By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, September 18, 2025
Donald Trump returned from Labor Day weekend to announce
in an Oval Office press conference his intention to send the National Guard
into cities such as Baltimore and Chicago to respond to urban street crime. Two
days later, he called another press conference to announce that he was issuing
an executive order to restore the Department of Defense’s pre–Cold War name,
the Department of War. And a week before that, he had issued a similar
executive order banning flag-burning, despite clear Supreme Court precedent on
the matter.
The constitutional complexities of all these matters were
left to his defenders, detractors, and the media to debate furiously — and the
debate rages on. Meanwhile, Russo-Ukrainian peace talks fell silent once again,
several members of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention resigned in
protest of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s vaccine-skeptical policies, and the American
economy produced alarming job numbers for the second month in a row as Trump’s
tariff regime faces an uncertain fate before the Supreme Court.
Which of these seven different stories, spanning two
weeks, was the focus of the media? All have received roughly equal coverage and
emphasis on social media and in mainstream news reports. It is but a single
illustration of the effect Trump has had on a mainstream media he has conquered
and broken. He is now the undisputed ringmaster in what has become, by his own
canny design, a media circus. He has created a relentless flow of headlines,
Truth Social rants, press conference quips, and opportunistic administration
initiatives to divert the attention of the masses, crowding out unfavorable
coverage of his setbacks and manufacturing his preferred narratives.
It is a strategy that owes its underlying philosophy to
Donald Rumsfeld as much as to Donald Trump’s own skills: one of shock and awe,
intended to overwhelm a media environment that is ill equipped to process the
president’s omnipresence in our cultural conversation. It has been a
brilliantly effective public relations strategy, taken on its own terms. It has
kept the spotlight forever on the president’s actions, rather than on their
repercussions, and kept a surly pack of Washington journalists in its place —
well fed with “content” and too distracted to focus on his vulnerabilities.
But it has also destroyed whatever remaining power
Trump’s media enemies may have hoped to wield in the wake of his reelection.
The president, when his charms or powers of persuasion have proven
insufficient, has sued his critics and leveraged the powers of his presidency
to punish their corporate overlords. Though media opponents continue to whimper
and criticize, he has mastered them.
***
To properly understand just how Trump has managed to
quickly turn the mainstream media onto their backs as if they were turtles,
their legs flailing helplessly in the air, you need to consider what a
demoralized state they were in by January 2025. I would tell you that Donald
Trump’s second inauguration ushered in as singular a presidential media
performance as any in my adult memory, but I can’t, for I had just lived
through the 2024 campaign experience of watching Joe Biden melt away onstage
during the presidential debate as though he had mistakenly stared into the Ark
of the Covenant instead of at his notes.
And that is where we must begin. That debate meltdown
irrevocably shattered the public’s confidence in President Biden, yes, but also
in the Washington media class that had — wittingly or otherwise — helped
conceal his feebleness from the voters. Why was America being told by these
journalists and media figures, right up until the moment in June when Biden
self-destructed, that he was as fit as a fiddle? Trump had run against the
mainstream media — using their obvious disdain for him as a foil — throughout his
career. But after June 2024, the entire nation was as receptive to his argument
about their untrustworthiness as his fans long had been.
Trump, vengeful as ever, was happy to tighten the screws
on that professional class during the campaign. He sued ABC News for defamation
after George Stephanopoulos incorrectly claimed that Trump had been found
guilty of rape in the E. Jean Carroll case. He sued CBS News for failing to
publish an unedited version of its interview with the verbally fumbling
presidential candidate Kamala Harris. He sued pollster Ann Selzer and the Des
Moines Register for, of all things, publishing an incorrect last-minute
poll that showed Harris winning Iowa (she lost by 13 percentage points). These
lawsuits could be shelved by media corporations so long as Trump was merely a
candidate for office. President-elect Trump’s legal threats, however, took on
real urgency. (In the first two cases, settlements, including donations to
Trump’s presidential library in lieu of damages, have been reached.)
