Ben Strauss is the co-author of Indentured: The Inside Story of the Rebellion Against the NCAA, winner of the 2017 PEN/ESPN award for literary sports writing.

As he walked to work down Pennsylvania Avenue, Jim Acosta, CNN’s senior White House correspondent, was wondering if today would be the day he busted out of the doghouse.

It was an afternoon in early September and it had been three weeks since he had been able to put a question to the administration—an eternity for a TV reporter whose success depends on his visibility. But this was the new normal for Acosta and his CNN colleagues covering the Trump administration: getting called on in the briefing room was hit or miss. Only adding to Acosta’s indignation today, a few hours earlier Attorney General Jeff Sessions had announced the administration’s plans to phase out the DACA program, an Obama-era directive to allow illegal immigrants brought to the country as children to remain here and work. Now Acosta, the son of an immigrant himself, passed a gathering group of protesters in Lafayette Square. “Si, se puede,” they chanted. “Yes, we can.”


Approaching the security checkpoint outside the briefing room, Acosta rehearsed out loud the question he wanted to ask the administration, that is if he got the chance. “I’d like to know how the president could leave the announcement to his attorney general,” he said. “There’s 800,000 people that will be affected, and he couldn’t deliver the news himself?”

The premise of the question was personal—a jab at the president’s character rather than some nuanced probing of policy or political strategy about the popular initiative. But for Acosta, 46, disdain delivered with a theatrical flourish has become something of a signature in the nine months of the Trump administration. Never was that more apparent than when Acosta threw down with White House adviser Stephen Miller.

On August 2, while Miller detailed the benefits of an immigration policy that favors high-skilled workers and English speakers, Acosta thought of his father, who fled Cuba as an 11-year-old in 1962 and spent 40 years working at a Safeway in Great Falls. He was the inspiration for an impromptu Google search of the Emma Lazarus poem etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty. “I was thinking about my own life, ” Acosta told me.

Acosta quoted the poem to Miller—“give me your tired, your poor ...” and added, “What the President’s proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration.” It sounded more like a debate rebuttal than a question (it actually wasn’t a question at all) and it triggered one of the most heated exchanges between a member of the administration and the media since Trump took office.

After Miller lectured Acosta on his “ahistorical” error about the history of the statue and the poem, Acosta continued to push, talking right through Miller’s attempt to silence him (“Jim … Jim … Jim … Jim … Jim …”). Invoking his father’s journey to the United States, Acosta asked if the administration was rigging the system for Great Britain and Australia. An outraged Miller shot back: “Jim, have you honestly never met an immigrant from another country who speaks English outside of Great Britain and Australia?” He charged Acosta with having a “cosmopolitan bias.”

The seven-minute exchange, in which Miller delivered a surprisingly personal rebuke of Acosta’s argument—“one of the most outrageous, insulting, ignorant and foolish things you have ever said”—was riveting television and spawned an entire news cycle’s worth of coverage, as commentators scored it like a heavyweight bout. Debate points aside, the battle cemented Acosta’s undisputed role as the chief antagonist for a network that styles itself as Trump’s chief antagonist, a sparring partner for the administration in the unscripted reality TV show that is the daily briefing.

Fans leave bourbon in Acosta’s mailbox and stop him on the street to thank him for standing up to Trump’s policies and press-bashing; his critics, some of them within his own newsroom, worry he has strayed into naked partisanship in pursuit of ratings and allowed himself to be cast as the perfect foil for an administration that has pegged the mainstream media as an enemy.



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Acosta, by informal acclamation of his peers, is considered the reporter most likely to become part of the news story of any given day. “He understands that this is a big show, he’s seen the Saturday Night Live parodies and he’s made a conscious effort to become one of the notable characters,” said a senior reporter who sits toward the front of the briefing room. Others told me they admired Acosta’s determination not to cower in front of the bully pulpit, but at the same time quietly bemoaned the delight the administration seems to take in sparring with him. One example: After Miller stepped away from the podium, he received high-fives from his colleagues.

