The Inglorious Never-Trump Media Bastards
So, with printer’s ink, by the barrel, the new comer was cried down.1
—John F. Steward, The Reaper, 1931
Boy, the media in this country suck. Don’t they?
—Mark Levin, February 17, 20212
Strategic Failure #5 may well be the most surprising failure that would lead to the fall of the White House of Trump. This was the chronic and pernicious inability of the White House communications team to fight back against the information warfare of the so-called “mainstream media.” This Never-Trump media would run fake news circles around us, thereby dominating each day’s news cycle and leaving the Boss to bellow, howl, and lash out across the Twittersphere on an almost daily basis.
As we explore this strategic failure, there is only one rule: no whining. Instead, let’s take it as a given that throughout President Trump’s four years in office, and particularly in the critical months leading up to the November 3, 2020, election, an overwhelming majority of the media were virulently Orange Man Bad anti-Trump and hell-bent on his defeat.
To say, think, or insist otherwise is to simply ignore this critical abiding truth: we have reached a sad, sordid, and very dangerous inflection point in American history where the preponderance of our print and TV journalists are Left-leaning, often rabidly partisan, and absolutely fearless in their “political ends justify the journalistic means” propagandist approach to covering what used to be called the news.
Today, that “news” is, as President Trump has so often charged, often fake news. It is nothing more than propaganda cleverly and deceitfully packaged by earnest, blow-dried, hair-dyed talking heads who would desperately have you believe they traffic in facts rather than the gutter trash that passes for truth.
All the Fake News Fit Enough to Print
The Oxford University Press defines propaganda as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.”3
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, on the other hand, prefers “dissemination of information—facts, arguments, rumours, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion”4 while Merriam-Webster cites “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person.”5
My favorite definition of propaganda, however, is this by Oxford Reference: “Persuasive mass communication that filters and frames the issues of the day in a way that strongly favours particular interests…. Also, the intentional manipulation of public opinion through lies, half-truths, and the selective re-telling of history.”6
Now, if collectively these definitions don’t fit the Never-Trump mainstream media, then I don’t know what does.
Just what exactly do I mean when I reference the “mainstream media”? These are the major newspapers, television networks, and cable TV channels from which nearly half of America gets its daily news.7 And within this mainstream media—let’s call it interchangeably as I have done in this book the “corporate media”—the bulk of the major players generally drive straight down the left side of the ideological street.
In the print world, the most prominent big left-wing dogs include, by circulation and political influence, the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today. As a countervailing force on the Right, you have the second and fourth largest newspapers by circulation, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post along with the fast-charging Epoch Times.
While both the WSJ and Big Apple Post are owned by Rupert Murdoch, the Post is far more pro-Trump and Main Street MAGA than its more highfalutin Wall Street cousin. By the way, if I had to read only one newspaper in the world, it would be the New York Post, if for no other reason than its incredibly entertaining “Headless Body in Topless Bar” headlines. And the Epoch Times is now a regular part of my daily scan-the-news routine, particularly for international news.
As for the TV world, the mainstream media’s big left-wing megaphones include—and sadly so—all three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC along with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). From the golden days of giants like Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, and Edward R. Murrow—and legends like Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer—our major networks have descended into a fool’s gold age of woke pearl clutchers.
Of course, this Never-Trump media TV universe also includes two of the top three cable news channels, CNN and MSNBC.
To refer collectively to these left-wing newspapers and television networks as part of the “mainstream” media is therefore really a misnomer. This media is mainstream only in the sense that it delivers much of its content to Main Street Middle America.
To put this another way, there is nothing really “mainstream” about a relatively small cadre of Left-leaning journalists numbering no more than in the thousands who have little in common with the hundreds of millions of Americans who stand squarely in the political center of this country.
As to where this political center lays across the ideological spectrum, we are for better, and I think not worse, a moderately right-of-center country. And that is the paradox of our times, that Left-leaning media cadres are effectively serving as primary content deliverers for a far more centrist America.
