Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
It appears several of Trump’s most loyal aides were transferred to the secret plane with him, even as reporters were not informed about any of this and were left on the decoy plane as well. All this neatly symbolizes Trump’s abusive and authoritarian relationship with the media. So to dig into all of it, we’re talking to Margaret Sullivan. She regularly calls on the press to treat Trump as the abnormal threat he truly is, on her excellent Substack, American Crisis. Margaret, nice to have you on.
Sargent: You too. So we learned from The Washington Post that Trump was secretly removed from Air Force One onto a catering truck without the knowledge of the press corps, and possibly many of his Cabinet officials who were left on the plane. The Times’s reporting on this is quite scathing. It notes that, quote, “If Iranians were trying to shoot down the presidential plane,” then the subterfuge that protected the president “may have made targets” of those who flew aboard the jet.
Sullivan: Yes, it’s highly unusual. It’s actually shocking that Donald Trump would, you know, arrange for himself to be flown in safety while leaving many members of the press on the plane who didn’t realize the threat, and didn’t realize that the president was removed to yet another plane.
Sargent: So now, based on more leaks, news outlets are reporting that others who accompanied Trump on the catering truck and onto the separate plane included White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, Walt Nauta, another top aide, and Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, who kind of functions like a security blanket to the president. I don’t know, Margaret, that seems pretty questionable.
Sullivan: So his actions were to protect and keep around him the people you just mentioned. And one of them is, is Pete Hegseth. And, you know, not to protect and not to keep in mind or think about the welfare, apparently, of the press and some of his Cabinet members, including the secretary of state. So I think it is very telling, and it certainly speaks to the relationship with the press in a bad way.
It was explained to the White House Correspondents’ Association, and they were told what sort of safety procedures were being put in place for journalists. It’s just plainly obvious that the Trump group didn’t think about the journalists at all in this case, right?
Sargent: It’s so strange. So Margaret, what do you make of the White House Correspondents’ Association’s role in this whole thing? They were not informed. In the case of the Clinton decoy operation, the White House Correspondents’ Association was informed at the time, and now the White House Correspondents’ Association is reacting kind of meekly to what’s happened here. What do you make of that?
And this is the same White House Correspondents’ Association that just had, you know, a big gala dinner at which President Trump trashed the press. They knew that would happen, and they did it anyway, and I can pretty much assure you that even after this, it will happen again next year. There’ll be a gala event. He’ll be invited. He’ll come. He’ll say some horrible things about the fake news media. And it’s a ridiculous relationship that should not be. They really should be standing up to him. They really should be doing a lot more in solidarity and for the public. I mean, that’s the part that bothers me—is this is about access. It’s not for the public interest.
And previous presidents, you know, they did all kinds of disgusting things, like under Bush the propaganda was terrible, under Clinton there was a lot of manipulation, et cetera, et cetera. But I think on some level they recognized that the press has an important institutional role in liberal democracy. This group does not recognize that at all, and that’s something the White House Correspondents’ Association doesn’t think it can say. What do you think of all that?
So some of it is losing access, not being able to, you know, do that, and some of it is just this strange normalization that has gone on for years now, in which the reporters seem to be saying to themselves, Well, he’s the president, and no one can argue with the fact that what the president does creates news. So we’re going to simply treat it as news. And if we need to do a little fact-checking or pushback, we’ll do that, but nothing that’s very radical. Whereas he’s radical, and so I think something much more powerful needs to be done in reaction to that. But don’t hold your breath.
Like, I think that may be the way a lot of these reporters conceive of it, and they think to themselves, We can’t really point out that Trump is different, because that puts us on the wrong side of this kind of shifting cultural phenomenon. What do you think of that? You think that’s possible?
That’s all fine, but it, it isn’t the only thing. I wish that the press corps would have in their minds, and I wish their bosses would insist on, their actual role in a democracy, which is to be the eyes and ears of the public, and to, to represent the public. And I just don’t see that. So much is about ratings and optics and access, all the wrong things—profits, shareholders. What does my boss...what merger is my boss trying to do right now? That’s not what the First Amendment was supposed to accomplish.
Margaret, there’s an irony to this whole thing I want to flag. The press actually was absolutely terrible to Bill Clinton, if you recall how Bill and Hillary were covered. By contrast, now Trump pretends he’s mistreated by the press, right? But there’s no comparison whatsoever between the way the press treated Bill Clinton and the way they treat Trump. They treated Clinton much, much worse and much more unfairly. Yet Trump world doesn’t respect the media’s institutional role. It’s just everything is upside down.
We’re in a different world now, and that’s a part of the, you know, contrast between what happened in the Clinton years and what’s happened now. Also, so many of the things that Trump does would be impeachable offenses, but we’re so overwhelmed by all of it that I think that it’s, as somebody wrote this past week very well—Craig Unger—”Nothing moves the needle.” And this is another thing that I’m afraid will not move the needle.
TikTok, the way the internet works now, right, the role of independent media, which is really kind of flourishing in a certain way and poaching people away from the MSM, and of course, like what you’re talking about, the local press disappearing. I wonder if the press feels institutionally really under threat and defensive in a very big sense, and that too makes them somewhat unwilling to really say that Trump is different. What do you think of that?
Sargent: Just to wrap this up, it seems to me like there’s sort of two stories at once. In certain respects, I want to give the media some credit here. You alluded to The Washington Post’s great scoop on all this. In some respects, the press is reporting as aggressively on Donald Trump as I’ve seen the press report on any president in my lifetime. There really is a lot of great work being done.
Sullivan: Well, it comes from leadership. I really think that the leadership, the top editors, the top people at the really big news organizations, need to send that message out to the troops that we’re going to bear down on this in a different way, including through the headlines.
So I think that needs to be taken seriously. But self-reflection is not something I’ve noticed as a really high value or ability of, you know, big journalism.
Sullivan: I would love to think so, Greg, but I just don’t. There have been so many things that have come along that seem like the thing that will change stuff. I think the only thing that will change anything is the overall accumulation of, you know, the public saying, there’s just too much now. It’s just, it’s gone too far. And the midterms are going to be extremely important, because Trump is unrestrained. And so if the checks and balances start to work, I think that changes everything.
Sullivan: They certainly liked it with the end of Biden’s presidency.
Sullivan: Thanks, Greg. Good to be on with you.
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