Finally, the demoralized media — already conscious of its
public loss of credibility — were also suffering a lingering hangover from the
soporific Biden era, when a mentally failing president would only occasionally
poke his head out from the White House to provide proof of life. That left them
woefully ill prepared for the blitzkrieg to come. The rush of presidential
activity in that first week of the Trump administration alone — via executive
order, press conference, social media, and government initiative — and the
unexpected monsoon of news swamped most journalists. For those paying
attention, the storm clouds had been gathering long before January 20, like
ominous flickers of lightning cloaked within distant thunderheads. (The surreal
idea of Matt Gaetz as attorney general floated off in the distance for a week
and then quickly disappeared, like a nightmare apparition.)
But the heavens opened up only on Inauguration Day, with
a torrent of executive orders banning affirmative action, DEI, and
transgenderism in the military, among other things. Trump purported to revoke
birthright citizenship with one hand and the security clearances of his
political enemies with the other. He introduced Elon Musk and DOGE into the
administration, a recipe for chaos. (Musk proceeded to send an email to all
federal government employees, offering to accept their immediate resignation.
It didn’t work.) Trump announced a massive program of deportations — and
promptly sent Kristi Noem on ICE raids in the ride-along seat next to Tom
Homan, for the cameras.
It was a first-week performance so energetic,
boundary-pushing, and audaciously head-spinning that Democratic activists —
already possessed by implacable rage — have been calling for an exorcist ever
since. Less noted, perhaps, is the effect it had on the mainstream media, who
have had their investigative and reportorial focus hopelessly scattered by not
one or two but twelve separate major controversies to cover all at once.
National Review’s favorite thinker Vladimir Lenin
is said to have observed, “there are decades when nothing happens, and there
are weeks when decades happen.” We are more than three-quarters of a year into
the second Trump term, and that flood of political news has continued
undiminished: Trump’s tariff regime, idle threats to annex Greenland and Canada
(the latter done quite intentionally, to prevent the victory of a conservative
government in Canada he would have felt compelled to cooperate with instead of
use as a piñata), a military strike on Iran — this is but a partial list of the
past seven months’ major political stories, one that could have filled out all
four years of the Biden administration’s term. All of this gushes forth
unceasingly from Washington, D.C., as if Trump had unscrewed the top from a
White House fire hydrant and decided to douse our political discourse in his
own brand of news.
***
At his core, Trump will always be a creature of New York
City media, the sort of person who is accustomed to threatening bad news out of
existence: If they don’t report it, or they move on to talking about
something else, it’s like it never happened at all! (His recent tantrum in
firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for reporting
embarrassing labor statistics, is completely of a piece with this assumption.)
His operative premise is that the media shape reality if not create it outright,
crafting narratives that the amnesiac masses lap up like slop. Reality has
always mattered to Trump less than perceptions of it have.
The mainstream media’s most fiercely progressive (or
remote and Apollonian) journalists may hate Donald Trump, but as Trump well
knows, they need him, and they must dance to whatever tune he chooses to call.
They will snap and snarl at him even as they scarf down every scrap of fetid
meat he decides to hand-feed them. He has mastered the media, much as an animal
tamer walks a captive animal in restraints around a sawdust circle for an
amazed crowd to gawk at. The media coverage of Trump’s second term has already
taken on a tellingly different cast than that of his first: reporting inflected
— for the first time — by a consciousness of the media’s acute weakness in a
game of power they used to dominate. Trump glories in it.
Trump’s most recognizable dramatic quality has forever
been his hubris. And hubris inevitably breeds nemesis. One of the engineers of
the Iraq War, the ones behind “shock and awe,” famously boasted to a reporter,
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” That turned
out not to be quite the case; reality got a vote as well. Trump has a similar
mindset, and one can only wonder whether he will meet a similar fate.
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