A Revealing Exchange Between Donald Trump and Kaitlan Collins
· The Atlantic
When CNN’s Kaitlan Collins approached President Trump with a question about the Iran war at the United Nations General Assembly yesterday, the president scolded her for being there at all. “I’m surprised that CNN is here covering me,” Trump said, adding, “You should not be here covering me.”
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Presumably, he said this because CNN is among the three outlets, along with MS NOW and Politico, that Trump has barred from White House grounds because he didn’t like their coverage. But, to state the obvious, the United Nations is not the White House. If a journalist is denied a press pass from one entity, she’s not precluded from getting credentialed by another. As Collins said to Trump, “The United Nations allowed us in, sir.”
The exchange highlights Trump’s warped understanding of journalism—in which stories are either good or bad, reporters are “friendly” or “terrible,” and a president decides who covers him and who doesn’t. “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” he said when he banned CNN and the other two outlets. “Now, if they want to write them, that’s fine. But I don’t have to let them into my—into the people’s house.”
As Trump noted when he corrected himself, the White House serves the American people—but so does the press. Since the days of FDR, a cadre of rotating print, TV, and radio reporters have traveled with the president wherever he goes, including on weekends and holidays, to provide an unbroken and independent record of everything the president says and does in public. This press pool exists because not every reporter can constantly trail the president; neither can every citizen. Political reporters stand in for people who want to know what their most important elected representative is doing, but who have day jobs.
The importance of the pool became especially visible this week when, in solidarity, the other four networks that typically share pool duties with CNN—ABC, CBS, Fox News, and NBC—suspended their pool coverage of the president. This led to an unintentionally Veep-like moment during Trump’s unveiling of his new helipad, when no networks provided audio as Trump appeared flanked by smiling construction workers, speaking without sound. (A Newsmax host gingerly described the scene as a sign that the CNN ban was perhaps “backfiring just a little bit.”)
Trump has a long history with the press—and of seeming not to understand how it works. (As with many things pertaining to the president, however, determining whether his ignorance is genuine or strategic can be difficult.) At times, he has appeared to feign confusion in an effort to get reporters to do what he wants. In a 1997 New Yorker profile, for instance, Trump repeatedly told the reporter following him that his words were “off the record, but you can use it”—guidance that makes no sense, because “off the record” is an agreement that means a reporter can’t use a piece of information in a story. When he was campaigning for president in 2016, Trump frequently railed against “libel laws” and promised to “loosen them up” but struggled to describe what that meant. (“I’d have to get my lawyers in to tell you,” he told The Washington Post.) He suggested that late-night comedians should devote “equal time” to jokes about Democrats and his administration, seemingly invoking a law that doesn’t apply to either presidents or late-night jokes.
[Read: The press is not the root of Trump’s problems]
A fact that seems to bedevil Trump most is that the press doesn’t take orders from him, and that therefore almost every reporter he encounters will at some point seem “unfriendly.” In his current term, one of Trump’s first orders of business was to decree that the White House would choose the reporters in the press pool, breaking with the tradition of news organizations choosing. He’s trying to ban the Associated Press from parts of the White House because the wire service continues to refer, against Trump’s wishes, to the body of water south of the United States as “the Gulf of Mexico.” Trump regularly interrogates pool reporters about which network they’re really with, and dubs the answer “fake news” if it’s not one that he likes. As evidenced by the exchange at the United Nations, CNN’s Collins seems to provoke his disdain to an unusual degree: Over the years, Trump has attempted to bar her from White House press events, tried to make her sit in the back of the press room, called her “stupid” and “nasty,” implored her to smile, and told her she should be ashamed of herself because she used to be “a conservative from Alabama.” To which Collins replied, “I’m still from Alabama, sir.”
Presidents have always had testy relations with the press, of course, and have tried to minimize negative coverage. The behavior of Trump’s administration, however, often shades into something more sinister. His FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter whose coverage he found objectionable, and Trump has sued and defunded news organizations whose coverage he deemed biased. MS NOW reported in May that the FBI had opened a criminal investigation focusing on my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick, related to an article she wrote about FBI Director Kash Patel. (The FBI has denied the existence of such an investigation.)
As a reporter, I spend a lot of time explaining to sources—many of whom have never interacted with the media—the basics of journalism: that we don’t accept or grant payment for interviews, that reporters don’t interact with advertisers, and that most mainstream outlets pride themselves on not affiliating with any given political ideology. Some degree of media illiteracy is understandable at a time when thousands of local newspapers have closed, and when influencers—some of whom secretly accept payment for their branded videos—compete for attention on social media with journalists reporting the truth. Journalists shouldn’t have to explain their jobs, though, to someone who has lived his entire adult life in the public eye, and who is now America’s most important public servant. But as Collins showed at the UN, apparently, they must.