Transcript: Trump’s Rage at NYT
Offers Unnerving Hint at What’s Coming
An interview with former New York
Times public editor Margaret Sullivan about what Trump's coming crackdown on
the press might look like—and how the media can respond.
Chris Unger/Zuffa LLCThe following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 27 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
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Greg Sargent: This
is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced
and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This week, Donald Trump erupted in fury at The New
York Times. It’s not entirely clear what triggered him, but it might
have been a story about a Trump aide named Natalie Harp, a young, former
right-wing cable news host who now operates as a gatekeeper to Trump with a
level of loyalty that’s frankly creepy. What caught our eye here though is that
in his rant, Trump demanded that the Times show obedience to
him because he won the election.
We think this sheds light on what he’ll demand from the
news media during his presidency and how he’ll attempt to cow and bully the
media into submission. Today, we’re chatting about all this with Margaret
Sullivan, the former public editor at The New York Times and
author of the great Substack American Crisis. Really glad to have you on,
Margaret.
Margaret Sullivan: Thanks
a lot, Greg. Good to see you and hear you.
Sargent: According
to the Times, this Trump aide, Natalie Harp, writes Trump
devoted letters. She follows him around with a printer and prints out hard
copies of messages for him to read. Trump’s own aides worry about her playing
this role in the White House because she’ll be in a position to channel really
crackpot and conspiratorial ideas to him. Margaret, the timing sure looks like
this is what angered Trump. What do you make of all this?
Sullivan: First
of all, even though it’s a horrifying story and the future looks
equally scary, I was entertained in the story by the fact that she was
described as a human printer because she is said to follow around his golf cart
with a portable printer so that when he gets adulation in the form of text
messages or whatever they may be, social media posts, that she can print them
out and hand them to him because he likes to see them in hard copy. But that is
a little bit beside the point because you are right, and this is something I’m
very concerned about too, that everything we saw during the first Trump
administration in which he was very difficult for the press to deal with, can
become much worse.
Sargent: I
want to read a key part of Trump’s rant about the times. He said, I
don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in The New York Times for
years, and yet I won in record fashion, the most consequential
presidential election in decades. Where is the apology? Now, it wasn’t
in record fashion, but either way, Margaret, this neatly captures how Trump
understands the media. He actually thinks it should grovel and show submission
to him now that he won. I don’t think he accepts on the most basic level that the
press’s role is to challenge power. At least he doesn’t accept it when he’s in
power. What do you think we can take from that?
Sullivan: In
some ways, it’s nothing new. He’s always been very manipulative about the press
and he does not understand that the press is there to help citizens hold him
accountable. This never entered his mind, or if it has, he’s quickly dismissed
it. But yes, he does seem to think that because he won the election and again,
of course it has to be put in these superlative and false terms, that
therefore, the Times should apologize to him for anything that
isn’t what he terms “a good story.” And a good story, of course, is a story
that flatters him and makes him look great. We know and your sophisticated
listenership here knows that that is not what The New York Times should
be doing in any way. He has this thing about, I have a huge mandate
here, and everybody needs to get in line and bow. That is worrisome
for sure.
Sargent: You
had this piece outlining the threat of second Trump term poses in The
Guardian. And as you pointed out, things are going to be very
different this time. The Supreme Court is, if anything, more likely to rule
against the media if and when cases come up. And to your point about mandates,
he won the election after actively threatening to yank broadcasting rights
of networks that anger him. So he’s going to think he’s got a popular mandate
to essentially grind the media into the ground. Don’t you think?
Sullivan: I
do. Also those who voted for him, many of them would agree with that. They hate
the press and they hate elite institutions like The New York Times and The
Washington Post. So I’m sure they would stand by cheering, but that’s
not how democracy works actually. And there are many, many people in the United
States who would not want to see that happen. It shouldn’t happen. It is
heartening in some ways that every time Trump constantly threatens to sue
journalists—and he sometimes does; he has two suits that are current right
now—it don’t tend to go anywhere. But that, as you say, could change
because he has more judges, he has the Aileen Cannons of the world
and he has his very sympathetic, right-leaning, to say the least, Supreme
Court.
So if he finds a case that could go to the Supreme
Court and could do damage to existing precedent, I think he would love to do
that and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see it.
Sargent: Let’s
talk about that. What specifically do you think Trump can do to use state power
in an effort to bully the media into submission? How successful do you expect
that to be? What precise things can he actually try?
