The FRONTLINE Interviews
Margaret Sullivan
The Washington Post
Margaret Sullivan is the media columnist at The Washington Post, and the former public editor of The New York Times.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on June 13, 2018. It has been edited for clarity and length.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Margaret Sullivan
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
One of the themes that we’re building throughout this film is Trump’s relationship to the press, to the media, to his understanding of it, his use of lawyers, in that sense, for intimidation, but also other things.Let’s just pause for a moment.To the extent that you know, Trump in New York, New York tabloids, Page Six, his perception about how to use and manipulate the media, learned at the elbow of Walter Winchell’s tipster, Roy Cohn.
I think that Trump loved the attention of being in the tabloids, and knew how to get it, and sought it—in fact, sometimes sought it by, at least according to reporting that’s credible, by impersonating someone named John or James—I guess John Barron.He would call up reporters and say, “Here’s a tip about Donald Trump."But it actually was Trump.It’s peculiar, but I think it definitely speaks to his desire for that kind of public attention.
We interviewed a woman who worked with him in those days, and she said he learned this from Cohn, but he perfected it himself, which is this sense of there's no such thing as bad news.You just keep your name out there all the time and build a brand, I guess.
Exactly, exactly.And he did.
Yeah.The lawyer-intimidation element about the press emerges in a couple of different instances.One of them, of course, is around Ivana’s allegations that she was raped by Donald Trump, and that brings Michael Cohen into the story.
Right.So Michael Cohen, when you think of him, the word “fixer” comes to mind, that he was the guy that, for Trump, would let people know that there would be a price to pay for something that he didn’t like, would threaten and would intimidate, you know, quite effectively.I think that probably worked in the New York world much better than it has in Washington.
So it’s end of 2016.Trump is the president-elect.… I know he’s had the press with him on the campaign.But what do you figure his idea of how to handle the press is as he’s leaving New York City and the experiences he’s had here with tabloids and the kind of journalism that was practiced here?
Well, I think Trump, as president-elect and as president, really carried forward what worked for him during the campaign, which was to treat the press as his enemy, as his foil.He wanted to be able to have something to oppose and to be able to portray to his base that the press is part of this elite system that must be brought down, and that he, Donald Trump, was the one person who could do it.
During the campaign, we saw the chance against CNN, or the pointing to reporters in the bullpen and the mocking of them, and the people at the rallies would turn around and really give those folks a very hard time.It was scary to see.But it worked for Trump.And I think that’s what he carried with him into the White House, that the press was something to maybe on the side, you’d chat people up or have an off-the-record discussion, or maybe you’d call [New York Times reporter] Maggie Haberman or someone from The Washington Post.But in public, your role was to oppose and to challenge and to put them down, and to, in fact, call them “scum,” and at times to call them the “enemy of the people."
How is that different, do you think, than the way that it was in New York?Or is it just more of the same?
No, I think it’s very different.I think in New York he was kind of working the press and manipulating the press, but not opposing it.I think as a politician, as opposed to a businessman or a developer, he began to see the value of really treating the press as an enemy and portraying the press as an enemy, while at the same time being very concerned about getting attention, being on the front page, wanting—I mean, it’s paradoxical—wanting the attention and wanting to shoot the messenger.
Let’s talk about the difference between big media and … establishment media and the rest.Major news outlets, their initial view—to the extent that giant corporations have initial views—from what you can tell from the coverage and the attitudes and perceptions of the reporters, … how does journalism approach the newly elected president of the United States?
Well, in two different ways.One was to realize and to want to convey that this was a very unusual president of the United States.This was a businessman but also a reality TV star, and someone who had had a very unconventional campaign.So you needed to get at that.At the same time, I think there was a strong desire to normalize him.Now he’s the president.We have to show a certain amount of deference and to assume that certain norms would be the same, that there would be a daily press briefing, that he would give press conferences, that the information that came out of his mouth or out of his office would be essentially true, and that if it were pointed out that it were not true, that there would be some kind of retraction or apology.But none of those things actually came to pass.