Just how did American journalism wind up in this ideological paradox? The answer begins in a brief microwave history of the precipitous decline of America’s print media in the digital age.
Death By Internet
In the golden age of print journalism, which occupied much of American history right into the 1990s, newspapers were king. And there were glorious rags on both sides of the ideological aisle that would duke it out across this grand land.
For example, the left-wing Che Guevaras of the New York Times and Washington Post would do righteous battle against the right-wing Attila the Huns of the Hearst papers and publications like the New York Herald Tribune (once famously cancelled by JFK at the White House).
In this golden age of print journalism, Americans loved to pick up paper newspapers and stretch them out on the kitchen table, peruse them on their porcelain thrones, or fold them up subway-style to read on their daily commutes. Even in bad times, advertising revenues stayed relatively good, and newspapers thrived.
Once the internet arrived, however, and news came digitally and in real time—rather than delayed on its circuitous route to your doorstep—a lot of folks just canceled their subscriptions, and print newspapers began dropping like flies.
Between 2004 and 2019, more than two thousand papers8 with daily circulations totaling several hundred thousand or more each would go belly up. These newspapers ranged from the Seattle-Post Intelligencer and Honolulu Star-Bulletin to the Tampa Tribune, Albuquerque Tribune, and Green Bay News Chronicle.
And here’s even worse news for the cause of good investigative journalism: those relatively few newspapers that did remain invariably slashed their budgets and staffs to the point where relatively little real investigative journalism would or could get done. As a canary in this particular coal mine, the Ithaca Journal of upstate New York once employed an editorial staff of more than twenty people. It would shrink to a pale shadow of its former self with just two full-time reporters.9
Over time, the scourge of the internet left newspapers to compete with other forms of information delivery, first with news aggregators and, eventually, with a wave of social media platforms. In the wake of such technological disruption, many of today’s so-called “print journalists” have become nothing more than Facebook and Twitter pirates who wake up every day praying to God or the God of Relativism that this will be their day they go viral.
In this new social media age, rather than do the hard work of investigative journalism, today’s so-called reporters devote far more of their time dredging the Swamp for gossip, engaging in punditry, and often getting bamboozled by a bevy of anonymous sources with agendas sharply divergent from the pursuit of truth. Think, here, highly talented reporters like Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, Jonathan Swan of Axios, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post who have nonetheless gone the way of all gossip flesh.
The end result: Today we live in a world where the editors and reporters of America’s big three national newspapers—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today—like to think (and often pontificate) that they still engage in what passes for true investigative journalism. However, each of these three papers is the palest of shadows of its former self.
Across these diminished rags, and the broader diaspora of pilot fish political publications like Axios, Politico, the Daily Beast, and the once mighty Drudge Report, I can count on my right hand the number of left-wing print journalists who actually do their homework and report “without fear or favor,” as the old saying goes—and sorry, David Lynch, Daniel Lippman, and Shawn Donnan, you are not on the list. The rest, in my judgment, are just old grifters with no consciences and new millennials without any sense of history trying to make a dishonest dime on the back of Donald Trump’s blue-collar America.
On the TV side, I can count on my left hand a similar number of journalists who transcend their celebrity and actually do some real journalism and investigative work—and sorry, John Berman, Rachel Maddow, Joe Scarborough, Margaret Brennan, Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, and David Gergen, you’re not on my list either.
A Bezos Rascal in Alfalfa Land
To be clear here, there’s nothing new about the New York Times and Washington Post being unabashedly liberal and supportive of the Democrat Party. After all, it was the “Gray Lady” Times with its Pentagon Papers and the “Democracy Dies in the Washington Swamp Dark” Post with its Watergate coverage that helped take down Republican Richard Nixon.
However, with the Washington Post in particular, things have gotten a lot more complicated politically since the paper was bought by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. That further complication comes in the form of the many tentacles of the Amazon-Bezos octopus that are now reaching into the coffers of the American government.