From CNN’s vantage point, Acosta is standing up to a bully—both for a network that has been under attack by Trump and those who feel disenfranchised in the president’s America. But there is also a view inside the network’s newsroom that Acosta has been given the latitude, perhaps even the implicit assignment, to turn the briefing room into a personal editorial page because it is good television and reaffirms CNN’s integral role in the ongoing drama. “There’s some grumbling in the rank-and-file that this isn’t straight news,” said a senior person in the network’s newsroom. “But the higher up you go, the more people like what Jim’s doing or he wouldn’t be doing it.”

At the White House, Acosta slipped through security, took off his Ray-Bans and had his makeup applied. His immaculate TV hair perfectly coiffed, Acosta stepped inside CNN’s camera booth underneath a green awning outside the briefing room. Acosta did a brief piece, saying that Trump had “dumped the Dreamers.” Then he headed through the French doors of the briefing room. “There’s Ben Jacobs,” Acosta said, pointing out the Guardian reporter who had achieved notoriety for his own encounter with a politician in Montana. “He’s the guy who got body slammed!”

Then, with a smile, he said, “Let’s see if I get a question.”



***

At a press conference in Houston in 1974, at the height of the Watergate scandal and just five months before Richard Nixon would resign from the presidency, CBS White House correspondent Dan Rather redefined the deferential relationship between the media and the leader of the free world. As Rather introduced himself and readied to ask Nixon a Watergate-related question, the president quipped, “Are you running for something?” Rather’s retort: “No, sir. Are you?” By today’s standards of combative questioning and equally antagonistic responses, it seems almost quaint. But outraged by the perceived disrespect, Nixon supporters organized letters and phone bank calls to complain to CBS.

By the 1980s, Sam Donaldson gained notoriety for shouting questions at President Ronald Reagan when he made public appearances, an act of protest about a lack of access to the administration. But, as Donaldson said, there is no precedent for what Acosta is doing. “Nobody I was asking questions of lied to my face,” he said. “Nobody was trying to tell the American people the press was their enemy.”

Acosta covered Trump on the campaign trail, as the candidate ramped up his anti-media message; he was physically threatened by Trump supporters at rallies and at one he found a sign with a swastika drawn on it left at the media table. (In their first noteworthy encounter, Acosta asked Trump at a news conference in May 2016 if he could handle media scrutiny. “You’re a real beauty,” Trump replied.)

Acosta at the CNN Republican presidential debate in Miami, March 16, 2016. | CNN/

But it wasn’t until after the election that Acosta’s new role took shape. The day after CNN reported that Trump had been briefed on an unverified opposition-research file and BuzzFeed published the entire dossier, the president-elect held a news conference at Trump Tower—originally intended to address business conflicts of interest—and called the decision to report on the dossier a “disgrace.” (He also called BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage.”) “Since you’re attacking us, can you give us a question?” Acosta shouted from the front row. Trump refused. “Your organization is terrible,” the president-elect barked. He called CNN “fake news,” one of the first times he used what would become a favorite epithet.

During the news conference, Acosta was emailing directly with CNN President Jeff Zucker, who told me he was offering his support to a reporter “on the firing line.” He didn’t want Acosta “to be cowed by attacks that could be hard for anyone to take.” Acosta called the news conference “a defining moment in American journalism.” “It was an attack on all of us, on all journalists,” he said.

Afterward, then-press secretary Sean Spicer heatedly told Acosta he was out of line, and over the next several months, as the White House took an increasingly antagonistic stance toward the press corps, Acosta ramped up his protests. He took the administration to task for taking news briefings off camera, tweeting pictures of his socks (he began to receive pairs in the mail) and calling Spicer, with whom he says he was once quite friendly, “just kind of useless” on CNN. Later, at a news conference after the Charlottesville violence, he told Trump directly, “No, sir, there are no fine people in the Nazis.”

To Dan Rather, who himself has achieved late-career relevance as an outspoken critic of the administration, Acosta offered the needed response to a harrowing moment in American history. “CNN should give him a raise and a week off,” Rather told me. “That’s how good he’s been.”



CNN should give him a raise and a week off,” Dan Rather told me. “That’s how good he’s been.”



