AP Photo Fourth Estate Unsolicited Advice for the White House Press Corps Seven rules for covering Trump.

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

Reporters stare dumbfounded—like beasts of prey—at anything new that comes across their horizon. Friend? Enemy? Rival? Anomaly? Ordinary? Donald Trump, the likes of which few reporters outside of the New York journalistic nexus had ever studied, bewildered the campaign press corps. His defiance of the standard rules governing candidate coverage allowed him to plow through the acres of critical pieces and come out the other end intact.

Friend? Enemy? Rival? Anomaly? Ordinary? Trump emits all five scents simultaneously, fouling the air with a disorienting gas during the first two-and-a-half weeks of his administration. That disorientation won't last forever because nothing does. The press corps eventually will regain its capabilities by calibrating and adapting their techniques. After chatting about this topic with all who would listen, I’ve assembled a bundle of unsolicited advice that might help.


1. Frame Trump News With a Triangle and Protractor

My friend Alex Howard, the deputy director of the Sunlight Foundation, says he goes through this thought process every day in Trump’s Washington: Can what just seems to have happened be confirmed? Is it unprecedented? Is the recent act of governance normal by the usual standards? Is what just happened a threat to transparency?

Trump’s loose mouth and cheeky tweets have eroded our sense of surprise, as have the quotations from chief strategist Stephen “Keep Its Mouth Shut and Listen” Bannon, press secretary Sean Spicer, and other Trumpies. Journalists, instructed from birth to strive for accuracy, would be wise to imbue their reporting with an extra dose of rigor because journalistic mistakes—like a Time reporter’s botched pool report on the allegedly moved MLK bust and the misreported Washington Post column about Trump’s immigration order—will be turned on them like heavy guns. Reporters need to gather information as carefully as they ever have, double-dotting i’s and double-crossing t’s as if there will be no chance for do-overs. Because there likely won’t be.

As Trump sails presidential power into new seas, reporters need to report those coordinates faithfully and let readers know. Every chief executive explores new and expanded powers, so in this sense, Trump isn’t anything new. But where he flexes his power, a chronicle of that expansion will prove valuable. When Trump moves the normality needle, chronicle that, too, and wherever he seeks to blind the public from his exercise of power, well, there’s a Page One story there, too. “There’s now a much higher premium on being measured and right, as opposed to being first, especially on Twitter,” Howard says.

Also, threaten your editors with death if they oversell your reports with sensational headlines.

2. Be Like Deb

Media scourge Michael Wolff took a beating from some in the press corps for explicitly stating that journalists need to be “stenographers” in their Trump reporting. It pains me more than walking on a spirally fractured femur to endorse Wolff’s thought, but he’s right. Never has what the president and his aides say been more important to transcribe and scrutinize than with Trump and his circle. Looking back, members of this administration have been transparent about where they intend to take the country, which means we’d be fools to think that their next paragraph won’t provide clues to where they intend to go next.

Journalist Sopan Deb earned a status upgrade from CBS News to a new job at The New York Times by serving as unofficial stenographer to Trump during the campaign. “[I]t was Deb’s Twitter feed, a rolling resource for Trump interview transcripts and fact-checks of the candidate’s claims, that distinguished the journalist,” wrote The Huffington Post's Michael Calderone in November. As a Times memo announcing Deb’s hiring put it, the transcriptions “put Trump’s language in context so even the candidate couldn’t quibble.” Stenography is hardly sufficient for covering the Trump crew, but it has never been more necessary. So, Ladies and Gentlemen of the press: Bone up on your shorthand! News outlets: Maintain Trump quotation databases like this one and this one dedicated to his tweets!

3. Ask Un-evadable Questions

Almost every official slips and slides in the face of direct questions. Trump treats many questions like a freeway entrance—a chance to pedal the metal and race off in a pre-determined direction. One technique to keep him from escaping accountability would be to ask questions that can’t easily give him a launching point for a digression. If, say, he’s issued new executive orders, a good question would be, “Mr. President, you signed two new executive orders this week. What do they say? What do they mean?” If he can’t explain what his own orders—which carry the force of law—mean, that’s news. If he can, his interpretations will likely be news.