He continued to be highly unorthodox, but the press hasn’t really been able to adjust to that.There's been a debate, as you know, about can we say the word “lie”?Is that all right?Or should we not say that, because we don’t want to use such a harsh and such a guilt-inducing word?
But when there are then hundreds and thousands of these falsehoods, you do have to consider that.So that’s one of the things that the establishment press, or what I like to call the reality-based press, has been struggling with, is how do you cover someone who’s so unconventional?
Now, you also have something that didn’t exist in the Nixon administration, and really any other administration, which is Fox News.
Right, and Twitter.
And Twitter.Help me with an understanding of what the newly elected president signals, based on his campaign.I remember we all thought, pivot.They all pivot; he’ll pivot.Absent the pivot, what do we know he had as part of his arsenal?
Well, certainly, Fox News has been a tremendous, tremendous help to President Trump.It’s practically, not its news coverage, but certainly the opinion coverage—and I would include Fox & Friends talk show, news talk show, certainly people like Bill O’Reilly, though he’s no longer there, and certainly Sean Hannity—have been very much in his corner and in his camp, and a tremendous help to him.At the same time, it’s a way that he gets information.There’s a feedback loop between what is said on, for example, Fox & Friends, and then, very quickly, we see, well, Trump must be watching this, because his tweets will then reflect things that were just said on Fox & Friends.
It’s a very tight, reciprocal arrangement.And most of the interviews he’s given have been to friendly interviewers on Fox.It’s been a way that he’s been able to bypass the more conventional and perhaps the more challenging members of the media, is by going to those that would be friendly and have proven themselves to be friendly.
And there's every indication that he knew this from the very beginning.
I think so.It wasn’t a secret that he was getting very favorable coverage on Fox.And again, there are people on Fox—and people are quick to say this; you know, there's the Shep Smith and others who tell it pretty straight and are pretty straight news people.But as soon as you veer into talk show, commentary, opinion people, they can be described as pro-Trump, not down the middle, not really trying to be objective, but pretty overtly pro-Trump.
And the power of Fox?
Well, Fox has a big audience.It’s the number one rated cable station.All the cable networks have an older viewership.As you know, millennials and others have cut the cord.They're not really watching Fox, but a sizable chunk of the country does.And it also seeps into other—there's a kind of ecosystem, a media ecosystem that’s centered around Fox, so places like Breitbart, for example, end up sounding a lot like that, too.They can be more edgy, or they can be at times straighter, but Fox is kind of the center of this pro-Trump media ecosystem.
And the power of the tweet?
Well, the tweet is very powerful for Trump because there's no gatekeeper.It’s direct to the people, and it has generated a tremendous amount of interest.We in the establishment press find ourselves, of necessity, reacting to it.When the president goes on a tweet storm and is saying lots of outrageous things, I've had people say to me, “Well, that should be ignored."But you can't ignore it, because they are presidential statements.They are unconventional presidential statements, but they actually are official in some way, so you can't ignore them.
I do think we tend to overreact to them in some ways in that they are very distracting, and they keep us from covering things that might be more important.But you can't ignore them.And Trump absolutely knows the power and has talked about the power of his huge following, and the way he’s able to take his message directly to the people with the idea of: “I'm the one you can believe."You don’t have to believe what he calls the “fake news media."
… Help me understand the media environment and Trump’s relation to it in that moment.
Well, again, there's been this opposition to the mainstream media set up during the campaign and certainly continuing into the inauguration and so on.He’s already building an idea that anything that comes out of the mainstream press is not to be believed.So anything, you know, the details of the dossier or anything that comes out of the FBI, he has labels for these organizations or institutions.There's the “deep state."The deep state are the supposedly evil people in the CIA and the FBI and those who he would like to portray as conspiring against him, although the truth is, Jim Comey, very arguably, helped him win the election by making the statements he did about Hillary Clinton in October of 2016.