Acosta’s work has struck a chord for many, particularly in the Hispanic community. He flew to San Antonio in July to receive the Corazon de Oro (Heart of Gold) award from a group of Hispanic journalists and recently the National Association of Hispanic Journalists honored him with their Presidential Award. Later this month, Acosta will be the keynote speaker at the Chicago Latino Network. After his fracas with Miller, an Indian family stopped him outside the White House and thanked him for his work.

The two groups he has rushed to defend, Acosta told me, are immigrants and journalists, and anyone who considers that to be scripted or some role he is trying to play is stuck inside “the Washington bubble.” “The president of the United States should be a champion for the First Amendment,” he said. “The president should be a champion for immigrants.”

But in making an issue like immigration personal, Acosta also committed the cardinal sin of traditional journalism: He had become part of the story. “He has become the personification of the anti-Trump movement, and that’s not the role of a White House reporter,” said Ari Fleischer, George W. Bush’s press secretary. Acosta’s tussle with Miller reminded Fleischer of when reporter Helen Thomas used to ask what he believed were pro-Hezbollah questions. (She once asked Fleischer, “Does the president think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?”) “I loved it,” Fleischer said. “I’d let her talk all day because you could practically hear the American public disagreeing with her from the briefing room.”

Of the many current and former White House reporters I spoke to about Acosta, all expressed some form of solidarity, as they, too, wrestle with the almost impossible challenge to report objectively and ask tough questions while dealing with unprecedented attacks from Trump and his surrogates. They praised Acosta as a news gatherer and a genial colleague—“He’s a guy you like to have a beer with,” one said—but also wondered what he had accomplished with his aggressive posturing. “You can just see Trump and Steve Bannon reveling in watching Jim snap back to Miller,” said Jim Warren, the Poynter Institute’s chief media critic and a former White House reporter for the New York Daily News. “And you can bet Jeff Zucker did, too.” For the record, I asked Bannon whether Acosta was playing into the administration's hands, he texted one word: “Yes!!!!!!!”

On the day of the DACA announcement, over lunch at the Sofitel Hotel across the street from the White House, Acosta told me that as soon as Miller dropped his “cosmopolitan bias” line he knew the exchange would be news and that “CNN would be instantly overjoyed.” Indeed, Acosta was plastered all over the network and its website afterward. When I asked Acosta to explain what he meant by overjoyed, Richard Hudock, a public relations manager eating with us, interjected: “That was sarcasm.” “That was sarcasm,” Acosta quickly agreed, adding, “My thought was this was going to cause an uproar.”

Zucker told me he didn’t acknowledge feeling “overjoyed” by Acosta’s dust-up with Miller, but he clearly wasn’t bothered by it, either. Trump the candidate and Trump the president have been good for CNN—and most every other news organization, too. Last year was CNN’s most profitable and this year, as many of its anchors take on Trump, the network is on pace to set a record for viewers. “Miller walked right into it with his silly assault on Jim and didn’t have an appreciation of Jim’s background and looked even sillier given few people understood the plight of immigrants more than Jim Acosta,” Zucker told me. Asked whether CNN and Trump were the winners in the Acosta-White House dynamic, Zucker told me that I would have to determine that myself, but he assured me that Acosta was doing straight news. “100 percent,” he said.

As for the White House’s motivations, the benefits of going toe-to-toe with Acosta seem readily apparent. In July, a SurveyMonkey poll found 89 percent of Republicans trusted Trump over CNN. (Total adults still trusted CNN, 50-43, and Democrats trusted the network by a 91-5 margin). Acosta is the most high-profile Hispanic White House reporter working for the network demonized by a president who has built some of his appeal on white identity politics. As cynical as that may sound, one White House reporter told me, “He’s as good a foil as the administration can find in the press room.” (The reporter added that, given his newfound prominence, Acosta needed to pick his spots better. Going up against an immigration obsessive like Miller was like “bringing a knife to a gunfight.”) “What binds Trump to his base?” asked another. “They loathe the elite coastal press telling them what to do, lecturing them about civil rights.”