One such tentacle is trying to corner the market on online government procurement services. Another is scooping up lucrative contracts for offerings such as cloud service computing.
The billionaire Bezos has also joined up with other social media oligarchs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, and Google’s Sundar Pichai to silence Republican and conservative voices on the internet through tools such as de-platforming, search suppression, shadow banning, and denial of cloud services. For example, Amazon Web Services at one point delivered what was reported as a “killing blow” to the conservative Twitter alternative Parler by suspending its account.10
With Amazon, there is also the fact—and I was the tip of the spear on this—that the Trump administration, as part of its Tough on China policy agenda, aggressively began to crack down on the trafficking of Chinese counterfeit goods through e-commerce platforms like Amazon.
Here, I vividly remember the night of January 26, 2019, when, at the annual Alfalfa Club dinner, I bumped into Bezos and his new paramour. It was a chance meeting for the ages.
By way of background, this Alfalfa Club dinner is the yearly gathering of the swampiest A-list cast of the swampiest creatures in the Washington lobbying firmament. As to why a lumpen proletariat Deplorable like me was there, that’s a story for another day.
Suffice it to say that I told Bezos, quite frankly, that the growth rate of counterfeiting over his crown jewel e-commerce Amazon platform was moving at a pace far faster than the growth rate of the budget and resources Amazon was using to police such counterfeiting. As the problem was spiraling out of control, Americans were being defrauded by the millions, and every single day, thousands of Americans were being put in harm’s way by Amazon’s lack of safe e-commerce practices.
And note here, I wasn’t just talking statistical smack. I informed Jeff Bezos that evening that under my direction, the White House had been running a joint operation with Customs and Border Protection dubbed Operation Mega Flex. Every month, CBP was opening thousands of additional packages from Communist China, and the bulk of them came into America via e-commerce platforms like Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay—now there is a trifecta of thieves in the dark web night if I have ever seen one.
Said I that night at the Alfalfa Club to Jeff Bezos:
The ‘hit rates’ we are getting from Operation Mega Flex for contraband and counterfeits from China are off the charts. Over the nine months that we have been conducting the operation, we have been averaging rates well above 10 percent. We’re finding deadly counterfeit products, including counterfeit prescription drugs like Lipitor and Viagra. We’re also finding deadly contraband ranging from opioids and gun silencers to smuggled pork products infested with swine flu. And much of it is coming over e-Commerce platforms like Amazon.
As Bezos smiled at me politely, I explained just how crazy it is for Amazon shoppers to face a one-in-ten chance of getting ripped off and possibly harmed or killed by products from Communist China, and I asked for Bezos’s help—sincerely and respectfully.
That night, Jeff Bezos seemed equally sincere with that earnest grin of his, but what would follow over the next couple of days was anything but. Bezos’s promise to meet with me personally quickly devolved into a comic farce the next day when I tried to arrange such a meeting through Amazon’s chief lobbyist Jay Carney.
Carney, by the way, is a former Obama high-ranking official who is now cashing in with Amazon. He told me that “Jeff” would not be able to meet. However, he, “Jay,” would be happy to sit down and chat.
Irked, I told Carney I was not really interested in meeting with a lobbyist and proceeded to publicly call out Amazon and Bezos during my next television appearance. All I got from that was a passive aggressive Instagram post from none other than “Jeff” himself.11 He denied that he had ever agreed to meet with me to begin with.
“Oh really,” thought I. That blatant lie was all I had to know about who Jeff Bezos truly is. He is yet another billionaire like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and George Soros who got to where he got by caring simply about himself and his bottom line rather than the American people. Call me naïve, but I expected more from someone who should be thinking at this stage in his rich life more about our nation and our people rather than his profits.
Of course, once I started going after Bezos, WaPo quickly turned up the “hit piece” heat on me. At the same time, any possible access I might have to their op-ed page as a White House official was brutally and swiftly severed.