But there's this adversarial relationship that Trump has cultivated, so both with the deep state and with—again, there's always a nickname.There's the “deep state,” the intelligence community, and there's the “fake news media,” otherwise known as the mainstream press.And in both cases, by disparaging those institutions or the people in them, it’s a way that Trump is able to distance himself and give himself some cover from whatever might be coming out.
From what you can tell—we’ve now had 18 months to think about it—do you think he was ready for this?Those guys come in.They tell him this stuff.Maybe he knows about the dossier; maybe he doesn’t.But this is just the kind of thing that’s grist for his mill and that he was ready to go with [correspondent Jim] Acosta; I’ll point to CNN. Or is this just playing it as it lays?
I always find it somewhat difficult to believe that Trump is doing anything except acting on instinct.I don’t think that, from what I can tell, he doesn’t do a lot of plotting and planning in advance.But he has a very strong instinct about how to manage these things in ways that have worked very, very well for him.So I don’t know that there was a playbook, but I think there was a strong gut feel.And he would go to it, you know, always at the knee of Roy Cohn, taught to counterpunch and never apologize.Come back at those people.Attack, attack, attack.And that, I think, is what we've seen play out.
He comes off the elevator at Trump Tower just a few days after the dossier meeting with Comey, and there's paper all stacked there.It’s supposedly the tax information and all his businesses that he’s divesting himself of.But he can't—it’s like he can't help himself, or he decides, and he really—this is the moment, if you talked about a declaration of war that was different than the campaign declaration of war, this is the real thing, it looks like.
That’s right, although I do think it was of a piece.That moment and that meeting and the dossier being published would have to be on any timeline that you'd develop about this.But there was, in my mind, no radical change from what we had seen, just perhaps a digging in deeper.
Why was the press surprised then?
At what was in the dossier, or his reaction to it?
Well, in his reaction to it.
Well, I think we’re continually surprised.We don’t seem to be able to get over our surprise at how unusual he is.And this idea that he would pivot, and he would become more traditionally presidential, hasn’t really played out.Yet I think our sense of tradition is so ingrained that we expect normal behavior from President Trump, and we’re surprised when we don’t get it.
The cable news has already divided up the landscape.But really, MSNBC means one thing; Fox means something else.I guess CNN is the paragon of fake news.
Right.That’s right.Well, CNN is in a very peculiar situation with Trump, because they really helped him get elected, giving him tremendous amounts of free airtime.The New York Times calculated it as some outrageous number; I can't remember what it was, but really gave him a lot of free advertising.At the same time, there's been no institution that’s gotten more abuse than CNN from Trump.It’s a dysfunctional relationship.
How do you square that circle?
I don’t know how to, except that this is what has worked for him.He was happy to take the free exposure and then felt no sense of loyalty, certainly, about doing anything except continuing to trash them.
Is this [CNN President] Jeff Zucker in an old intramural squirmish over The Apprentice at NBC?
Well, you know, Jeff Zucker and Donald Trump have a long history together, and Trump’s success with The Apprentice really helped Zucker in his role at NBC. Then comes the campaign, and Zucker has said, since the campaign, that he does think that they gave Trump too much free exposure.Then Trump has put CNN down, constantly disparages reporters, and has made life difficult for CNN, although I guess if CNN buys the idea that there's no such thing as negative publicity, they benefit, too. All the media outlets have benefited.Even though Trump opposes them, they’ve benefited from the tremendous interest in Trump and the fact that if Trump is in the headline, or if Trump is the point of your report, there's inherent interest in it.
… Who is Jim Comey in the universe, the man meeting Donald Trump in that Trump Tower meeting, and the man who we’re about to talk to in other ways as well?But who is he?What are his characteristics, from a media perspective, if nothing else?
Well, Comey also likes attention, but he has had a very different path to this very prominent role that he’s now in.He’s been a government lawyer for most of his career, in different ways.And he’s a meticulous notekeeper.He is, I think, very careful about telling the truth.His judgments have sometimes been highly questionable.The judgment he made about deciding to come out and tell the world about the Clinton investigation, you know, Hillary Clinton at least thinks that that was the turning point and caused her loss, perhaps more than anything else.
