If nothing else, Trump has the bully’s cunning to pick on a target more unpopular than he is. And like a bully, he knows that his mark suffers the additional weakness of being susceptible to moral reproach. Institutions with a conscience have a tendency to be weak. They set standards to which they are bound to fall short, and publicly hold themselves to account.

Preserving — even cultivating — a capacity for shame, they are easily shamed. The shameless, having none, are only too glad to participate in the shaming.

That’s why it was a mistake of CNN to let the three journalists — veteran reporter Thomas Frank and editors Lex Haris and Eric Lichtblau — responsible for the Scaramucci story go. The political success of Trump’s assault on the press depends on his conflation of mistakes with dishonesty, of fallibility with fakery.

Assuming no dishonesties were involved in CNN’s actions, cashiering the journalists does less to uphold the network’s reputation for probity than it does to advance Trump’s work. No news organization is going to pass an infallibility test, and advancing a perception that we should pass such a test merely sets us up for diminishing public regard. Journalistic honesty is better measured through corrections than dismissals.

That’s a lesson that bears repeating now, as the White House’s media vilification strategy comes to resemble a war on truth itself. I’ve noted elsewhere that Trump’s notion of truth is whatever he can get away with, at any given moment, for any given purpose.

No serious news organization can stand for it, which is why this president and the press would be destined for an adversarial relationship even if their ideological leanings were more in sync. Call it the clash of epistemologies — truth as a construct of facts versus truth as a collection of wants and wishes. And never the twain shall meet.