How do you explain that Fareed Zakaria regularly called Barack Obama, and Barack Obama regularly spoke to Fareed Zakaria to give him advice about foreign policy, and you never heard any outcry about that. And yet, I talk to Donald Trump over the phone once or twice a week after he’s elected and it’s in the lead of the New York Times and suddenly it becomes this great scandal.

This is the thing that is so frustrating to me: Far from being a new phenomenon, this is something that’s been going on since newspapers began being printed. There are the stories of Joseph Alsop busting down a door in L.A. at the 1960 convention, badgering John Kennedy to select LBJ as his running mate. Walter Lippmann bragged about giving advice to LBJ. So on that aspect of it, actually, I socialize with politicians far, far less than the overwhelming number of people who report — whether you’re talking about Andrea Mitchell or Elisabeth Bumiller or Chris Matthews or, as I said, Fareed Zakaria or Thomas Friedman. …

The only difference is that Donald Trump is now the person calling us up. So for some reason, this is now shocking and everybody’s aghast when the fact is, again, my interactions with Donald Trump are so much more limited than Fareed Zakaria’s with Barack Obama or Ben Bradlee’s with JFK or Walter Lippmann’s with LBJ, or — you just go down the list.