Donald Trump has been going after people in his traveling press corps again.
Donald Trump has been going after people in his traveling press corps again. Now, a lot of the national political press deserves cordial contempt, and sometimes the situation calls for it to be less than cordial. But there are nonetheless several things wrong with this picture.
First, and most alarmingly, is Trump’s response to an ABC News reporter asking irksome questions of him and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman:
Trump called Mary Bruce, the chief White House correspondent for ABC News, a “terrible person and a terrible reporter” and called her network “fake news.” He also urged his Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr, to revoke ABC’s broadcast licenses in response to Bruce’s questions, which concerned both the killing of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the Epstein files. . . .
“I think the license should be taken away from ABC because your news is so fake and it’s so wrong,” Trump said. “And we have a great commissioner, the chairman, who should look at that, because I think when you come in and when you’re 97 percent negative to Trump and then Trump wins the election in a landslide, that means obviously your news is not credible and you’re not credible as a reporter.” The FCC issues licenses to ABC for affiliate stations owned by its parent company, Disney, but the network itself does not hold one that could be revoked.
Telling Bruce that she’s a bad person and a bad reporter is not very civil, but politics ain’t beanbag, and reporters who make themselves political players can expect some combative pushback. But threatening the press with revoking their government licenses for publishing is a giant red line that no president should cross. Indeed, federal regulators shouldn’t be in the business in the first place of licensing the press. Whatever scarcity issues once justified its existence, in an age of cable and broadband and podcasts and endless web-based platforms, the FCC should not exist. The fact that presidents can use its power to threaten their critics shows why. But it also illustrates the fundamental lack of character and respect for the American way that has so often been a hallmark of Trump. And while this sort of thing may thrill his most devoted fans, I remain doubtful that it is good politics. It would be disastrous politics if those threats were ever carried out.
Second, and depressing in its own right, was Trump telling Bloomberg White House correspondent Catherine Lucey “quiet, Piggy” when she asked another Epstein-related question. It’s not even a sensible insult: from what I can tell, Lucey isn’t overweight — if she were, that would be more offensively boorish. It would also be deeply ungentlemanly. It was bad enough when Joe Biden snapped at a heavyset voter, “look, fat,” but it does matter that it’s a woman. A man, especially a man in the public eye, ought to be better than that in how he speaks to women, and specifically how he comments upon their appearance. But it appears that this was just a random insult. While Trump has been an equal-opportunity offender in dealing out insults to anyone who gets in his way (sometimes humorously, sometimes in bad taste, sometimes both), he has tended to go further out of his way to do this sort of thing to women in his way, and it’s ugly and bad.
I weary of pointing out that Trump is a jerk, a man of low character, and a bad role model for men. It’s all been said before to the point of boring repetition, and the 2024 election proved beyond doubt that he can survive that politically. But it’s still true.
Third, there’s this from Michael Grynbaum’s New York Times writeup on the flap:
She added: “The president being frank and open and honest to your faces, rather than hiding behind your backs, is, frankly, a lot more respectful than what you saw in the last administration.” (Ms. Leavitt was seeking to draw a contrast between Mr. Trump, who fields questions from reporters on a near-daily basis, and former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who met infrequently with the press.)
It is positively pathetic that the Times feels, now, that its readers need to have explained to them that Joe Biden didn’t talk with the press often.