The impeachable president whined last week that he missed the good days when the Fourth Estate covered him exactly the way he wanted. In his inimitable words, “I used to be the king of getting good press.”
Just for the record, this poseur was never the king of anything. But there was indeed a time when he indeed orchestrated good press, when he’d leak gossip garbage to compliant New York tabloid reporters. That’s still his frame of reference, but those days are long gone. He’s playing in the big leagues now, the high hard fastballs are hurtling at his head, and he’s down in the dirt multiple times per news cycle.
The self-described “king of getting good press” was spoiled back in the ’80s. He had a great deal. According to Allen Salkin and Aaron Short, co-authors of a new book on Trump, here’s how the game worked: “In his calls to reporters, Trump tattled about who showed up where and with whom (at New York parties), and asked for something in return. Sometimes it was a mention of a new project or book. More typically, he wanted the adjective ‘billionaire’ preceding his name when the New York Post’s Page Six, the New York Daily News’s Hot Copy, or Newsday’s Inside New York mentioned him.”
There was zero evidence, of course, that Trump was actually a billionaire, but the tabloid reporters never bothered to fact-check it. They duly described him as “billionaire Donald Trump” as a transactional thank-you for the gossip he perpetually supplied. Lloyd Grove, one of those tabloid reporters back in the day, recalls that Trump “definitely knew how to write a tabloid story. He just had a natural ability to communicate in bold headlines.”
But was Grove concerned that the “billionaire” label might be bullshit? Nah. He tells Salkin and Short: “I didn’t really challenge (Trump) on the facts. So I guess in that sense I was being an enabler and lazy. But he was a colorful personality. He wasn’t the president of the United States.”
In Grove’s defense, who at the time could have imagined such a preposterous scenario? Unfortunately, however, those lazy enablers shaped Trump’s deluded belief that whatever emanated from his mouth would be forever treated by the media as golden nuggets.
Heck, he would even call up reporters, disguising himself as somebody else (“John Miller” or “John Barron”), and, without being challenged, he would dish about himself in the third person – as we heard in this 1991 recording, which surfaced during the ’16 campaign. Here’s “John Miller,” extolling Trump (himself) as a babe magnet: “I think that he has a whole open field really. A lot of the people you write about, and you people do a great job, by the way, but a lot of the people that you write about really are – I mean, they call. They just call. Actresses, people that you write about just call to see if they can go out with him and things.”
Trump can arguably be excused for assuming that his luck with the media would last forever; in 2016, the cable networks covered his toxic campaign rallies from start to finish, without fact-checking in real time. Jeff Zucker, the top guy at CNN, said on the eve of the ’16 election: “If we made any mistake (in 2015), it’s that we probably did put on too many of his campaign rallies in those early months and let them run…Because you never knew what he would say, there was an attraction to put those on air.”
That era of mindless media indulgence is blessedly over. These days, Trump’s panicked tweeting is a sign of weakness. The narrative is not his to command. Just in the last 24 hours, we’ve learned that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listened to Trump’s infamous phone call to the Ukraine president, when Trump requested a dirt-digging probe of Joe Biden. (Pompeo, on national TV, had previously denied any knowledge of that call.) We’ve learned that Trump attorney general Bill Barr has asked western allies to aid his mission to undermine the U.S. intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia helped elect Trump. We’ve learned that dirt-digging lawyer Rudy Giuliani has been subpoenaed by three House committees. We’ve learned that the intelligence community’s Inspector General (a Trump appointee), who vetted the whistleblower’s report on Trump’s impeachable behavior, has released a new letter attesting that the whistleblower had “official and authorized access to information and sources referenced,” as well as “direct knowledge of certain alleged conduct” and “subject matter expertise.” And last Friday, we learned that Trump told two Russian officials, during a ’17 Oval Office meeting, that he was fine with Russia’s interference in the ’16 election.
Trump is now hostage to events beyond his control. And if he’s still tempted to wax nostalgic for his “good press,” I’d suggest that he heed these Steely Dan lyrics:
Those days are gone forever/ Over a long time ago / Oh yeah.