Another clue to the administration’s attitude can be mined from the official transcript the day Miller and Acosta went at it. As Miller finished up at the podium, he said, “I think that was exactly what we were hoping to have happen.” Asked about Miller’s line, Acosta said he had not heard it, but that he wasn’t surprised. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Don’t take the bait, you’re playing into their hands,’” he said. “So when he calls us the enemy of the people, we say nothing? When he calls us fake news, we don’t point out that he used to say Obama wasn’t born in this country? Do we not do those things? I think that’s a cop-out, I think that’s raising the white flag and saying we’re not going to do our job anymore.”



***

As a rule, the White House daily briefing is more important for TV coverage than print. Newscasts use the video and networks like to feature their own reporters asking the pointed question of the day. “There were print people like David Halberstam who resented what I did,” Sam Donaldson said. “They thought I was a showman, but the nature of TV is different. People see you and recognize you.” When Acosta has been passed over for questions—there were other periods earlier this year where he went days without getting called on—he has emailed both Spicer and his replacement, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asking why. “Nobody ever says we’re screwing you over, but come on—it goes on for weeks,” he told me. Acosta also reminded me that Fox News was called on at every White House briefing during the Obama administration. When he was still ignored, Acosta responded by shouting questions, turning the administration’s cold shoulder into a narrative of the day. (He also tweeted some snark: “[Spicer] avoided taking questions from CNN today” with a #courage hashtag).

Acosta got his first taste of the TV limelight when he was 9 years old. From Annandale, Virginia, his class took a field trip to see the Iranian hostages return to the United States. A Washington Post reporter tagged along, and quoted Acosta: “I'm a movie star, I was on Channel 4 once and on ABC twice and one of the hostages waved at me.” His parents split up when he was young, but both sparked his interest in politics. His mother, a bartender, read the Washington Post every day. His father told him about the D.C. bigwigs, TV personalities and members of Congress whom he met at Safeway.

In high school, Acosta delivered his first big scoop. A Pink Floyd mural was mysteriously painted over and the school paper assigned him to investigate. Acosta solved the crime: The French teacher had wanted the school to paint a mural of the Statue of Liberty. “Who can argue with that—especially me?” Acosta said.

After college at James Madison University, Acosta worked for TV stations in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Dallas before he was recruited to Chicago to join an experimental newscast for the local CBS station. The anchor, Carol Marin, couldn’t promise him job security, but the new show was driven by a hard-news ethos. “We weren’t doing squirrels on waterskis,” she said. “Jim had to risk his career to come work with us—and he did.” Acosta worked as an enterprise and investigative reporter on the police beat and at City Hall. After 9/11 he was hired by CBS Newspath, which produced content for CBS affiliates across the country.

For CBS, Acosta covered the Iraq War from Baghdad, Hurricane Katrina and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. He joined CNN as a national correspondent in 2007, and focused more on politics, including the 2008 presidential campaign and later the Tea Party, landing big interviews with far-right, anti-establishment Senate candidates Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. After following the Romney campaign in 2012, Acosta was named senior White House correspondent for CNN.

Acosta’s job as White House reporter, as he sees it, is to ask the blunt, edgy questions, which he has been doing since long before Trump. “Why can’t we take out these bastards?” he once asked President Barack Obama about ISIS. He harangued Raúl Castro about human rights during a joint news conference with Obama in Havana. And when Obama’s IRS lost 2,000 emails without much of an explanation, Acosta quipped, “That sounds like the dog ate my homework.” “I tend to talk the way real people talk, just like my parents do,” Acosta said. “Sometimes, I do ask questions in the way somebody on that bar stool would ask the question.” (He also reminded me that conservative media outlets treated him much differently when he was grilling the Obama administration).

In the briefing room the day of the DACA announcement, Acosta took his assigned seat. After Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump’s decision would allow Congress to act on DACA, the questions came in a flurry. Major Garrett, from CBS, asked whether the president would sign a standalone bill to address those affected. A one-piece immigration fix was not the answer, Sanders answered. The Washington Post’s Phil Rucker wanted to know what gave the president confidence that Congress could pass anything to fix DACA. “It's Congress' job to legislate,” Sanders parried. “I think that's something we all learned in 8th-grade civics.”

