When the President Hates the Press — and Has the Espionage ActFrom license-stripping threats to sedition talk, Trump’s media crusade isn’t just bluster — it fits a troubling American pattern
Since pivoting from real estate investor to politician a decade ago, Donald J. Trump has harshly and regularly criticized journalists and the news media. As tabloid fodder in New York City, Trump was a celebrity and found that any press was good press for building a brand. Scrutiny of Trump became serious after he decided on his first run for president and as he began to mow through more than a dozen other Republican primary contenders. At that stage — as it would be with anyone having a serious chance to become a presidential nominee of a major political party — his personal and professional life, which included his businesses seeking bankruptcy protection six times, came under deeper examination. By the time Trump entered the White House in 2017 he had a rude awakening that reporters assigned to cover politics and the presidency were not going to fawn over him and he would no longer successfully manipulate the media as he did with the local New York newsrooms. Coverage of the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape made that clear. The sensationalistic and unverified sexual kompromat of the Steele Dossier published just 10 days before Trump’s inauguration gave him further cause to distrust the press. As I detailed in my 2024 book, Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalist’s Story of Covering the President―and Why It Matters, nearly every U.S. president has complained about their press coverage and not without good reason. George Washington was pilloried, while in office, as senile, a thief and a want-to-be king. Washington did not fight back, but his successor, John Adams, did. Adams, “His Rotundity,” was further described by one political writer as a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams’ enthusiasm for the Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) allowed his Federalist prosecutors, including traveling Supreme Court justices, to charge at least two dozen critics, many of them newspapermen. Republican papers accused Adams of using these laws to muzzle the press and jail political opponents, calling the Sedition Act an “unconstitutional exercise of power.” That was the last peacetime use of laws by a U.S. president to imprison critics in the news media. President Trump’s attack on White House pool reporters (those who go into the Oval Office or fly with him on Air Force One) have recently become more frequent and caustic. I discussed this today at some length during a live interview on France 24. The Society of Professional Journalists, incidentally, deems itself “galvanized” by Trump’s “Quiet, piggy” epithet and is fundraising off of it. “For a limited time, take $15 off an SPJ Pro membership with code: PIGGY.” There are a couple of relevant elements I did not discuss during the France 24 interview. The reporters who Trump targets are interacting with him in a respectful and matter-of-fact manner. The president could ignore their questions (as he sometimes does). He could restrict the duration of his encounters (as did most of his predecessors). He could choose not to summon the press pool. That is his prerogative. Barack Obama, as president, rarely answered questions off-the-cuff when he was meeting with foreign heads of state in the Oval Office. By contrast, those fleeting encounters were known as a “grip-and-grin,” as they consisted of a handshake and silent smiles for the photographers, with the media entourage frequently ushered out in less than 60 seconds. Chats on Air Force One, prior to this presidency, were mostly off-the-record and almost never on camera. Administrations, prior to Trump’s, engaged in some level of message discipline, planning what the president would say, how and when. There is no such coherent planning in this White House. In summary, Trump’s problem with the press are primarily of his own making. Combined with the recent and repeated threats from the president and his FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, to strip some broadcast networks of the licenses for the TV stations they own and operate, it is increasingly likely the Trump administration will escalate attacks on mainstream journalism to further attempt intimidation and as an added bonus, for the delight of the president’s dwindling base of supporters. It is possible a thin-skinned Trump, under the guise of emergency powers, should he declare war against, say, Venezuela — or in response to a perceived domestic threat (such as the “terrorists” of the amorphous Antifa) , utilizes the Department of Justice or the Department of Homeland Security to raid newsroom or jail journalists. Could this happen in a democracy? It is a frequent occurrence in India, regarded as the world’s most populous democracy. In February, an innocuous social media posting prompted a high-ranking Trump administration figure to label me a potential traitor, which led to VOA’s upper management suspending me in an ineffectual act of anticipatory obedience. Rhetorical insurrection, treason (the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution) and sedition are being bandied about the West Wing of the White House this week with Trump on his favorite social media platform threatening death by hanging for a half dozen Democrats in Congress, all who served in the military or the CIA, after they made a video appealing to U.S. service members to “refuse unlawful orders” and “stand up for our laws.” Trump and those who prepare his Truth Social ripostes likely are unaware there further precedent for such prosecutions in American history. Armed with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, President Woodrow Wilson imprisoned political foes (Socialist Eugene V. Debs, who had received six percent of the popular vote in the 1912 presidential election) and prosecuted editors and publishers for encouraging resistance to the military draft, questioned America’s involvement in the world war and the motives of those who backed sending U.S. troops to Europe. The Sedition Act was repealed in 1920. The Espionage Act remains in force. Share
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