Sullivan: Well,
he can do a lot of things. He can threaten to yank broadcast licenses. This is
a little bit separate, but he can pull back the funding or the leadership of
organizations like Voice of America, which does come under the control of the
federal government.
He could go after, I think this could easily happen,
journalists who have used information given to them by a source that is
classified, and he could make an example out of them using something like the
Espionage Act, which in the past has been used to punish or try to punish
government officials who’ve taken classified information and given it to the
press. It hasn’t successfully been used very much or at all, maybe against
reality winner come to think of it, but very little against journalists themselves,
but I would expect to see more of that.
And I would expect to see Trump and his people looking for
a good example that can be made of someone to do just that to. Therefore, throw
journalists in jail under the aegis of the Espionage Act. He told Jim Comey
back in his first administration that he wanted to do that. And I do think
that reality winner was punished in that way. But again, she wasn’t a
journalist. She was a source.
So I think what could change here is that the reporters who
get that information and publish it or their news organization could be the
target. Very few things would make him happier.
Sargent: Right.
We should probably note that administrations in both parties have kind of gone
after that type of reporting on classified information in ways that are
questionable or dubious. But it sounds like you’re really talking about another
thing entirely, right? A much more concerted and systematic effort to abuse
that in some way toward some end that goes well beyond what other
administrations have tried to accomplish. I’m not defending what they’ve
done. What he’s going to do is worse. Can you talk about that? How you see him
doing it?
Sullivan: Barack
Obama did not have a great record with this. He did, his administration, his
justice department did use the Espionage Act to go after leakers. But let’s
just say, and I don’t want to give anybody any ideas, some national security
reporter at a prominent news organization publishes a public interest
story that should be published based on classified information.
And I’ll just remind people, historical note here, the
Pentagon papers would have fallen squarely into that category. But in this
case, which I’m positing, the reporters themselves would be prosecuted. And if
you have unfriendly ... or you have a judicial system that has turned rightward
... The other part of it is Trump has managed to turn a lot of the country away
from appreciation of the journalistic role. The whole campaign about fake news
and enemies of the people has really had a very bad effect on people’s
understanding of what the role of the press is.
Sargent: I
will say what worries me too is that the constant threats during the campaign,
the suggestion that CBS should lose its license. That’s a distortion, right?
The way the threat would work is complicated and whether it could work is also
complicated. The broader point is that by doing these types of threats during
the election, campaigning on them and then winning, he’s going to have
raised expectations among MAGA voters, among Trump voters for retaliation.
Remember, this is going to really kick in with the media going hard at Trump in
his second term, when it comes to things like our relations with Russia,
Ukraine. There’s going to be some real conflict there.
There will be leaks of all kinds about what’s really
driving Trump’s, what I expect to be, pro-Putin policy. And his people are
going to expect state action, state power used against the media when it does
that.
Sullivan: Right.
One of the things I worry about is that we’ll see some hard to identify
self-censorship on the part of journalists and their news organizations
because they are afraid of this kind of retribution. I hope that’s not the
case. Journalists are going to have to be courageous and are going to have to
have great legal backing from their editors and from their publishers and from
their legal departments. But it’s pretty scary to have the full power of the
Trump justice department glaring at you and with very few restrictions.
That’s a real concern.
It’s in a different category, but when we saw the Morning
Joe hosts trotting down to Mar-a-Lago to make nice with Trump, that’s a version
of this, what I’m worried about, because it’s a preemptive yikes, we
know you’re mad at us, so maybe if we can make things right between us,
you won’t come after us. No one said that, but I think that’s the
underlying feeling here. So it’s a weird dynamic. We certainly want the press
to be aggressive and assertive and to do its job. And at the same time, no one
wants to see a national security reporter getting tossed in jail or
something.
So it’s going to be, I’m afraid, a wild and disturbing
ride.
Sargent: Indeed.
I want to ask you about this idea of self-censorship under that pressure. You
have some experience and insight with what happens inside The New York
Times. You were public editor. How do you think editors and newsroom
leaders experience criticism like this from Trump? Do they see it as something
to worry about? Do they get anxious about being perceived as being biased
against Trump? How does this sort of stuff register internally there?
Sullivan: There’s
a real push and pull about it. Reporters want to do good stories. They’re not
going after Trump, or it’s not really about their personal politics or whether
the Times leans left or right. They want to do a good story.