Comey is often in the public eye, one way or another, which is a little unusual for a government lawyer.He’s very, very different from [Special Counsel] Robert Mueller, who keeps his head down and doesn’t call any attention to himself.Comey, I think, is, for someone who’s in such a job that would suggest that you're not going to be in the public eye, he’s been in the public eye an awful lot.
That’s right.We interviewed Jeh Johnson yesterday, who used to be the head of DHS. He said he called Comey the day before, when he was going down to the meeting, and said: “I know Trump.I don’t know if you should raise the dossier."I think Comey knew what he was getting into it, but he got into it anyway.
Yes, he sort of seeks that kind of thing in some ways.But I think he comes at it from the perspective of a man of conscience, or he certainly wants people to think that about him.And it may be the case.But somehow, the end result is still that he’s pushed into the spotlight.
Yeah.So the next moment Comey and Trump interact is a media event where it’s two days after the inauguration.You're in the Blue Room of the White House.Comey is trying to blend into the drapes.Trump is standing there.All these law enforcement officials, he’s thanking them for their help and the thing, and he calls Comey across the room into that awkward handshake, hug, kiss, whisper in the ear.Walk me through that, will you?
Well, it’s a very strange moment that I think, in a lot of our minds, is on a kind of auto loop because we’ve seen it so many times.It’s Comey crossing the room and looking uncomfortable, doesn’t want to be—he thinks that Trump is going to give him a hug or something like that and has said that his entire focus was to avoid that.So he kind of sticks his hand out to make it into not an embrace, but an arm’s-length handshake.But Trump, nevertheless, pulls him in so that he can say something in his ear, which was, I guess, something like, “I look forward to working with you."But it almost looks like a kiss or something.
It’s an extremely awkward moment, with Comey realizing that in order to be the independent head of the FBI, he cannot seem to be in league with the president, which there's no reason to think he was, and Trump wanting to show that he had this guy under his control and that they were close and that there was some kind of fealty being demonstrated.
… If Trump is who we have come to believe he is, in terms of his media manipulation, that moment in the Blue Room represents what?There's a whole slew of cameras standing there.He knows he’s going to get on the news.What’s he conveying there?
Again, I think that with Trump, I always think it’s not a plan but an instinct, and I think his instinct was to bring Comey or to seem to bring Comey into his orbit of loyalty, and to do that by saying, “Come on over here,” and to kind of go in for this quiet word into your ear and to show: “This is where we’re close.I've got it under control."
This is a watchful/waiting moment for the press, who are expecting a pivot.It’s only two days after the “American carnage” inaugural address.But still—and it may be that we all are deceived by this moment of comedy with Comey, not understanding what maybe Trump knows, which is that Comey has a secret investigation underway.
Right, right.Well, and we’re looking at it now, knowing what we know.At the time, it just sort of looked like a weird, awkward thing that happened, and now, because Comey has written a book and explained how he perceived it, we see it differently.He describes Trump as being like a mob boss, who wants to have this clear sense of loyalty, unquestioned loyalty, among those who report to him, or his inner circle.And Comey felt, he says, that he was being asked to show that.But as the head of the FBI, he felt that the most important thing for him was to show independence.So there was a lot of tension there.
The press, Washington Post, New York Times, certainly, Wall Street Journal, too, are using the Russia probe, whatever that means at that moment, as absolute front-page material whenever they can get something, the collusion, the telephone calls.… [Washington Post associate editor and senior national security correspondent] Karen DeYoung goes over to Flynn’s office and talks to him and asks him a question.They get his denials.They then get the intercept.And it really feels like the very first of all the moments we can find, the first moment where something actually happens in the administration as a result of journalism.Tell me a little bit about the power of that and the meaning of it.
Well, I thought it was meaningful because it was one of these cases in which Trump and his inner circle were denying, denying, denying that there had been any wrongdoing, until the time that they cut Flynn loose and he was gone.So it was fake news, and it was, “You're wrong, and there's nothing wrong here, and he’s a great guy."And the next thing you knew, he was out.And the reason given for that was that he had lied to the vice president.But it probably wasn’t just that.
