The White House is preparing for war. Despite a decisive electoral victory and with majorities in both chambers of Congress, the president is encountering unforeseen obstacles in the effort to enact his agenda. The president’s critics in the press are growing more brazen and, thus, irritating. Media is a soft target—far softer than Congress—so that’s where Donald Trump’s energy has to go if only to keep the faith of the true believers. We’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends.

Trump and his White House are devoting an inordinate amount of attention to CNN. The network gave the president an opportunity to make a valuable political point this week when it published an erroneous story alleging that a Trump campaign official had ties to a Russian state-run investment firm. The story was retracted entirely, and the editors and reporters responsible for it resigned. Any savvy political operation would not pass up the chance to use the affair not only to discredit an institution they regard as hostile but to cast doubt the other allegations involving the Trump campaign team and Russia.

The zeal with which the White House’s political allies threw themselves into this effort on the president’s behalf was, however, remarkable. The White House communications shop advised the public to seek out a James O’Keefe sting video featuring a CNN producer and a contributor appearing to question the network’s integrity. The president personally disseminated that video on his social-media accounts while hammering away at the network’s credibility.

Trump’s allies in media have followed his lead. Some have asked earnest questions about the ethics of CNN’s editorial decisions. Others have questioned the network’s viability in the current political environment. Still others simply reveled in the adversity with which this institution is contending.

“Could Donald Trump be the end of CNN?” asked radio host Rush Limbaugh. “CNN being treated this way is exactly what Trump voters supported and are applauding.” According to a source who attended a closed-door fundraiser on Wednesday night, the president allegedly basked in the beating this cable news network was taking—and all to the “wild” celebrations of the Republican donors in attendance.

The enthusiasm with which the Trump fan base has taken to the smoking out of wreckers and saboteurs at a cable news network seems directly proportional to the trouble in which Donald Trump’s legislative agenda finds itself. The effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act is stalled. The legislative product that has emerged in the Senate is deeply unpopular, as is Trump’s plan for a “wall” along the border with Mexico. Meanwhile, support for free trade is on the rise. That which the president can do with a pen stroke (and over the objections of the courts) has been done. Save for appointment power to the judiciary, those accomplishments are ephemeral. His successor can undo them. Trump needs an uncooperative Congress to secure lasting achievements.

So what is a political operation to do? To allow the troops to dwell on these unmet promises would be dispiriting. The president certainly can’t allow his allies to go too hard after the GOP in Congress. That’s counterproductive. The Democrats are a spent force unworthy of the energies Trump supporters would expend in attacking their credibility. Who else is left but “media” and, specifically, one particularly vexing network?

This is precisely the trajectory the early Obama administration followed when facing similar circumstances. At the beginning of 2009, Barack Obama was struggling with the unanticipated negative consequences of large congressional majorities: ideological heterogeneity. Emergency measures to stanch the bleeding resulting from the financial crisis were easily passed, but sweeping financial regulatory reform was stalled. By June of Obama’s first year in office, Democrats in the Senate were missing their own deadlines on health-care reform. The House wouldn’t produce its first draft bill for another month. When they did, it would be to the consternation of fiscally and socially conservative Democrats who would ensure it was broadly amended. For Democrats who anticipated a glorious new progressive age, the early months of the Obama administration were an ice water bath.

It’s not coincidental that during this period the Obama White House also went to war with a media outlet: the Fox News Channel. By the autumn of 2009, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was attacking Fox as “not a news organization.” Anita Dunn, then White House communications director, defended the attacks on the network by claiming it was functionally an “arm of the Republican Party.” In early 2010, even the president himself joined the chorus. He told Rolling Stone that Fox represented a return to the era of yellow journalism and represented a “destructive” point of view. This discrediting effort crossed a line when the White House tried to withhold access to a White House advisor from Fox and only Fox. The news-media industry rallied to the network’s defense. The administration backed down. Eventually, the warring parties declared a truce.

Does the White House retreat to attacks on media in the face of political diversity as a conscious distraction? That’s surely part of the calculation. For average voters—both progressive Democrats in 2009 and populist Republicans in 2017—that strategy is unrealistically Machiavellian. More likely, they believed that their political opposition would accept electoral defeat as they had accepted victory. The fact that their adversaries didn’t dry up and blow away with the winds of change is aggravating. That condition is made more bothersome by the fact that, for politically oriented radio and television networks, catering to a sitting president’s opposition is a far more rewarding business model.

Far from celebrating the Trump administration’s war on CNN, the president’s sincerest supporters should consider it a warning sign. When the Trump administration is gone, media will still be here. If the Trump era is remembered for anything, it won’t be how many of the president’s fans yelled at the television.