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"Must Indie, now on Indie.de/recruting." "This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent. By now you've heard that when Donald Trump left the NATO summit in Turkey last month,
“the Secret Service transferred him off of Air Force 1 and onto an alternative plane, flying”
him out clandestinely to avoid an Iranian threat. Many of Trump's cabinet members were left on the decoy plane. Now new leaks from inside the administration are making this whole affair look considerably darker. It appears several of Trump's most loyal aides were transferred to the Secret plane with
him, even as reporters were not informed about any of this, and were left on the decoy plane as well.
All this neatly symbolizes Trump's abusive and authoritarian relationship with the media,
so to dig into all of it were taught into Margaret Sullivan. She regularly calls on the press to treat Trump as the abnormal threat he truly is on her excellent sub-stack American crisis. Margaret, nice to have you on. "Thank you, Greg.
Good to see you and hear you." "You too. We learned from the Washington Post that Trump was secretly removed from Air Force 1 onto a catering truck without the knowledge of the press corps and possibly many of his cabinet officials who were left on the plane.
The time is as reporting on this is quite scathing, it notes that, quote, "If Iranians were trying to shoot down the presidential plane, the subterfuse that protected the president may have made targets of those who flew aboard the jet."
“Margaret, can you explain why that's so highly irregular and objectionable?”
"Yes, it's highly unusual, it's actually shocking that Donald Trump would arrange for himself to be flown in safety while leaving many members of the press on the plane who didn't realize the threat and didn't realize that the president was removed to yet another plane. He has treated the press in a very unusual and very bad way for years now. And unfortunately, many members of the mainstream media, they don't seem to care or they
don't know what to do about it, but they keep covering him in this very normalizing way. Like, well, he's the president, so therefore we have to believe everything he says or treat it with a great deal of reference. And this, I think, is a very vivid example of what he thinks of them." So now, based on more leaks, news outlets are reporting that others who accompany Trump
on the catering truck and onto the separate plane included White House deputy chief of staff, Dan Skavino, Walt Nauta, another aide, Top Aid, and Natalie Harp, Trump's executive assistant who kind of functions like a security blanket to the president. I don't know, Margaret, that seems pretty questionable. Obviously, there are reasons Trump would want his closest aides around him.
But this occurred even as all these other people were left on the decoy plane. So his actions were to protect and keep around him. The people you just mentioned, and one of them is Pete Hexeth, and not to protect and not to keep in mind or think about the welfare apparently of the press and some of his Cabinet members, including the Secretary of State.
“So I think it is very telling, and it certainly speaks to the relationship with the press.”
In a bad way. It really does, and so something similar happened with President Bill Clinton, at least similar in the sense that there was a decoy operation. But in that case, the press was briefed beforehand. It was explained to the White House correspondence association, and they were told what sort
of safety procedures were putting place for journalists. It's just plainly obvious that the Trump group didn't think about the journalists at all in this case, right? Yeah, I mean, maybe they had some dire thoughts about it like well, if something happens
Well.
But we don't have to go quite that dark here.
“I think what we can see is that there wasn't an effort to inform, there wasn't an effort”
to protect, and also what ends up happening is that the press then is misleading the public about what exactly took place, and with no correction afterwards, it had to be turned up weeks later by the Washington Post. It's so strange. So Margaret, what do you make of the White House correspondence associations role in this whole
thing? They were not informed in the case of the Clinton decoy operation, the White House correspondence association was informed at the time. And now the White House correspondence association is reacting kind of neatly to what's happened here.
What do you make of that? So as I understand, what's happened is that the new president, if that's the title of the White House Correspondence Association, who happens to be a Fox News correspondent, got together with White House officials, and apparently I think with perhaps a written statement as well as spoken words said, gee, you know, we really didn't appreciate that too much, and it's
a problem. And please, you know, let's not do that again. But was there a huge outcry? Was there a sense of my God, you can't do this? It's an absolute outrage.
No. And this is the same White House correspondence association that just had, you know, a big gala dinner at which president Trump trashed the press, they knew that would happen. And they did it anyway, and I can pretty much assure you that even after this, it will happen again next year.
There'll be a gala event, he'll be invited, he'll come, he'll say some horrible things about the fake news media, and it's a ridiculous relationship that should not be. They really should be standing up to him. They really should be doing a lot more in solidarity and for the public. I mean, that's the part that bothers me.
