Hello, and welcome to Who Extorted It Better? Time to meet our contestants! One is an avid user of Twitter, frequent golfer, and the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth: Donald Trump! The other is a major international news organization full of great journalists and run by bean-counting execs who helped put Donald Trump in office: CNN!

Ready? Aaaaaaaannnd extort!

Ooh, strong opening move from the president, hinting that if CNN continued its critical coverage of his administration, well, Trump might have his regulatory agencies withhold approval of a merger between CNN’s parent corporation, Time Warner, and the telecommunications giant AT&T. Plenty of good reason you and I might not want a transnational company to own a massive chunk of the world’s bandwidth as well as a giant news outlet, a legacy movie studio, and DC comics. But as New York magazine pointed out, making that merger incumbent upon showing news favorable to the president? Ooh. Yeah. Points on the board for President Trump.

But coming back with a piledriver of a response, here’s CNN letting someone from corporate, probably a lawyer, insert a line into a story by investigative journalist Andrew Kaczinsky about a gif the president posted on Twitter (this, let me just emphasize, is a thing that happens). The gif itself showed the president in a professional-wrestling context (again, a thing that happens) tackling a person whose face had been replaced with the CNN logo (again, I’m forced to say, a thing that happens). Does that encourage violence against the press? Maybe! Was it meant to be a joke? Probably! Did it come from a racist shitposter who goes by the name HanAssholeSolo? It did!

None of which necessarily makes it OK for CNN to withhold his true identity and then say that “CNN reserves the right to publish his identity should any of that change.” The right wing media and its adherents quickly spun that into “#CNNBlackmail.” As Glenn Greenwald wrote on The Intercept, it reeks of corporate bullying and creepy censorship.

Who! Extorted! It! Better?!

The president has a reality television star’s instinct for narrative arcs, and not the kind that bend toward justice. In that sense, Trump must continually elevate the press that covers him, not only because the structure of his argument requires an enemy—a “heel” to his “face,” in pro-wrestling parlance—but because he needs to frame some element of society as an unregulated check on his presidency. He predicated his presidency on winning; when he loses, it must be because the game is rigged.

It’s tempting to think of this rhetorical deployment as Machiavellian, and I think it is. But not in the sense of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli's 1513 work of political philosophy that embraced scheming, backroom deals, violence, and direct-to-camera asides in a dodgy Southern accent. That book specifically focuses on states with one ruler. To deal with republics, though, Machiavelli wrote another book, Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, which came out in 1531. It’s Discourses—nominally about Rome but really about contemporary Florence and Venice—that says more about how President Trump is dealing with the press.

Machiavelli starts out by setting up three kinds of government and how they all go wrong. Monarchies turn into tyranny, aristocracies become oligarchies, and democracies tend toward anarchy—unless you can triangulate them so they check and balance each other. You get a king, a body of nobles, and a body of commoners—in other words, an executive and a legislative body with an upper and lower house. Smart.

Monarchies turn into tyranny, aristocracies become oligarchies, and democracies tend toward anarchy—unless they check and balance each other.

Because this was the early 1500s, the judicial branch basically serves at the pleasure of both the other two, and the press doesn’t exist yet. This is super-important. The printing press isn’t even a century old when Machiavelli is writing; the first newsletters don’t show up for another two decades, the idea of an independent journalism doesn’t really emerge until the 1600s, and the modern idea of a fair, free, watchdoggy press is a response to the Industrial Revolution. Machiavelli is trying to work out how to govern with no external oversight except a generally unruly populace.