The following is a lightly edited transcript of the August 13 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.
By now you’ve heard that when Donald Trump left the NATO summit in Turkey last month, the Secret Service transferred him off of Air Force One and onto an alternative plane, flying him out clandestinely to avoid an Iranian threat. Many of Trump’s Cabinet members were left on the decoy plane. Now new leaks from inside the administration are making this whole affair look considerably darker.
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.
Margaret Sullivan: Thank you, Greg. Good to see you and hear you.
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.
Margaret, can you explain why that’s so highly irregular and objectionable?
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.
He has treated the press in a very unusual and very bad way for years now, and unfortunately, many members of the mainstream media, they don’t seem to care, or they don’t know what to do about it, but they keep covering him in this very normalizing way. Like, “Well, he’s the president, so therefore we have to believe everything he says,” or, you know, treat it with a great deal of deference. And, you know, this, I think, is a very vivid example of what he thinks of them.
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.
Obviously, there are reasons Trump would want his closest aides around him, but this occurred even as all these other people were left on the decoy plane.
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.
Sargent: It really does. And so something similar happened with President Bill Clinton, at least similar in the sense that there was a decoy operation. But in that case, the press was briefed beforehand.
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?
Sullivan: Yeah. I mean, maybe they thought, maybe they had some dire thoughts about it, like, “Well, if something happens, oh well.” But we don’t have to go quite that dark here. I think what we can see is that there wasn’t an effort to inform, there wasn’t an effort to protect, and also what ends up happening is that the press then is misleading the public about what exactly took place. And with no correction afterwards. It had to be turned up weeks later by The Washington Post.
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?
Sullivan: So, as I understand it, what’s happened is that the new president, if that’s the title, of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who happens to be a Fox News correspondent got together with White House officials and apparently, I think with perhaps a written statement as well as spoken words, said, Gee, you know, we really didn’t appreciate that too much, and it’s a problem, and please, you know, let’s not do that again. But was there a huge outcry? Was there a sense of, “My God, you can’t do this. It’s an absolute outrage? No.
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.
Sargent: That’s really interesting. I’d like to pick up a little bit on that. You wrote a good piece about the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with Trump. He just relentlessly abused reporters, personally abused them, and he lied about the media having Trump Derangement Syndrome, or at least Trump’s lackeys did that. I think on some fundamental level, the White House Correspondents’ Association just doesn’t want to say that Trump is different, that he’s different from other presidents in the most fundamental way, in the sense that he really just has zero respect for the media’s institutional role in a democracy.
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?
Sullivan: I think two things. One is that they’re very afraid of losing access to the White House. I mean, it’s their job not to, you know, sort of dig up dirt about the White House, or, like, really sort of get under the surface. It’s mostly their job to, you know, for example, be in the briefing room and ask a question, and then the evening news with David Muir, or whoever it may be will take that as a soundbite and show, Look, we’re, we’re doing our jobs here. So much of it is optics.
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.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s a bigger calculation as well on the part of the news media, and maybe you could shed a little light on this. They really think that the election of Trump represented some sort of seismic cultural event that repudiated them. I think that’s how they think about it on some level, a lot of reporters. He called them fake news for years. They just kind of let it roll off their backs, and then Trump was reelected, so maybe the American people agree that we’re fake news, right?
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?
Sullivan: I do think that when Trump was elected in 2016, there was a kind of internal reckoning. Was it the right reckoning? I’m not so sure about that. I think the right reckoning would’ve been to say, Gee, maybe we paid a little too much attention to Hillary Clinton’s email problems, and, you know, maybe we did a few things that were out of line. But no, the reckoning was, We need to get out of D.C. and New York and California and get into the heartland. OK, that’s reasonable. The Washington Post put together an America desk, you know.
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.
Sargent: Certainly not. I want to flag a quote from Joe Lockhart, press secretary to Bill Clinton, about the difference between the Clinton decoy example and the current one. Lockhart said this, quote: “They just didn’t seem to give a second thought to anybody but the president and the few people who were with him. We went out of our way to make sure the maximum number of people, especially civilians, were protected and not human shields. They didn’t even think about it, and to me, that’s the big difference,” close quote.
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.
Sullivan: That’s right. And, you know, the role of the media and the role of the press, and their sort of power to hold public officials, especially the president, accountable, has radically changed since the Clinton years. And, you know, that’s for many reasons that could be a book. But one of them is the decline of local news. One of them is that Trump is—we may criticize him harshly for certain things, but he’s very good at sort of blasting this misinformation out there, and then when he’s called on it, blaming the press.
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.
Sargent: Yeah, it might not. I guess we’ll see what happens in the midterms. I think things are sort of on the right track there. Let me ask you this, though, Margaret. Is there another thing going on here with the press and Trump that maybe we should pin down, which is that the press sort of feels like it’s on its back foot in a big sense, right? Not just vis-à-vis the culture with Trump’s victory, but also because of all the changes in the media landscape, which are actually really delivering the media some pretty severe blows.
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?
Sullivan: Well, I mean, there’s a lot of pushback against the mainstream press right now, from the public, from public officials. Yes, but we have a job to do, and we ought to do it and not be worried about whether what foot we’re on, or whether we’re sensitive and got hurt or let somebody call us a name or something. We have a constitutionally protected job to do, and that should be front and center for us.
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.
But on the other side of the equation, you’ve got, like, the conventions of political reporting aren’t really shifting to meet the moment in some sense. The headlines don’t really reflect the seriousness of what the reporters themselves are turning up. This is something you’ve talked about, like the conventions of political reporting. How do we get the press to take a little more seriously this difficulty—that the conventions of political reporting really aren’t up to the moment and need rethinking?
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.
I mean, very often—and this is I think part of what you’re saying—very often there is a very strong story, and it has a very wimpy headline on it, and often people don’t get past the headline. You know, they’re skimming. They see a news alert, they see a tweet or a Bluesky, you know, whatever it may be. They’re not going to read into the 11th or 12th paragraph. So we see a headline that says, “Critics say,” something, and it seems just like more infighting, when in fact the story could be very strong.
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.
Sargent: So do you think this latest thing has the capacity to change things a little? I mean, you could not ask for a clearer look at just the amount of pure contempt that Trump and his people have for the media than this one. Will that change anything?
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.
Sargent: Yeah, I think that’s a really important point. I just want to close on it. If Democrats can take one or both houses of Congress, they’re going to have more of a role in setting the agenda of what the press is talking about. And Trump’s going to look weaker, and if there’s one thing that reporters can really sniff out, it’s when someone’s weak or losing. They like that story, right, Margaret?
Sullivan: They certainly liked it with the end of Biden’s presidency.
Sargent: Well, we’ll see if they apply it here. I don’t know. Well, folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Margaret Sullivan’s excellent Substack, American Crisis. Please subscribe to that. Margaret, thanks so much for coming on. Great to talk to you.
Sullivan: Thanks, Greg. Good to be on with you.