It was the power of the kind of reporting we’re seeing, and it definitely had the effect of flushing out the situation and having there be real-life consequences for it.So it gives the lie to the idea that this is all made-up fake news stuff, because there was action taken from it.
… Trump, angry that this has all happened, goes to the side of the table that you know a lot about, which is—pulls out the tweets and says, “The press is the enemy of the people."Has a press conference that [New York Times chief White House correspondent] Peter Baker told us he was absolutely unhinged at about all of this.Are we feeling a ramping up of what's happening with the president, and his response to the uncontrollability that you’ve just talked about?
Right.Well, I do think that when we’ve seen this over and over, when Trump starts to feel cornered, he lashes out.That’s a syndrome that we see over and over.When it feels like the walls are closing in, that’s when the tweet storms happen.And some of them have been very strange to see.They do seem to be irrational.And in some cases, they haven't been very wise.But nevertheless—and I think this is, again, Trump acting on instinct that has worked for him over and over—he counterpunches.He doesn’t just go and consult with a bunch of lawyers and figure out what the really smart thing to do is.He gets public, draws attention to himself, revs up his base, and counterpunches.
Fox?
Well, Fox will always, in a situation like that, reflect what Trump would like to see reflected, so they're giving it very favorable coverage.And Sean Hannity, in particular, has really helped Trump develop this idea of the deep state that’s out to get him, and the evil press that takes its marching orders from the Democratic National Committee.That’s the Hannity playbook, and it’s certainly on the press’s side is not true.I don’t think it’s true that there's a conspiracy of deep-state people who are trying to take Trump down.Far from it.
But that’s the way that Trump has started to and has continued to protect himself against what may happen in the future, is by undermining those institutions, the independent press and the intelligence community, who he would like to portray as being out to get him.And if he can get enough people to believe that, or I think perhaps most importantly, to not quite know what to believe, I don’t know then.People may think: “Well, Trump says one thing, and I read some of this other stuff.It’s all pretty confusing, and I'm tired of it.Now I've got news fatigue, and I don’t want to hear about it anymore."I think that’s dangerous.
This is the malleability of truth really coming forward.If it happened earlier, on Jan. 6, now it really feels like it’s in play.
… It’s been a process of many months of working to come up with a reason that, no matter what happens, you can't believe it, because these are just people who are out to get him.And I think the message to the base, and the message to voters in general, is this is a duly elected president, and the deep state and the fake news media, as he calls them, are trying to undo the results of a perfectly legitimate election, and you, American people, shouldn’t let them do it.
Ralph Peters is a very experienced lieutenant colonel who’s a longtime commenter at Fox, so far before Trump was in the political spotlight, who decided, fairly recently, to leave Fox because he thought that the network was doing something deeply unpatriotic by essentially not telling the truth, not living up to their mission as a news organization, basically spewing propaganda.He couldn’t countenance it, so decided to leave.
What do you figure the effect of Peters leaving Fox is on Fox?
Next to nothing, really.It’s annoying [to Fox], I think, to have someone like Peters out there disparaging what Fox is doing.But does it really change many people’s mind?I don’t think so.I think that the people who are inclined to watch Fox and pretty much believe what they see are not going to say: “Oh, my gosh.Now, I can't possibly believe it, because this one person has left."There's still a huge cadre of people at Fox who are continuing to do the same thing.There's the very dominant voice of the high-rated Sean Hannity and his prime-time show.I think that’s a much stronger message than Ralph Peters leaving.
To those who already think that Fox is almost state TV, or is guilty of pro-Trump propaganda, they see it as evidence toward their point of view.But I don’t know that it changes people’s minds.I mean, maybe a few people, but not enough to make much of a difference.
How important is it to feed the machine at a place like Fox with increasing intensity, with increasing distraction or whatever it is, conflict?
