By Becket Adams
Sunday, December 21, 2025
One of the first skills humans develop is the ability to
recognize patterns.
When it comes to the Republican Party, it’s impossible
not to notice the pattern of its members saying one thing and doing another.
I’m talking specifically about the gap between GOP rhetoric and actions
regarding the legacy news media, which follows the same pattern as the party’s
approach to similarly right-coded issues, especially abortion.
Republicans talk a lot of trash about “fake news.” But
that’s what it is: talk. When it comes to engaging with mainstream reporters
and jumping at the chance to appear as a profile subject in one of those glossy
periodicals, there is no cheaper date than a Republican officeholder.
The latest example of this eagerness to consort with a
supposed sworn enemy came last week with the publication of Vanity Fair’s
profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The profile included a
series of (unflattering) photos of top Trump advisers, including Karoline
Leavitt, JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Dan Scavino, among others.
The article is painfully embarrassing for the White
House. The staffers involved ended up looking just as vainglorious and out of
their depth as their critics claim. They don’t come across as powerful or
savvy, which was clearly their goal, as evidenced by their power poses in their
glamour shots. They come across more like beauty pageant contestants in a
coal-mining town with a population of 50, with the main difference being that
that town has at least enough good sense to recognize itself as a small-time,
amateur operation.
No one involved in the Vanity Fair ordeal escapes
unscathed, especially Wiles, who, for reasons only her diary is privy to,
thought it was a good idea to do eleven on-the-record interviews in which she
made not-at-all prudent and hardly flattering comments about her colleagues and
even her boss, at one point comparing him to a manic alcoholic. Wiles now
claims she was taken out of context, though audio of her remarks contradicts
this. Setting aside the weakness of her defense, we still have the unanswered
question: What was she thinking by going on the record eleven times with any
reporter, let alone one writing for Vanity Fair?
Is the White House just now discovering the concept of a
hostile news media? This can’t be, since Vance often led supporters in jeering and booing journalists during his
2024 campaign speeches; Leavitt often describes members of the legacy media as
“propaganda machines”; and Miller
and Scavino
frequently use the term “fake news.”
Yet here they all are in the pages of Vanity Fair,
while Wiles dishes as if she were the last person on earth to remember that she
is the chief of staff.
So, one has to ask: at what point will Republican
rhetoric align with Republican action? At what point does the GOP’s stated
position on legacy media manifest itself in Republicans not drooling
over the chance to appear before CBS News’s Margaret Brennan to take a drubbing
on national TV?
Because the way it looks from here, they have no plan to
change their relationship with the press, even though they clearly enjoy
complaining to their constituents about the state of modern media.
Does this sound familiar? It should.
If you were born between 1973 and 2022, you grew up in a
time when Republicans promised in every election cycle to do something about Roe
v. Wade. It was a major campaign pledge; no election would pass without a
Republican somewhere promising action on that hated Supreme Court decision,
only to shift focus to almost anything else after winning.
More than 50 years of promises with no progress — until,
that is, the double whammy of Mitch McConnell in the Senate and Donald Trump in
the White House. Only then did the promise materialize, but not because of any
actual legislation or long-term plans by the GOP. You can attribute Roe’s
demise to two men, aside from the justices themselves. Trump, for his
stubbornness in refusing to back down from nominating conservative Supreme
Court justices, and McConnell, for his long-term, nearly obsessive effort to
place conservatives on the bench.
As for the party itself, if you didn’t already suspect by
2022 that it had no real plan for or intention of ever taking action on Roe,
the fact that its members were caught flat-footed by the decision’s overturning
and were unable to answer even basic questions about proper abortion limits
should have removed all doubt.
Where am I going with this? This extreme mismatch between
word and deed is part of a pattern.
Members of the Trump administration, like the party as a
whole, will make a lot of noise about our “corrupt” and “dishonest” media. And
the moment a photographer from Vanity Fair or another prestige outlet
shows up, they’ll stumble over themselves like giggling cheerleaders to be the
first to win the star quarterback’s favor.
The modern GOP’s stance toward the media today is like
the old GOP’s stance toward Roe v. Wade — a lot of theater. A good show
designed to keep the faithful voting down-ballot and writing campaign checks.
But much of the anti-media talk is a gimmick, one that builds a shared sense of
purpose and can also serve as a shield against legitimate journalistic
scrutiny.
Don’t you just hate unfair news coverage? Me too!
Remember to make checks payable to . . .
The reality is that most Republicans want to be loved in
the same way that even the Democrats’ greatest dimwits are loved — only this is
the mainstream media we’re talking about. Republicans will never enjoy that
affection, no matter how much access they offer. They will always be freaks to
news outlets such as Vanity Fair, and no amount of overt ingratiation
will change that. In fact, that very behavior will only reinforce in Vanity
Fair’s mind that Republicans are demagoguing to the masses.
The added downside is that those who actually vote
Republican will eventually come around to the same conclusion.
Hope the glamour shots were worth it.
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