Why The Media Keeps Losing To Donald Trump

Not since Nixon have the press and White House clashed so much, but this time it’s different.

- Michael Wolff

DONALD TRUMP is obsessed with the media. The media is obsessed with Donald Trump. On both sides, this obsession is unhealthy. The last time there was such a level of neurotic fixation and overwhelming distrust between a president and the press was during the Nixon administration. The current White House should recall that the press won that war—and that the stakes now can be mortal.

Indeed, each side believes that, given its druthers, the other would kill it. So how does this bitter game play out?

The media view is that the Trump people are not only mendacious but nincompoops—“alternative facts, ha-ha!” To the media, it is a given that Trump is largely out of control and that the people around him are struggling at all times to save him from himself—and largely failing. This view persists (again, in a recent series of unsourced stories) despite Trump’s victory flattening almost every media assumption about his supposed ineptitude and lack of strategy.

It is the Trump view that the media has been so wrong in its predictions, and made to look in the eyes of the public so woeful and ludicrous, that it must now double down in an effort to prove its thesis about the president and restore its honor. (The Trump White House now hammers a persistent theme: Why was nobody fired in the mainstream media for such dunderheaded election coverage?)

The media strategy is to show Trump to be an inept and craven sociopath. The Trump strategy is to show that media people are hopeless prigs out of touch with the nation (e.g., CNN’s media correspondent, Brian Stelter, who turns to the camera every Sunday morning and delivers a pious sermon about Trump’s perfidiousness) and nursing personal grudges.