Well, the whole thing about cable news is that there's a lot of time to fill.And you want to keep your viewers both entertained and kind of stimulated.We see this across the board.It’s certainly true at MSNBC and at CNN, and certainly true at Fox, that they know their audience, and they're going to play to that audience.So you do see the continuation of Hannity doing his thing.It does ramp up, and it simply continues.
… He watches television all morning long.But he’s not really just watching television; he is learning from the television.Like his research, especially Fox, it’s, as you say, a feedback loop.He does something; they respond.He hears a response to the response; he does something.
… when they bring experts on, our so-called experts, or when they express opinion or break news, it doesn’t take very long for Trump to respond to that.You can look at these things side by side and see how quickly it goes from an interview on Fox or an opinion expressed on Fox right into Trump’s Twitter feed.
One of these moments, one of the good examples, is the idea that he had his wires tapped by that bad guy, Obama.It’s a weekend.He’s watching maybe Jeanine Pirro [on Fox’s Justice with Judge Jeanine], and this comes up, and suddenly, he’s tweeting, and off we go.
Right.And there was really no evidence to suggest that Trump had had his wires tapped by Barack Obama, but it took a long time for that storyline to go away.It was reflected and fed—the fire was fed on Fox.There was really nothing to it, but I think a lot of people believed it, because, you know, when you hear something enough times, a certain segment of the population will buy it, and I think Trump knows that.
… Describe Comey testifying, the impact of it.It’s televised.
Well, it was a huge media event, just the focus of the entire media world that day and leading up to it.And now you have the FBI director and the president of the United States at odds.It’s very high stakes, and there couldn’t have been more attention on it.Trump at that point was essentially calling Comey a liar, and soon afterward, Comey was saying, in his own tweets, “Well, we’ll see; the truth will come out,” and all of that sort of thing.So there was a lot of tension, a lot of conflict and a lot of drama.And I think for both of these people, that drama is, in some ways, comfortable and sought.
You mean both of them need it?
Yeah.I mean, I think to varying degrees.I don’t think Comey is quite at the level of Trump in terms of wanting that kind of drama, but he doesn’t shy away from it.… You need to tell the story, and I think that he did feel that he had to tell the story.Comey often seems to feel that he has to tell the story, as he did when he talked about the investigation of Clinton.He said he struggled with it, but ultimately he decided he had to tell it.I think that’s what we found out about Comey, is that he may struggle, but ultimately he wants to make a public statement.
… He fires Comey.…[There is] Comey standing in the Los Angeles FBI office with TV screens in the background.… He thinks it’s a prank when it says “Comey fired” on the screen.He thinks these FBI guys are just having a blast at his expense.It turns out to be true.
It turns out to be true that he was fired in a very—again, very peculiar way.I mean, the whole idea that the president would fire the FBI director at all is highly unusual, and to do it in that manner, in which there wasn’t even a conversation, but rather to find out—you know, Comey is away from the main office.He’s not in Washington.To find out by seeing news reports on a TV screen does seem designed to embarrass and mortify him, and to punish him, I would say.
… The next day, [Sergey] Lavrov, the foreign minister of Russia, and [Sergey] Kislyak, the ambassador, are invited to the Oval Office.No American press pool in the room.TASS, the former Soviet, now the Russian news agency, is there.A couple of stenographers are writing the notes.Trump says: “I got rid of that guy.[He] was a nut case.He’s a real problem on my shoulders.I feel like I can breathe again,” or whatever he says.
Right.There's laughter, and there are photos that come out of that meeting in which there's a lot of apparently very high spirits and “Isn't this kind of fun?"Pretty serious stuff to be laughing about with Russian officials.
What’s he doing there?Again, is this just he’s playing it as it lays?
I think so.I don’t think that that certainly was planned.Under any other president, the optics of it were horrible.They were horrible, but they—nothing seems to stick.So it was onto the next thing.And that’s part of Trump’s MO, is that there's always the next distraction and the next Twitter storm or the next outrageous news event that pulls you away, so that something like that, that might have dominated the news cycle for weeks with another president, is just another part of that day’s craziness.And the firehose of information and events and weirdness that’s coming out of Washington every single day, it’s hard to focus on even something like that.
