Trump Can't Discard Legacy Media Just Yet

For years, Donald Trump used television and tabloids to build his personal brand. He leveraged Twitter to propel his run to the White House and, for his first four years in office, to maintain the country’s attention. But he won a second term by taking his message straight to podcasts and online influencers — and for much of his transition, he’s simply iced the press out.

Last week showed that for all the ways that Trump’s approach to the media has evolved, some of the old rules still apply.

With Washington suddenly up in arms over the sudden prospect of a government shutdown, the president-elect called four journalists, all from major news networks. Speaking to reporters from NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox News — on the record — in a single morning would not have been considered unusual given Trump’s obsessive focus on media coverage that characterized his first term.

The Thursday talk-a-thon showed that, while an emboldened Trump may be more determined than ever to punish more independent members of the press in this second term, he still needs the mainstream media, at least when he’s under pressure.

“He wants to impose his will, and the election has led some in the media to recognize that their being so anti-Trump is hurting them more than it is him,” said one person in the president-elect’s orbit who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “But there are going to be times where he decides he needs to get a message out and that the traditional press offer a good way to do that.”

The spate of TV interviews was something of an aberration for this transition, during which the president-elect has mostly remained in the sunny seclusion of his Palm Beach club, largely ignoring the rotating cast of reporters flying in to cover him. The sudden outreach was driven by Trump’s need to make clear that he, not Elon Musk, was the one who blew up a spending compromise.

Eight years ago, Trump paraded Cabinet hopefuls before a pool of press gathered outside his home. This time around, his staff have yet to sanction an official transition press pool, leaving the reporters taking part in an unofficial version organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association with little to do or report after arriving in West Palm Beach.

The organization is treading lightly, continuing quiet negotiations with Trump’s team and avoiding public criticism, according to three people familiar with the discussions. That’s a shift from 2016, when its then-president, Jeff Mason of Reuters, blasted the president-elect for ditching the protective pool and taking Mitt Romney, then a contender to be secretary of State, to dinner.

“It is unacceptable for the next president of the United States to travel without a regular pool to record his movements and inform the public about his whereabouts,” Mason said in a statement at the time.

Back then, Trump mostly adhered to the agreement, hammered out between WHCA and a communications team overseen by former RNC officials. But since winning the presidency for the second time, Trump and a team of dyed-in-the-wool loyalists haven’t given an inch to the press corps. Beyond the matter of not agreeing to the long-standing protocol and allowing a small pool of reporters to shadow the president and president-elect at all times, some of Trump’s aides have pushed to go further, suggesting, among other things, a reorganization of the briefing room seating chart to benefit more Trump-friendly correspondents, according to two people familiar with internal conversations.

“There are a lot of ‘normies’ on the press team who will deal with us, but there are also a few folks who see everything as a fight,” said one veteran Trump reporter who was granted anonymity to describe their interactions with the transition. “And you don’t always know which side is in charge.”

Unlike eight years ago, there are scant signs of mainstream media outlets girding for battle, no clear audience of determined resistance to capitalize on.

“It feels like the people who were up in arms about Trump eight years ago are just worn out,” said one veteran White House reporter who was granted anonymity to describe the fatigue inside their newsroom. “Stories that have new, vivid details that we can work all day long to get aren’t landing like they used to. Everyone is used to the Trump chaos after almost a decade of this, and a lot of people seem to be deciding they’re just not going to let the news dominate their day-to-day lives.”

If anything, many power brokers in the industry appear to be moving in the opposite direction, preemptively and publicly demonstrating an eagerness to work with the returning president and atoning for past sins by parroting his critiques or, in ABC’s case, paying to resolve a lingering legal dispute.

Nearly two weeks ago, the network agreed to pay Trump $15 million to resolve a lawsuit charging that anchor George Stephanopoulos libeled Trump by saying on air that he’d been found guilty of rape.

Two of Trump’s most prominent and vehement critics, Morning Joe co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, met with the president-elect in Florida just days after the election in hopes of engineering something of a reset.

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the publisher of the Los Angeles Times, killed the newspaper’s planned October endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris by the editorial board, most of which has since resigned. He has made a show of adding Scott Jennings, a prominent Trump defender, to what he says will be a more “fair and balanced” board and touted a plan to include a “bias meter” on political stories.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post who similarly prevented his paper from endorsing in the presidential race, gave $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and dined with him and Elon Musk at Mar-a-Lago last week.

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!” Trump wrote on social media following the meeting.

Given their other business interests, Soon-Shiong and Bezos are hardly the first billionaire entrepreneurs seeking to curry favor with a president-elect. But their outreach has cost them with readers, as both the Times and Post have seen hundreds of thousands of subscriptions canceled by readers angry to learn about their interference on Trump’s behalf. That said, both men have indicated that they want to regain the trust of more right-leaning voters who’ve lost faith in traditional media.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, says most of these actions seem driven by the same thing: fear.

“I'm not inside newsrooms, but I can feel it,” Rosen said. “From getting kicked out of the White House entirely, to fears of violence against journalists as a hate object. From having the tools of government turned against you, to getting sued for doing what used to be your job. There's all the ways big media companies can be harrassed by the state, and the effect these have on newsrooms as the bosses try to play it safe.”

Several journalists experienced retribution during Trump’s first term, including CNN’s Jim Acosta and Brian Karem, who covered the White House for Playboy, both of whom had their hard passes revoked after tough exchanges with the president (courts ordered the passes restored in both cases). Some correspondents anticipate even more of that in a second term, and more lawsuits, which, however frivolous, could cost cash-strapped news organizations to significantly fight.

Earlier this month, Trump sued The Des Moines Register for running a poll by Ann Selzer over the final weekend of the election that showed him trailing Harris by three points in Iowa.

At a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump said he had no choice but to sue. “We have to straighten out the press,” he said.

The comments, of course, were made to a room full of reporters and photographers, who were able to ask the president-elect questions on a number of topics. Any irony in that gets at the larger paradox of a media-obsessed politician who has made a career of attacking the press in public while courting them in private, calling reporters on the phone and frequently inviting them into the Oval Office or the executive cabin aboard Air Force One for long off the record conversations.

That paradox still holds.

“He believes he is owed positive coverage and has endured so much coverage that has been critical,” said the person in Trump’s orbit. “So he will do what he has to do to bend coverage his way. But he still cares about it a lot.”

Like this content? Consider signing up for POLITICO’s West Wing Playbook newsletter.