Indeed, shortly after that blow-up, I had an op-ed that had been accepted and fully cleared by the op-ed editor Michael Duffy. Yet, lo and behold, the next thing I knew Duffy said the Post was not going to be printing it. So much for the claim from the Washington cum Amazon Post that the paper operates independently from Jeff Bezos.
McPaper’s Fauci Apologist
Allow me now to make a brief and similar comment on McPaper—USA Today—as it further helps underscore the lack of independence in today’s Never-Trump media. On July 14, 2020, Bill Sternberg, the editorial page editor of McPaper, invited me as a White House official to pen a piece about my bête noire Tony Fauci.
This was an op-ed that almost got me fired. Yes, in a rookie mistake for which there was no excuse, I failed to run the op-ed through the review process within the White House.
In my defense, everything I said in the op-ed I had already said on television several times. Moreover, the text of the op-ed had been posted in a press release almost verbatim so this never should have been the tempest in the teapot that it became.
Still, I got my ass handed to me by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and I even got a bit of a spanking from the president publicly, who said: “He shouldn’t have done it.” Well, maybe. But maybe not.
The op-ed itself was a scathing indictment of Fauci’s flip-flopping scurrilous ways and everything in it was factually accurate.12 Yet McPaper’s Sternberg would publicly apologize for publishing something that “did not meet USA Today’s fact-checking standards.”
This was of course utter nonsense. To repeat: Everything in the op-ed was pure fact. Zero Pinocchios. Fauci foibles straight, no chaser.
To me, Sternberg’s public self-shaming was the big reveal about USA Today itself being just another journalistic tool of America’s left wing and growing cancel culture.
The Wall Not Main Street, Journal
Now you might think that at least Donald J. Trump had the putatively conservative Wall Street Journal on his side during the 2020 campaign. You might think that. But you would really be wrong.
•The Wall Street Journal is just that—the Wall Street, Globalist, Offshore Our Supply Chains, Silk Stocking, Multinational Corporation, Party of Davos, RINO Journal.
•What the WSJ is decidedly not is the Main Street, Make America Great Again, Populist Economic Nationalist, Pro-Trump Journal.
Indeed, the WSJ’s core ideology is the same as that of the traditional free trade, open borders, endless wars Mitch McConnell-Pat Toomey-Chuck Grassley-Mitt Romney-Ben Sasse RINO wing of the US Senate and Republican Party prior to the coming of Donald J. Trump. That would be the same traditional RINO wing of the Grand Old Party of Davos that tried to make life miserable first for Candidate Trump in 2016, then for President Trump for four long years, and now for ex-President Trump, who they rightly fear is the odds-on favorite for the 2024 Republican nomination.
By the way, if I had a dime for every time the WSJ’s editorial page editor Paul Gigot trashed me and Bob Lighthizer during the four years of the Trump administration, I would have a shipload of dimes.
In fact, I was the WSJ whipping boy for at least two editorials predicting I personally would be responsible for a recessionary implosion of the American economy because of my alleged wild-eyed trade policies. Here’s an excerpt from an August 11, 2019, lead editorial in which the WSJ waves the bloody tariff shirt:
Multiple reports out of the White House last week say President Trump overruled all of his economic advisers other than Peter Navarro when he decided to impose new tariffs on China. Global and American economic conditions have been heading south ever since, so perhaps we should call this the Trump-Navarro trade-policy slowdown.13
I suspect that that when the Navarro Recession never hit, Gigot was deeply disappointed. Instead, we would have the best economy in modern history—and the Trump, dare I say Navarro, tariffs were a big part of the reason.
As for the remaining midsized state and regional papers—from the Bangor Daily News and Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer—many are likewise Left-leaning and were eager to thump Trump during the 2020 cycle.
