Trump’s Attacks on the Media Are Self-Defeating
When the president asserts that all negative coverage is false, he seals his party off from necessary criticism.
Donald Trump's presidency is struggling, yet he relentlessly attacks the news media, including banning CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House. However, his inability to govern effectively is not due to his animosity towards the press; rather, his hatred for the news media is a consequence of his governance shortcomings. Trump has been hostile to the media since before his political career began, and his attempts to limit independent reporting date back to his first days in office.
His most dangerous assaults on the press came after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, when some conservatives saw an opportunity to discredit their critics.
Trump's disdain for critical news coverage is a deeply ingrained belief on the political right, but his actions have far exceeded those of his predecessors. Conservative distrust of the media has been so entrenched that the Nixon administration's defense of the Watergate scandal relied on attacking the credibility of reporters uncovering its misconduct. Despite the media's efforts to report objectively, conservatives often ignore this, treating liberal media bias as a fixed truth of their worldview.
The Republican Party has long accepted this bias, training itself to disregard negative news coverage as evidence of innate hostility. In Trump's view, negative news is inherently fake, a hoax, or the product of "Trump Derangement Syndrome." His supporters have adopted this formulation, and Fox News media critic Howard Kurtz's book, Media Madness, argues that critical stories about Trump inherently reflect media bias.
Trump's attacks on the media are not illegal, as the First Amendment protects freedom of the press. However, his belief that negative stories inherently reflect media bias may be part of his motivation to reinforce a personality cult that disregards evidence of failure. By constantly reminding Republicans that the press cannot be trusted, Trump has made it difficult for them to engage in fresh critique and correction. This haphazard protectionism has only made the GOP's governing failures worse.
Written by urgent.news from The Atlantic's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