They want to do stories that get attention, that could win a prize, that tell
us something that we didn’t know. That’s what motivates reporters and their
immediate editors.
As you go higher up the food chain, there is a concern that
big news organizations not be perceived as too liberal or liberal at all. They
want to be seen as neutral. The question is, and this came up a lot during the
campaign and it just comes up all the time, can you really be neutral when
you’re dealing with Donald Trump?
There’s a strong sense that we don’t want to alienate this
huge number of 75 million people in the country who voted for him because we
want a big tent. We want all the customers and all the readers and everybody we
can get. And we don’t want those people to be alienated by us. That’s the push
and pull. And I don’t know how it’s going to play out. The Times made
a very strong endorsement of Kamala Harris to their credit. At the same time,
some of the coverage of Trump has been very white glove careful. So I
guess we’ll see.
Sargent: It’s
really interesting. I’ve always thought of the Times coverage
as being almost like a split screen effect. On the one hand, you’ve got all
this fantastic reporting laying out fully in detail Trump’s authoritarian plans
for a second term. That reporting didn’t pull punches. It was professionally
done, really revelatory and powerful. So that’s on the one hand. Nobody would
deny that that happens, that great reporting. But then on the other, you get
these headlines that just clearly sane-wash Trump. And what puzzles me is
how The New York Times top people react when we point that
stuff out. It’s so mysterious, Joe Kahn ...
Sullivan: I
already know how they react. I really do. There is so much criticism coming at
the Times from every side at all times. You’ve got Trump over
here saying how terrible they are and using horrible, defamatory, abusive names
for reporters. And then you’ve got people on the left saying you’re
sane-washing him.
There’s so much coming at the Times that
there’s a tendency there to shut it all out. And when they dismantled the
public editors role, a role that I held, as you said, that was unfortunate
because this was well-intended criticism that really emanated from the
readership that they don’t hear anymore.
So there’s a lot of noise out there and there’s a tendency
to say, We’ll handle it. We know what’s right to do and
we’re not going to respond to criticism.
Sargent: Can
I ask you about that? They did away with the public editor and I guess the
effect of that is to actually screen out the good faith criticism, the
criticism that’s actually pretty legitimate. You would register the criticism
that you thought was valid and not register the criticism that you thought
was invalid.
This is the thing that people like Joe Kahn won’t admit to,
but there’s a type of media criticism coming from liberals—not all of it;
there’s plenty of crap out there on the internet on both sides, of
course—that’s actually pretty careful and considered that really tries to
acknowledge the good work that the Times does and
really tries to get specific about where the conventions of
political reporting are breaking down in the face of a
challenge like Trump’s mendacity and level of totalitarian propaganda and so
forth.
It seems to me that without a public editor there, they no
longer have to acknowledge that there’s real criticism and fake
criticism that’s meant to gain the coverage. You know what I mean?
Sullivan: Yeah,
I do. I agree with that. They may hear some legit criticism and take it
seriously. For example, if someone with standing writes Joe Kahn or Carolyn
Ryan or Mark Lacey, who are the top three editors at the Times, a
considered email pointing out, with just the right tone, some of the
things that they object to, they may read those kinds of things and take them
in, and there may even be some discussion of it. But for the most part, there’s
just so much coming at us all the time. We’re going to do what we know
is right. Plus the fact that the Times is very
successful, uniquely successful financially right now, that gives them a
sense of well, we’re clearly doing it right. And that doesn’t
allow for a lot of openness to criticism.
Sargent: One
thing that really bothers me about the way the Times handles
criticism, with Joe Kahn in particular, is we heard a lot of him saying over
and over and over that liberals just want the times to be anti-Trump. And
that’s it, right? As if that’s the demand, when there’s actually a very
specific and concrete critique that’s been laid out about the conventions of
political reporting and why they’re failing in some key ways. To me, that
makes me wonder why they did away with the public editor, and whether part of
it was to just not have to deal with real critiques anymore.
Sullivan: I,
of course, have thought a lot about why The Washington Post and
the Times got rid of their ombudsman or public editors. A part
of it is that the person that you hire to do that, if you’re going to do it
right—which they both did—you have to give them complete independence. That
gives that person a lot of power. You got to trust and you have to trust
when you hire the person and just then say, OK, go do your job for two
or four or whatever number of years it is. If you have someone who is
less than very even-tempered or is making weird judgments or whatever, there’s
not a lot you can do about it. There’s a fear of that that comes with the
territory and has been a factor.