The effect on the journalists—I talked to [Washington Post White House bureau chief] Phil Rucker, who was sitting in the newsroom while this is happening, not knowing exactly what was happening.People are coming out of the room, and he’s like, “What in the hell is going on?,” right, for that whole weekend, the firing of Comey, the whole thing.It’s almost like, if you're in journalism, in Washington, and this is happening every day with a new shock, a new event, as you say, distraction, what is the effect of that on journalism?
Well, I think just in a very basic way, Washington journalists are exhausted by all of this.There's no end to the news cycle.It is constant.Things can happen almost at any hour of the day and night, and there's no respite from it.There's definitely a fatigue that sets in, and also this sense of, it’s hard to put it all in context because there's so much of it.I think that’s one of the things that journalists have struggled to do and haven't always succeeded to do on behalf of their readers or their viewers, which is to really help people understand what the heck is going on here, because it’s onto the next thing; here is the outrage of the day.But by the end of the day, even that may be forgotten.There could be a new piece of craziness.
… Then Lester [Holt], is sitting there in a chair, waiting to talk to the president of the United States.And what happens then?
Lester Holt scores an interview with President Trump, and it’s a big deal.Lester Holt is one of the most prominent broadcast journalists in the country, and is well prepared.It turns out to be very newsy, because the subject of the interview is Comey’s firing, and in the course of the conversation, Holt asks him what it’s all about, and Trump actually comes right out and says, “Well, that ‘Russia thing’ was hanging over my head."These aren’t the exact words, but “I had to get some relief from it; it was a cloud over my head,” or something like that.
You know, you can't believe you're hearing this.There's a funny Saturday Night Live skit about it in which Holt says: “So that’s it, right?I got it."But no.In fact, it isn't that way; that there it is, you can hear it.Trump is saying, essentially, that he fired Comey not because of all this other stuff involving Clinton or the Rosenstein memo, but because he wanted to get rid of this pesky guy who was in charge of the Russia investigation.And it was a way to push that, “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?"And yet, even that hasn’t seemed to—it didn’t seem to get—I mean, it got a lot of attention, but it didn’t seem to have that stickiness that would be, “OK, this is the final word." …
So this is a more general question.Is there a press war?I know there's a press war going on between the President and the establishment press, or whatever we want to call it.Is there a kind of press war between and among the establishment and the Fox News, this battle for the truth or what is truth?
Well, so for one thing, I don’t actually think there's a war between the President and the press.So—
Good.Why?
I think that the president has declared war on the establishment press, but I do not think that the respectable and legitimate members of the press are responding in that fashion.My boss, [Washington Post editor] Marty Baron, is quick to say, “We’re not at war; we’re at work."We’re trying to get at the truth.We’re trying to report things out accurately and provide context and provide perspective.But there is no feeling that I have ever picked up either at The Washington Post, where I work now, or still certainly no people at the Times—and I've talked to them—people are not trying to bring him down.It’s not about that.We’re trying to report the facts.
So I don’t think there's a war between—to me, it’s a one-sided war, and on the other side, an effort to do our jobs.
… The going for Cohen, would seem to indicate that [the special prosecutor is] headed toward the business and the personal life, in lots of ways.So it signals a kind of strategy change.And what we’ve been talking about, this ramping up of media attacks, the president using Fox and tweets and others to articulate his position … what some people call and you’ve referenced it in one story, an anti-impeachment strategy.… We’re going to go after them, and we’re going to use somebody like Rudy [Giuliani], a TV prosecutor, to do it.Help me with that environment, in the post-Michael Cohen moment, where we are now.
