Through spectacle, intimidation, catching and killing, and even extortion, Donald Trump has been manipulating the media for longer than I’ve been alive.
Contemporary senility and insanity notwithstanding, it would be foolish to dismiss Trump’s lifelong compulsion to shape and sustain himself as a main character in our ever-shifting cultural zeitgeist as anything but masterful.
We saw this on full display during his latest State of the Union address – a long, dramatic spectacle carefully scripted and orchestrated entirely for reality television. It had all the trappings of Trump: pathological lying, pageantry, “celebrity” sightings, and a pornographic level of extractive human trauma.
If ever there were a shred of shame impeding Trump, it is painfully obvious that shame is long dead and gone now, not unlike his natural hair and complexion.
Longtime Canadian political journalist and author Susan Delacourt says she’s disturbed by what she’s seeing in some American newsrooms in the second Trump era – particularly within one that she’s followed all her life, and which was recently decimated thanks to Jeff Bezos: the Washington Post.
“I’m upset. I grew up in the Watergate era. I’ve canceled my subscription (to the Washington post),” she said in an interview with rabble in February.
“I would have thought it unthinkable even five years ago that the media would cave to intimidation like this. Some of the media’s power rests in its ability to shame people. But this President has no shame. He cannot be shamed into accountability,” said Delacourt.
“Nixon had shame. Trump doesn’t,” she said.
Director of the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University and head of Carleton’s journalism program, Allan Thompson, agrees that it is distressing to see news organizations that used to hold power to account now do the opposite – both in overtly supporting Trump and in making dubious decisions about broadcasting.
“There is a very active and organized move by Trump supporters on the right to buy up, take control, or create their own media outlets that will support the movement and be part of the cause,” Thompson said.
If watching Karoline Leavitt’s slick Washington press briefings are any indication, this is absolutely true. Leavitt and her team have their marching orders and they are loyally implementing them. Since Trump’s re-election, Leavitt and her colleagues have taken extraordinary steps to alienate, smear, and destabilize legitimate news media by harassing, berating, and even barring entire news organizations from the White House. All standard ethical protocol went out the window months ago.
Perhaps most disturbingly, Trump’s staffers have actually stripped press credentials from respected political journalists. Journalists have been replaced with sycophantic, blindly MAGA-partisan YouTube streamers and social media influencers funded by MAGA and in some cases the Kremlin, like Tim Pool and Brian Glenn – who, predictably, ask nothing but carefully-rehearsed propagandic softballs designed to flatter the Trump administration, generate clickbait to fundraise, and/or mislead the American public.
Given Trump’s lifelong obsession with media attention, he’s become adept at controlling his personal narrative. To ‘catch and kill’ a story is one trick Trump’s deployed many times over the years to curb bad coverage or get out ahead of a story before it breaks. He’s done this to keep many of the women he’s sexually harassed and assaulted quiet, to kill stories about the many more women he’s had extramarital affairs with – Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels being two famous examples – and of course, as we’ve seen most recently, to cover up the many stories about his long personal friendship with convicted pedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein.
Former lead anchor of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Peter Mansbridge, tells me he doesn’t blame individual journalists for recent media failures or capitulations in the Trump era. Instead, he sees the ownership behind some of these news organizations as the real problem: “who can’t get on their knees fast enough.”
“I mean when you look at these examples, like CBS or the Washington Post – and I have friends at both – these are really well-established journalistic operations. However, the ownership is what’s crushing both of them,” he said.
“Those owners are, clearly, very much in Trump’s pocket.”
Many probably don’t realize that Trump’s own autobiography The Art of the Deal wasn’t even written by Trump but by a ghostwriter. Journalist Tony Schwartz has since lamented and even renounced his decision to write that book as he now feels as though he’s helped create a monster. He’s also shared his personal certainty – after studying the man extensively and interviewing those closest to him – that Donald Trump is a racist and misogynistic sociopath who must be contained for the good of humanity.
Ten days before the 2016 election, Schwartz delivered a lecture to the Oxford Union asserting that Trump “is a dangerous threat to the future of our planet” as well as “an unbelievably effective manipulator of the media.”
The one and only person bearing the Trump name who has ever really stood up to Donald is his niece, Mary. In her book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man she describes the toxic world that shaped her uncle and begs those with the power to stop him to do so:
“No one knows how Donald came to be who he is better than his own family,” she wrote.
“Unfortunately, almost all of them remain silent out of loyalty or fear. I’m not hindered by either of those. Donald has always needed to perpetuate the fiction that my grandfather started that he is strong, smart, and otherwise extraordinary, because facing the truth – that he is none of those things – is too terrifying for him to contemplate.”
“Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of my siblings, destroyed my father. I can’t let him destroy my country.”
When Trump was kicked off Twitter during the January 6 insurrection, before another certain unhinged billionaire purchased the platform then deliberately destroyed it, Trump proceeded to create his own similar platform hilariously entitled ‘Truth Social.’ He’s been self-publishing an endless firehose of lies there ever since – unchecked, unquestioned, and often enjoying the fact that his posts wind up in the news every day, regardless how dishonest or repulsive the message.
But lately Trump has taken even more audacious and authoritarian steps to shape consequential news coverage – like acquiring legacy news outlets then effectively destabilizing them.
Bari Weiss, a MAGA media darling known for her repulsive contrarian takes on issues like the ongoing genocide in Palestine and men’s violence against women, was tapped by Trump-friendly billionaire David Ellison to dismantle CBS – a once beloved institution formerly helmed by titans of American journalism like Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.
Peter Klein, a past producer for CBS’s flagship investigative program 60 Minutes who now works as a professor of journalism at the University of British Columbia said he’s deeply concerned by the editorial direction CBS is moving since the arrival of Weiss. Klein notes that while he understands the many Americans who’ve felt disconnected and unrepresented by mainstream press in recent years, he’s seen a distinct shift recently in the quality of journalism produced by his past employer.
In a recent column for the Toronto Star, Klein wrote:
“In the more than 95 years since CBS News was founded, there had never been a role of ‘editor-in-chief.’ Like most network news divisions, there’s a president of news, who serves as a buffer with corporate owners. But Weiss’s position short-circuits that process, as she answers only to the new corporate owner of CBS, conservative billionaire David Ellison, who is close with U.S. President Trump.”