There’s also the sense that with all that criticism ... and
they said this, With all that criticism out there, why should we have
someone on our payroll whose job it is to criticize? Of course, that’s
a very different thing, because what you can accomplish as a public editor is
take the complaints of the readers or your own observations to the decision
makers, get their answers, and take those back to the readership in the
very organ, in that news outlet, where they’re going to see it.
It’s not the same as a tweet. It’s not the same as a
Twitter thread or any of that other stuff. It’s a very different and more
useful and more responsible way to go at it. But they made their
decisions, and I’d be shocked if it was reversed. It never will be.
Sargent: That’s
really unfortunate. There’s one episode that I want to just bring up
because it was an interesting one. You may remember that during the campaign, a
bunch of us were just blasting away at the Times to try to get
them to cover Trump’s mental and temperamental unfitness for the presidency
with the same crusading zeal that they covered Biden’s age. They rejected the
criticism over and over, said it was just partisans wanting the Times to
be on their side, which was baloney, but that’s what they said.
Then all of a sudden, they do this immense piece by Peter
Baker, which actually did the thing that many of us wanted them to be doing. It
actually seemed to me a little bit like a response to criticism. What do you
think of that? Is that a cause for thinking that maybe sometimes criticism gets
results? What’s your sense of it?
Sullivan: It’s
hard to know where that piece came from, what the basis of it was or what the
motivation was for it. It may have been Peter Baker’s own, or The Washington
Bureau’s own observations and people they talked to. It could possibly have had
something to do with outside criticism. The other thing I just want to mention
here is: Now with some perspective after the election and knowing how people
who were reasonably well-informed reading the Times—whatever their
headlines and whatever their sane-washing and whatever was—generally did not
vote for Trump, and the people who were tuned out of the news or who were
listening to right-wing podcasts were the ones who voted for Trump, in some
ways it seems pointless to pick away at wording in headlines in The
New York Times because the media problem is a much bigger one than
that.
Sargent: It
absolutely is. I wonder whether there’s a way to take that fact that you just
laid out and use it to say, Well, in some sense, institutionally, the
press corps is not informing large swaths of the citizenry. I don’t
know if that’s the fault of this one headline or that headline, but it does
seem like a problem.
Sullivan: I
felt that mainstream media overall, which does still have a huge impact, did
stories and they did coverage but they never really got it across to people.
What they’re now going to see and are starting to see already—the tariffs, and
perhaps dismantling parts of Social Security or Medicare, or whatever’s going
to happen to the Affordable Care Act—all these things, was there really an
effort to see if that was getting across, which is different from we
did a story about it?
Sargent: Exactly,
it’s not a box checking exercise. You really nailed it there. That’s the
question. Did the press as an institution really get across what a Trump
presidency is going to bring. I think not. Can I ask to close this out, just to
return to this question of how Trump is going to bully the press and to
submission. You brought up the case of The Washington Post. As
you recall, The Washington Post declined to endorse. This came
under heavy criticism, lots of cancellations of subscriptions and so forth.
I’ve got to think that what that tells us is that there is
an immense appetite out there for the media and other institutions to not fold
in the face of the Trump threat. I’m wondering, there prospects for this public
outcry to maybe shore up our institutions or get the media to not fold? Can we
feel a little optimistic that if the subscription bases really do wield
their power that maybe these institutions will listen?
Sullivan: Well,
I hope so. When 250,000 people cancel their subscriptions in anger at The
Washington Post and when MSNBC’s Morning Joe sees its ratings slide
after the visit to Mar-a-Lago in the coveted demographic by as much as 40
percent, from what I’ve read, at least in the initial period, that has to send
a message. It sends the message where it can be heard. Unfortunately, the
message will be heard most if it cuts into profits or the possibility of
profits. The Washington Post is losing lots of money. It’s
really a big problem. So I hope that these things at least give the sense
that, Wow, there’s some people out here who would really like to see
the press do its job, and maybe we need to be thinking about that.
Sargent: There’s
going to be a lot of work to be done on the part of ordinary citizens and news
consumers. That’s for sure. Margaret Sullivan, thank you so much for coming on
with us. This was just awesome.
Sullivan: Thanks
a lot, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: 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 and the DSR Network.
