Every administration feuds with the press, sometimes with good reason. With the unenviable task of writing about meetings they cannot attend, Washington reporters can be too easily seduced by leaks that may only provide a portion of the story.



Nor is it unusual for the objective truth of news events to be contested. When I covered the Iraq War for The Washington Post, my colleagues and I often found ourselves competing with an army of government spokespeople over whose account of the conflict was correct. The stakes of such disputes are high: public perceptions of the war helped determine how much latitude the Bush administration had to continue waging it.



What is different about the Trump administration's approach to the press is that it has not just advanced an alternate version of important events, but rather it appears to be signaling an assault on the very legitimacy of the press as an independent actor in American public life.



The result has been unusual statements by administration officials about what is or is not the press's job, ominous warnings about holding reporters "accountable" or ensuring they “suffer the consequences,” misapplying the term “fake news” to legitimate organizations, and repeated statements by the president himself that the press are "the most dishonest human beings," a sentiment he echoed to chilling applause at the CIA.

At least part what explains this onslaught is that the press has been the first line of defense against a steady stream of contestable, or outright false, "facts" put forth by Trump since the dawn of his campaign, including about a deluge of rapists and murderers among Mexican immigrants, a surge of violent crime across urban America, or millions of fraudulent voters in the 2016 election.

Now that candidate Trump has become President Trump, such "facts" are no longer just about winning votes. In government, they become the basis on which policies are sold to the public. For example, different decisions would surely flow from the myth advanced by Trump that the refugee population could be replete with terrorists, than from the reality that an infinitesimal few have been implicated in any crimes at all; or from his frequent claim that Iran received $150 billion in the nuclear deal it made with the international community, rather than the reality that it received a small fraction of that amount.

But Trump has not been content to merely distort the public debate over his policy proposals, an approach that may differ in degree, but not in kind, from that of his predecessors. Rather, and without recent precedent, he is also laying the groundwork to influence highly sensitive policy discussions by taking on the intelligence community, whose job is to frame those debates for national security decision-makers.

At the beginning of virtually every interagency meeting chaired by the president's National Security Council, representatives of the Central Intelligence Agency or the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are traditionally asked to brief on the current state of play for the issue at hand. For example, a meeting about the conflict in Iraq and Syria will often begin with an assessment of the current strength and disposition of Syrian regime and opposition forces, as well as the campaign against the Islamic State.