evidence of their own earnest naïveté. When Trump is going to accuse you of dishonesty no matter what, the least you can do is stay faithful to your mission of informing the public, which entails not lending him a free national platform from which to spew his latest bit of xenophobic nonsense.

Discrediting the media is how Trump keeps supporters in his corner despite mountainous evidence of his malevolence and incompetence, and it is never about one particular story or fight. #FakeNews is an ethos, part of systematic effort to eliminate the institution's ability to act as a check on his actions: All those awful and unsettling stories about me? Simple! They're not real. You don't need to listen. Then he laughs, and the crowd chants "CNN SUCKS!" for a few minutes, and then he grins and moves on to Hillary Clinton's emails again. He is not interested in developing any respectful working relationship with journalists; he wants only their unconditional surrender.