Because this is about access, it's not for the public interest. That's really interesting. I'd like to pick up a little bit on that. You wrote a good piece about the White House correspondence dinner with Trump. He just relentlessly abused reporters, personally abused them.
And he lied about the media having Trump derangedments syndrome, or at least Trump's lackeys did that. I think on some fundamental level, the White House correspondence association just doesn't want to say that Trump is different. That he's different from other presidents in the most fundamental way, in the sense that
he really just has zero respect for the media's institutional role in a democracy and previous presidents, they did all kinds of disgusting things, like under Bush, the propaganda was terrible, under Clinton, there was a lot of manipulation, et cetera, et cetera.
“But I think on some level, they recognize that the press has an important institutional”
role in liberal democracy, and this group does not recognize that at all, and that's something the White House correspondence association doesn't think it can say. What do you think of all that?
They will never do that because I think two things.
One is that they're very afraid of losing access to the White House. It's their job not to dig up dirt about the White House, or really get under the surface. It's mostly their job to, for example, be in the briefing room and ask a question and then the evening news with David Muir, or whoever it may be, will take that as a sound bite and show we're doing our jobs here.
So much of it is optics, so some of it is losing access, not being able to do that. Some of it is just this strange normalization that has gone on for years now, in which the reporters seem to be saying to themselves, well, he's the president and no one can argue with the fact that what the president does creates news, so we're going to simply treat it as news, and if we need to do a low fact checking or pushback, we'll do that, but nothing
that's very radical, whereas he's radical, and so I think something much more powerful
needs to be done in reaction to that, but don't hold your breath. Yeah, and I think there's a bigger calculation as well on the part of the news media and maybe you could shed a little light on this, they really think that the election of Trump represented some sort of seismic cultural event that repudiated them.
“I think that's how they think about it on some level, a lot of reporters, he called”
them fake news for years, they just kind of let it roll off their backs, and then Trump
Was reelected, so maybe the American people agree that we're fake news, right?
Like, I think that may be the way a lot of these reporters conceive of it, and they think
to themselves, we can't really point out that Trump is different because that puts us on the wrong side of this kind of shifting cultural phenomenon. What do you think of that? You think that's possible? I do think that when Trump was elected in 2016, there was a kind of internal reckoning.
Was it the right reckoning? I'm not so sure about that. I think the right reckoning would have been to say, "Gee, maybe we paid a little too much attention to Hillary Clinton's email problems," and maybe we did a few things that were out of line.
But no, the reckoning was we need to get out of DC in New York and California and get it into the heartland. Okay, that's reasonable. The Washington Post put together in America desk, you know, that's all fine, but it isn't
“the only thing, I wish that the press corps would have in their minds and I wish their bosses”
would insist on their actual role in a democracy, which is to work be the eyes and ears of the public and to represent the public. And I just don't see that. It's so much is about ratings and optics and access, all the wrong things, profits, shareholders. What does my boss, you know, what merger is my boss trying to do right now?
That's not what the first amendment was supposed to accomplish.
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“Ingrid and in deed present, drops, by which you don't have a lot of loudness, you need to be busy.”
What's the matter? What's the matter? What's the matter? It's a lot of fun. It's fun.
It's fun. It's fun. It's fun. It's fun. That's a job for sponsored jobs.
With real profits, it won't happen. For trading, for sale, and for the qualified talent with sponsored jobs. Master indeed, Alpha, yet off in deed.e/recruiting. Certainly not. I want to flag a quote from Joe Lockhart, press secretary to Bill Clinton about the difference
between the Clinton decoy example and the current on Lockhart said this quote.
They just didn't seem to give a second thought to anybody, but the president and the
few people who were with him. We went out of our way to make sure the maximum number of people, especially civilians, were protected and not human shields. They didn't even think about it, and to me, that's the big difference, close quote. Margaret, there's an irony to this whole thing I want to flag.
The press actually was absolutely terrible to Bill Clinton if you recall how Bill and Hillary
“were covered by contrast, now Trump pretends he's mistreated by the press, right?”