I remember very clearly during the last few crucial weeks of the campaign trying to get some very legitimate news into the Bangor Daily News. In one case, POTUS had managed to pull several lobsters out of his policy hat to help one of Maine’s leading industries—POTUS would dub me the “Lobster King” for my yeoman efforts in this regard. Yet, it was extremely difficult to get favorable coverage out of Bangor, this despite the fact that the Maine lobster industry itself was over the moon about what the White House had pulled off.
Why Print Media Bias Matters
Now here is why, at the most subtle level, the Never-Trump bias of the print media is so important in the world of American politics. Lazy and understaffed fools that they tend to be, many of the cable TV producers at networks like CNN and MSNBC and Fox rely almost exclusively on the print media to supply them with the news that they will be choosing from to shape the so-called “daily news cycle”—at least the fake daily news cycle they want to propagate.
I’ll get to that bit of fake daily news cycle sleight-of-hand in the next chapter—the concept of the daily news cycle is one of the most important in electoral politics. But first, let’s do an equally brief history of the leftist shift over time first of CNN and eventually MSNBC. And let’s do so within the context of this question:
Do broadcast and cable shows that purport to deliver the news have any obligation to report such news in, to use the half ironic and always comic tagline of Fox, a “fair and balanced way”? Or, in a free society where the First Amendment is first in our Bill of Rights for a very good reason, are these news shows free to package their propaganda any which way they want within the loose guise of news?
This is certainly not a question we will answer definitively in this book—I think you know where I stand. However, it is nonetheless a critical question for us to have a national dialogue about given the sorry place our Fourth Estate has arrived at.
That sorry place is simply a cable news universe that is split right down the middle between the rabid leftists at CNN and MSNBC and what used to be the rabid conservatives at Fox News who have become, shall we say, more complex and subtle in their older age. Before going to that particular Never-Trump Fox conundrum, let’s, however, do a quick three-act play about the tragic devolution of cable TV news into two partisan warring camps.
In act one—circa 1980—Ted Turner seized upon technological change in the broadcasting industry to found the Cable News Network (CNN). Conservative though he might have been, Turner played it straight down the fair and balanced middle from the get-go, and through a brilliant fusion of technology and innovation, Turner built a global empire that became the envy of the journalism world.
It was a good sixteen-year run while it lasted, but then in 1996, in act two, along came Roger Ailes and the ideological beast and behemoth of Fox News. The pugilistic and always pugnacious Ailes approached cable TV like a no-holds-barred political campaign.
Ailes believed that viewers wanted their news packaged in the comfort of their own ideological beliefs, he correctly foresaw that the largest demographic in the country to be captured in terms of bang for the ad revenue bucks leaned Republican and conservative, and he carved out a media empire with the help of a very deep-pocketed Rupert Murdoch at Fox News by relentlessly and skillfully targeting that demographic.
For CNN, it was like Mr. Rogers getting tossed into the ring with Muhammad Ali. Within a few short years, CNN not only got knocked to the ground. It was almost tossed out of that very same ring.
By the way, my favorite Roger Ailes quote is this: “Truth is whatever people believe.”14 Nuff said.
In act three—circa July, 2016—after hemorrhaging large chunks of its audience, CNN decided to take what was Left over by Roger Ailes—pun intended—by taking a very hard Left and becoming the anti-Fox network and the mouthpiece of liberals and the Democrat party. As for MSNBC, it would pursue a similar strategy, albeit with a small detour.
During that detour, MSNBC would have an ever-so-brief flirtation with the conservative side of the TV audience spectrum. At one point—yes, this should surprise you—MSNBC featured a lineup of conservative beacons like Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Alan Keyes, Tucker Carlson, and Pat Buchanan. However, after a ratings decline, MSNBC went full bore Left—out with the Lauras and Tuckers and in with the Keith Olbermanns and Chris Matthewses and, eventually, that supercharged Goddess of Spin, Rachel Maddow.