This isn’t gotcha journalism. If Trump is changing the law on the fly, it’s his obligation to know what the new order means and to explain it to citizens. He’s an elected figure who must explain and justify his orders and actions, not a dictator. We’re his boss.

Trump has a habit of saying, “I never said that” when confronted with his past and even recent statements. Politico has noted this, as has The Washington Post, as has the Intercept, this Esquire supercut, and scads of other outlets. A president can’t express both A and Not A at the same time. Only a dictator has that right. If you’re going to ask Trump a question about a contradiction, make sure to have the original citation and language handy to set him straight.

4. Watch the TV He Watches

We know that Trump routinely tweets what he sees on TV. Because he’s not much a reader of books, briefing reports, or even cereal boxes, cable news programs escort his thinking and decision-making. The ad buyers are onto this. News broke over the weekend that the programs that Trump watches—Morning Joe, The O’Reilly Factor, and other Fox News Channel shows have raised their advertising rates. Reporters should be on to it, too. As should his staff! The Wall Street Journal recently reported, “During the transition, Mr. Trump’s team, flummoxed by how he came up with certain ideas, would search for clues by checking his call sheets to see whom he was consulting.” Reporters need not scour cable for clues every time he tweets. Indeed, I argued earlier that we shouldn’t react to every bit of bilge he types out. But just as Obama’s reading list was relevant to his presidency, so, too, is Trump’s video consumption.

5. What’s Happening at the Florida and New York White Houses?

Trump shows no sign of making the White House his preferred crib. As he flies Air Force One up and down the Atlantic seaboard to his hangouts in Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago, those places will become power centers. Who is he talking to in Manhattan and Florida? What is he saying to them? What are they saying to him? Who is influencing him? Real estate sharpies? People he’s made deals with? The same advice applies to reporting Javanka—the brilliant appellation Tim O’Brien bestowed on Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump—who are among the president’s most-trusted advisers. Never give up reporting on Washington, pressies, but recognize that this is a mobile White House.

6. Be a Corps

Reporters are natural competitors, vying against journalists at other news organizations and even their own cubicle-mates for scoops. In conferences, White House news hawks prefer to ask the question they want to ask and not a follow-up to the one before their own. That’s not a good idea in today’s era, because experienced news sources know how to evade questions, dribbling the issue for a minute and then shooting by calling on the next reporter. (See President Barack Obama’s penchant for answering simple questions with essayistic, digressive, time-hogging answers.) If press secretary Spicer or President Trump ducks a question, the first reporter to say, “I’d like to re-ask the last question, which wasn’t completely answered,” and then asks it, will earn a bottle of 20-year-old single malt from me. Done politely, re-asking would force the official sources to either answer or admit that no answer for the question will be given.

7. Don’t Declare War

President Trump declared war on the news media in the opening days of his presidency, calling journalists “the most dishonest human beings on Earth” and accusing them of “sowing division” and “deliberately false reporting.” His press secretary has endorsed that enmity. He’s even gone so far as to second Bannon and call “a big portion” of the media “the opposition party.” (Hmmm, might he be ordering opposition research on us?) But just because he’s at war with us doesn’t mean we need to wage war against him in any way but the most metaphoric sense. (A journalist’s hottest hostilities should always be directed at his editor.) Anger occludes rational and strategic thinking and gives the advantage to the self-disciplined. Let all the president’s men burn red with fury while we stay cool like Eskimo Pies in our insulated wrappers.

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Previously in these pages, I proposed new rules for covering Trump. Recommend single malts via email to [email protected]. My email alert is an AA dropout. My Twitter feed considers itself a higher power. My RSS feed subsists on rotgut.