Charles Dickens, a journalist of such Victorian energies that he managed to write some fiction on the side, was a keen observer of human vanities. Of a minor figure in “Our Mutual Friend,” he wrote, “Mr. Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap’s opinion.” In our time, journalists have been made to realize that they are widely viewed as Podsnaps: privileged peacocks, stubbornly unreflective, “happily acquainted” with their “own merit and importance.” Reliable outfits such as the Pew Research Center report that the news media, which, in the middle of the twentieth century, was among the most highly regarded institutions in public life, now dwells in a dank basement of distrust, alongside the members of the United States Congress.
And yet there is a difference between criticism and demonization. Donald Trump has spent years painting the press as the “enemy of the people,” though he is hardly the first modern President to do so. “Never forget, the press is the enemy,” Richard Nixon told Henry Kissinger, in the thick of the Watergate scandal. “Write that on a blackboard one hundred times.” Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s lieutenants, compiled an “enemies list,” which included the names of several dozen editors and reporters. (Richard Rovere, this magazine’s Washington correspondent at the time, made the cut.) The government tapped journalists’ telephones; two of Nixon’s Watergate henchmen, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, discussed plans to assassinate the syndicated columnist Jack Anderson.
Trump bears at least as much resentment toward reporters as Nixon did, but his psychology is arguably more complicated, because he was initially a creation of the media. In the nineteen-eighties, as a real-estate hustler, he repeatedly called in to the tabloids about his exploits, real or imagined. He was the Donny Appleseed of the New York Post, tirelessly planting items in the soil of Page Six. More recently, Trump’s obsession with the Murdoch press, particularly Fox News, has grown so deep that he is attempting to fill crucial roles in his Administration with Fox hosts and commentators.
Trump is keenly aware that the ecology of the press has changed radically since Nixon’s day. Local papers have thinned or vanished entirely. The Old Guard outlets are struggling for audiences, subscribers, and ad revenue. So, while Trump finds refuge and amplification in friendly ports––Fox News, Newsmax, Joe Rogan’s podcast, Elon Musk’s X–––he has increasingly made plain his intent on doing battle with the rest from a position of strength. He often threatens violence and humiliation. Two years ago, at a rally held months after Politico published a draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump suggested a way to smoke out the source of the leak: “The reporter goes to jail. When the reporter learns that he’s going to be married in two days to a certain prisoner that’s extremely strong, tough, and mean, he will say, he or she, ‘I think I’m going to give you the information. Here’s the leaker, get me the hell out of here.’ ”
In his first term, Trump was so agitated about his coverage on CNN that he reportedly pushed the Department of Justice to block A.T. & T.’s acquisition of the network’s owner at the time, Time Warner. (The Justice Department denied any White House intervention, and eventually the deal went through.) Trump also is said to have urged the doubling of shipping rates for companies such as Amazon, a move that would have been onerous for Jeff Bezos, whose newspaper, the Washington Post, had the irritating habit of committing journalism critical of the Administration.
Media lawyers now fear that Trump will ramp up the deployment of subpoenas, specious lawsuits, court orders, and search warrants to seize reporters’ notes, devices, and source materials. They are gravely concerned that reporters and media institutions will be punished for leaking government secrets. The current Justice Department guidelines mandating extra procedural measures for subpoenas directed at journalists are just that: guidelines. They are likely to be shredded. Nearly every state provides journalists with at least a qualified privilege to withhold the identity of confidential sources, but there is no federal privilege, and Trump has opposed a bipartisan congressional bill that would create one, the so-called PRESS Act. “REPUBLICANS MUST KILL THIS BILL!” he posted on Truth Social.
Retribution is in the air. “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig Presidential elections,” Kash Patel, a leading MAGA soldier, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Trump’s lawyers have already threatened or taken legal action against the Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, Penguin Random House, and others.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, meanwhile, calls for ending federal funding to NPR and PBS. It insists that there is “no legal entitlement” for the press to have access to the White House “campus.” Although Trump disavowed Project 2025 during his campaign, he has selected one of its authors, Brendan Carr, who is also an ideological ally of Elon Musk, to head the Federal Communications Commission.
A longer-range worry is that the Supreme Court may weaken or even overturn the 1964 landmark decision New York Times v. Sullivan. Sullivan limits the ability of public officials to sue journalists for defamation, finding that the Constitution guarantees that, at a minimum, journalists can write freely and critically about public officials, as long as they don’t publish statements that they know to be false, or probably so. Nixon regarded Sullivan as “virtually a license to lie.” Trump shares the sentiment. The legal protections established between Sullivan and Watergate have been eroding in recent years, and two sitting Justices, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have been public about their eagerness to revisit the decision. The Court might decline to take a Sullivan-related case and simply let stand a state court’s or a federal district court’s limitation of it, resulting in a de-facto patchwork of local standards for press freedoms.
All these threats and potential actions are hardly the stuff of legal arcana or the frenzied obsessions of self-involved Podsnapian journalists. They are the arsenal of a would-be autocrat who seeks to intimidate his critics, protect himself from scrutiny, and go on wearing away at the liberal democratic order. ♦