At that point—with Fox the voice of the Right and CNN and MSNBC the voice of the Left—all hope was lost for nonpartisan investigative journalism. Instead, it was polarization game-on in the political arena. It was also game-over for real, nonpartisan investigative journalism on cable TV.
Roger Rolls Over in His Grave
At least prior to the coming of Donald J. Trump, this polarization in the cable news cosmos was at a fairly stable equilibrium. Fox could promote conservative views and values and support Republican politicians. CNN and MSNBC, with roughly the same amount of viewers as Fox combined, could champion progressive and liberal causes for Democrats. So somehow, this all seemed fair and balanced, at least in the broader aggregate.
The problem Donald Trump faced in 2020, however, is that, with Roger Ailes first MeToo hashtagged and then dead and gone, at least part of the Fox tools in the putatively Republican shed went sideways on Trump and disturbed that Left-Right, Democrat-Republican equilibrium.
Some of that Fox talent was overtly hostile—Shep Smith, Chris Wallace, Neil Cavuto, Charles Gasparino, Juan Williams, and always Karl Rove, just to name a few. Others like John Roberts, Brian Kilmeade, and Bret Baier would take more subtle passive-aggressive shots at Trump over the course of the campaign—but they would be shots nonetheless.
If Roger Ailes had been around, these off-the-reservation Indians would have been out on their asses in a New York minute with hot pokers up said asses. But with Ailes himself out the door in July of 2016 and then in the cold, hard, ground less than a year later, the anti-Trump inmates in what should have been a pro-Trump Fox asylum were free to roam.
When President Trump fought back and publicly criticized Fox as an institution or singled out specific anchors or reporters—rather than privately back-channel Rupert and ask for relief—the Fox top brass, many Never-Trumpers in their own right, simply doubled down on Fox’s anti-Trumpism. As the schism grew, the chasm widened.
Here, it must be said that no amount of support from Trump stalwarts like Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Laura Ingraham could completely offset the significant damage others in the Fox orbit were doing to Trump, and given the transformation of Fox from a hard Trump drive to an uncertain floppy disk, no amount of rival conservative networks like Newsmax or OANN or Real America’s Voice could make up for the loss of a unified Fox News behind President Trump in 2020.
The Full Pompeo
During that 2020 presidential election cycle, it wasn’t just the cable news networks that were piling on and pummeling us in our White House bunker. Every Sunday morning, we faced the Orange Man Bad firing squad of Margaret Brennan hosting CBS’s Face the Nation, George Stephanopoulos or Martha Raddatz at ABC, and Chuck Todd at NBC’s Meet the Press, along, of course, with Jake Tapper at CNN, and Chris Wallace at Fox.
During the first three years of the administration, despite the poor treatment we usually got from the hosts, these Sunday shows were coveted appearances that each of the various White House senior staff and cabinet officials would jockey for. If there was a really big issue in a given week, one of our top officials might even go on all five shows—inside the West Wing, we called that the “Full Pompeo” because our secretary of state Mike commonly got that nod.
Once the virus hit, however, during the election year, there were not a lot of the usual suspects fighting to defend the president. Mick Mulvaney, Mark Meadows, Steve Mnuchin, and Larry Kudlow were all mostly missing in action. They just didn’t want to take the heat because all the Sunday show hosts wanted to talk about was the virus, virus, virus and how we were screwing it up. Meanwhile, Saint Fauci would stand in front of a microphone and a camera any time he got a chance and rip us every which way but Sunday—and whenever he could on Sunday.
And, of course, the lead in to the Sunday shows was NBC’s anti-Trump Saturday Night Live. The relentless skewering of the president by the unfortunately straight-shooting Alec Baldwin juxtaposed against the kid-glove treatment of bumbling Joe Biden by Jim Carrey was the least funny thing I found on television.
All in all, it was a sorry Never-Trump media spectacle to behold, and they would kick our butts on an almost daily basis during what we shall now see was the daily battle to determine who would dominate the daily news cycle. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t us.