I think that the Trump point of view on this, and the one that he tries to get out there, is that there are groups out there and institutions and people who want to impeach him.They don’t want to recognize that he won a legitimate election, and they're going to take him down unfairly, so, speaking to his base, in essence, “You need to know that, and you need to get onboard with the effort to protect me against that, because I may be vulnerable here."And the way to protect is in part to have a Congress that remains controlled by docile Republicans who won't challenge the president, so even if there were to be an effort to impeach, … even if there were an arguably impeachable offense—collusion, obstruction of justice—the Congress, under these circumstances, wouldn’t do anything about it.And the American people would be confused enough about what the heck is going on, not quite sure who to believe, that there wouldn’t be any huge effort to pressure their elected officials into doing anything.
That’s kind of the underpinning of all of this.And it’s a very legitimate idea that people are fatigued by all this news.They're mistrustful of institutions like Congress, like the press, like the intelligence community, and they're unlikely to rise up in numbers and at such strength that would force anything to happen.I think that’s the gamble here.That’s the Trump gambit.
… What do you think the view of the rule of law is that’s coming from the White House now?
Well, you don’t hear much from Trump that suggests that that is near and dear to his heart.He seems to be more interested in personal survival and the advancement of his agenda.You don’t hear him talking about the importance of everybody is equal under the law, and that goes for the president, too.In fact, he has said publicly and repeatedly that he could pardon himself if he wanted to, and I think that his recent pardons of various people are meant to send a message, and the message is: “I have sweeping powers to exonerate, and I will use them.And I may use them, or try to use them, even as far as my closest family members if it came to that, and maybe even myself."But then he’s quick to add: “But I won't have to do that, because I didn’t do anything wrong.There's no collusion."
Talk a little bit about the Humpty Dumpty effect and the reality.
So in Alice [’s Adventures] in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty is heard to say something like, “Words mean exactly what I want them to mean."Sometimes we feel that way in Trumpworld as well.Another version of Through the Looking Glass is that there seems to be not very much respect for verifiable fact that we must stick to; that all of this is kind of malleable.It’s like when Kellyanne Conway, early on in the controversy over the size of the inaugural crowd, said, “Well,” she said to Chuck Todd of NBC, “you know, you have your set of facts, and these are alternative facts."And Todd aptly and accurately said: “Well, there's no such thing as alternative facts, Kellyanne.Those are falsehoods."
But we are in a world now in which there doesn’t seem to be widespread agreement on what constitutes reality, and that’s very dangerous.
One thing I know I need you to talk about that I forgot to ask you is about Comey’s book tour, and the glorification of Comey, and the literally hundreds, probably, of interviews, and what the effect of that is.The boomlet, the phenomenon of Jim Comey, talk a little bit about that.
Well, Comey decided to fight back.He wrote a book, and then went on, as authors do—but this was a little more extreme—he started touring behind his book.And every news organization, or almost every news organization, did interviews with him.He was talking at all kinds of different venues and doing town halls and promoting his book, but also promoting, I think, a point of view that countered Trump’s line of thinking about what had happened, and certainly presented a problematic vision from the Trump administration’s point of view.
… You write about: This is not the Nixon era anymore; this is the Fox News era, and that that is a very important thing to understand, because you used to say the nation that turned against Nixon’s corrupt rejection of the rule of law may not even exist anymore.Can you explain that?
Well, Fox News has been around for a little over 20 years, and it has really changed the media environment.It’s not the only thing that’s changed it, but it has changed it, because it was set up to disparage and to use as a foil [of] the so-called left-leaning or establishment or mainstream media.It was against all of that.It’s part of the reason that the country is so polarized and so divided right now, is that media has become so divided and polarized.And Fox News, you can't talk about that without realizing that the invention, the creation of Fox News brought a lot of these elements to the fore.It wasn’t the first thing that did it.There were conservative talk radio hosts, but nothing with … the continual sweep and power of Fox.It’s been a highly influential part of the equation.
And I do think that it helps create a citizenry in which we don’t agree on much.There's the Fox News crowd, and there's the MSNBC crowd, and there are people who seek the center but are kind of pulled to one side or the other.Unlike in the Nixon era, where there [were] three networks and some dominant newspapers in general agreement on what was happening, we don’t have that anymore.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