But there's no comparison whatsoever between the way the press treated Bill Clinton and the way they treat Trump, they treated Clinton much, much worse, and much more unfairly. Yet Trump world doesn't respect the media's institutional role, it's just everything is upside down. That's right, and you know, the role of the media and the role of the press and their sort
of power to hold public officials, especially the president, accountable, has radically changed since the Clinton years, and that's for many reasons that could be a book. But one of them is the decline of local news. One of them is that Trump is, you know, we may criticize him harshly for certain things, but he's very good at, you know, sort of blasting this misinformation out there and then
when he's called on it, blaming the press. I mean, it's, we're in a different world now, and that's a part of the, you know, contrast between what happened in the Clinton years and what's happened now. Also, so many of the things that Trump does would be impeachable offenses, but we're so overwhelmed by all of it that I think that it's, as somebody wrote this past week very
Well, Craig Unger, nothing moves the needle, and this is another thing that I...
will not move the needle.
Yeah, it might not, I guess we'll see what happens in the midterms.
“I think things are sort of on the right track there.”
Let me ask you this though, Margaret, is there another thing going on here with the press and Trump that maybe we should pin down, which is that the press sort of feels like it's on its back foot in a big sense, right? Not just these of you, the culture with Trump's victory, but also because of all the changes in the media landscape, which are actually really delivering the media some pretty severe
lows, you know, TikTok, the way the internet works now, right, the role of independent media, which is really kind of flourishing in a certain way and poaching people away from
the MSM, and of course, like what you're talking about, the local press disappearing,
I wonder if the press feels institutionally really under threat and defensive in a very big sense, and that too makes them somewhat unwilling to really say that Trump is different. What do you think of that? Well, I mean, there's a lot of pushback against the mainstream press right now from the public, from public officials, yes, but you know, we have a job to do and we ought
to do it and not be worried about whether what foot we're on or whether we're sensitive and got hurt or let somebody call us a name or something, you know, we have a constitutionally protected job to do, and that should be that should be front and center for us. Just to wrap this up, it seems to me like there's sort of two stories at once, in certain
respects, I want to give the media some credit here, you alluded to the Washington Post's
great scoop on all this, and some respects the press is reporting as aggressively on Donald Trump as I've seen the press report on any president in my lifetime. There really is a lot of great work being done, but on the other side of the equation, you've got like the conventions of political reporting aren't really kind of shifting to meet the moment in some sense, the headlines don't really reflect the seriousness of
what the reporters themselves are turning up. This is something you've talked about, like the conventions of political reporting, how do we get the press to take a little more seriously, this difficulty, that the conventions of political reporting really aren't up to the moment, and need rethinking. Well, it comes from leadership.
“I really think that the leadership, the top editors, the top, you know, people at the really”
big news organizations need to send that message out to the troops that, you know, we're going to bear down on this in a different way, including through the headlines, I mean, very often, and this is, you know, I think part of what you're saying, very often there is a very strong story, and it has a very wimpy headline on it, and often people don't get past the headline, you know, they're skimming, they're, they see a news alert, they
see a tweet or a blue sky, you know, whatever it may be, they're not going to read into the 11th or 12th paragraph, so we see a headline that says critics say something, and it seems just like more infighting, when in fact, the story could be very strong. So I think that needs to be taken seriously, but, you know, self reflection is not something I've noticed as a really high value or ability of the, you know, big journalism.
So do you think this latest thing has the capacity to change things a little? I mean, you could not ask for a clearer look at just the amount of pure contempt that Trump and his people have for the media than this one, will that change anything? I would love to think so, Greg, but I just don't, there have been so many things that have come along that seem like the thing that will change stuff.
“I think the only thing that will change anything is the overall accumulation of, you know,”
the public saying, there's just too much now, it's just, it's gone too far, and the mid terms are going to be extremely important because Trump is unrestrained. And so if he, if he, if the checks and balances start to work, I think that changes everything. Yeah, I think that's a really important point.
I just want to close on if Democrats can take one or both houses of Congress, they're going to have more of a role in setting the agenda of what the press is talking about. And you know, Trump's going to look weaker. And if there's one thing that reporters can really sniff out, it's when someone's weak or losing.
They like that story, right, Margaret? They certainly liked it with the end of Biden's presidency.
Well, we'll see if they apply it here.
I don't know.
“Well, folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Margaret Sullivan's excellent”
sub-stack. American crisis.
Please subscribe to that.
Margaret, thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to you. Thanks, Greg.
“You've been listening to the Daily Blast with me, your host Greg Sargent.”
The Daily Blast is a new Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler on the DSR
network.
