In the year since we published our last Media Issue, the struggle between the Trump administration and the mainstream press has shifted from a hot war to a kind of glum trench battle. A White House press corps reports for duty to be served up answers they don’t trust; the president slams journalists as liars on Twitter, while his staff leaks incessantly behind his back. The lines seem oddly stable, even if the dynamic is unsettling. This, our fifth annual Media Issue, is our attempt to capture this moment, with President Donald Trump no longer such a novelty but still an unpredictable force in the nation’s highest office.

The president likes to talk about his administration as a TV show, and one way to think about this year is Trump’s season two. As it turns out, he has a long record of “season twos,” and, as Politico Magazine senior writer Michael Kruse discovers, it is dismal—offering a sneak preview of what might come next. Whatever happens, the person in front of the cameras is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the unflappable press secretary who has become a peculiar national figure in her own right. Jason Schwartz, Politico’s media reporter, delivers the first in-depth profile of her here.


What has happened to the media itself? As you’ll see in our annual survey of White House reporters, the job of covering the presidency has become an exhausting slog—though one also freighted with a sense of history in the making. On the right, a wave of pugilistic commentators has swamped the old-guard, conservative media establishment, and Politico photography director M. Scott Mahaskey traveled the country to capture its leading figures at home, in the studio, even on the gun range. On the left, a chorus of angry liberals has risen to attack the New York Times opinion pages for trying to add more Republican voices; their editor, James Bennet, sits down with Politico co-founder John Harris to discuss whether reasoned disagreement still has a home in a time of hostile winner-take-all politics.

One of the architects of this shifting new reality is the investigative sting artist James O’Keefe, whose Project Veritas amounts to a decade-long undercover hit job on one liberal target after another. Is he a scammer or an agent for truth? Our chief political correspondent, Tim Alberta, got unprecedented access to O’Keefe’s world (and his closet of disguises) and found an almost naïve ex-actor tugged between his sense of his own importance and his profound need to be taken seriously. Another architect of this moment, in the year of #MeToo, has been the media-savvy feminist attorney Lisa Bloom—who, after a headline-grabbing career built on helping women, found herself suddenly on the wrong side of the story that broke the dam, the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Contributing editor Liza Mundy asks her, basically: What were you thinking?

Out of view of the mainstream, Trump has managed to keep a powerful connection with his voters in part by colonizing unorthodox channels, not least of which is the Christian broadcasting world. Correspondent Ruth Graham traces Trump’s constant and very deliberate campaign of cultivating Christian TV, which dutifully pumps his unfiltered message into living rooms across America.

Finally, we think of Politico Magazine as a place for storytelling you simply won’t get anywhere else, and there may be no more extraordinary example than this issue’s account of a forgotten episode in the long drama of the Cold War. Drawing on declassified documents and never-published diary entries, the writer and researcher Peter Kornbluh unveils the drama of Lisa Howard, a pioneering TV journalist of the 1960s who forged a personal, at times intimate, relationship with Fidel Castro that began to transform the relationship between the United States and Cuba. Sometimes, the things shaping the world are right in our faces; sometimes they’re hidden for decades. In this issue, we hope you encounter a little of both.