The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 27 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
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.