For the fifth question, Sanders called on Acosta. “It sounds like the president is saying, and you’re saying, that if we're going to allow the Dreamers to stay in this country, we want a wall,” he said. “Is that accurate?” It was a political horse-trading question, and Sanders fielded it easily: The President hasn’t been shy about the fact he wants a wall, and it is an important piece of immigration reform, she said.

Then Acosta followed up with the question he’d rehearsed earlier that morning: “Why did the President not come out and make this announcement himself today? Why did he leave it to his attorney general? It's his decision. These kids—their lives are on the line because of what he is doing. Why not have him come out and make this call?” Sanders, looking incredulous, explained that countless legal scholars had said the Obama policy was illegal. It made sense that the attorney general would handle an issue of law, she added.

After the briefing, I spoke to Brian Karem, a veteran White House reporter with the Montgomery County Sentinel, a suburban weekly paper in Rockville. Karem made his own headlines this year when, after Sanders attacked CNN for a story it had retracted, he called her inflammatory for bashing reporters who were only trying to do their jobs. Karem told me Acosta’s question about DACA was the best of the day. “Jim cut to the heart of what’s at stake today because he’s a good reporter.” He continued: “The very fact we’re having this conversation: Has Jim crossed a line? Is he part of the story?—is exactly what the administration wants. We’re famous in our business for eating our own. If someone stands up, how long before we question their motives? The truth is, more of us should be doing what Jim’s doing.”



***

Later that evening, Acosta decamped for The Exchange, his favorite bar near the White House. Tucked into the back of a room full of slightly sweaty 20-somethings fresh off an evening of kickball games, Acosta settled in on his stool. “Off the Record is so not off the record,” he said of the famous political haunt at the nearby Hay-Adams. “Everybody’s there!” He was pleased with the day’s exchange with Sanders, whom he credited with easing some of the tension in the briefing room. “I asked a couple of questions and we went on with our lives,” he said. “That’s the way it should be.” But it wasn’t long before video of his question was posted online. One headline blared: “Trump Gets Called Out at White House Briefing for Having Jeff Sessions Announce his DACA Decision.”

As he sipped a 312 beer Acosta thought about the past year. It had been surreal to find himself in the Oval Office, as the president pointed at him and called him fake news. It had been strange that his relationship with Spicer, formerly one of his best sources in Washington, had soured. (Acosta’s outbursts in the briefing room were hurting the journalism profession, Spicer told the Post this summer.) He was going through a divorce and Page Six had run an item detailing his busy social calendar (Acosta says the report was inaccurate.). He had been played by Bobby Moynihan on Saturday Night Live. On the street, in restaurants, at bars, he was recognized over and over again by people far removed the insidery world of D.C. politics; keep holding the administration accountable, many told him.

What was hard, though, Acosta said, was the anti-press climate the administration had created and the threats he regularly received, some that were looked into by CNN’s security apparatus. “There’s concern that someone is going to get hurt with the danger we’re all in right now,” Acosta said.

I asked Acosta whether tweeting pictures of his socks and sarcastic hashtags were different than the job of pressing the White House on serious issues, like DACA. “If I had to do it all over again, would I take a picture of my socks?” he said before a long pause. “Knowing what I know now, I guess maybe not.” But that was it for regrets. The lines from Lazarus’ poem are still pinned to the top of his Twitter account.

For all the ink spilled over Trump’s treatment of the news media, and his presidency in general, Acosta remained convinced that the job of asking questions in the briefing room and antagonizing the administration, even if it drew criticism, was critical. The pushback couldn’t be left to the op-ed columnists and the studio show hosts. “People need to see it happen in the moment,” he said. “People need to see their fellow Americans, working journalists saying, ‘No, sir, there are no fine people in the Nazis.’”

As to whether he had given up reaching Trump voters with his reporting, Acosta promised that he had not. “I desperately want to reach them, for them to listen to what I say,” he said. “I want them to carefully consider and think deeply about what is happening in the country.”

Acosta took a last sip of his beer, content that he was on the right side of history. “People are going to look back at this moment and ask each and every one of us, ‘What did you do when [Trump] was doing this in America?” he said. “‘What role did you play?’”