Jungle-Orangutan...

The Jungle-Warfare Theory of Trump

The president’s assault on the media bears all the hallmarks of a comandante waging asymmetrical combat against a larger force. Except now he’s in charge.

By MARK FELDSTEIN

No president has ever established as volatile a relationship with the American media as quickly as Donald Trump.

During his campaign, he fenced reporters into a pen and encouraged his crowds to heckle them—only to surprise them later with personal phone calls and signed notes. Trump has attacked journalists individually and media outlets collectively as “absolutely dishonest” purveyors of “fake news,” “scum,” “slime,” “sleazy” and “disgusting,” but every week his White House publicly circulates positive articles from that same press. And less than a month into his presidency, he memorably excavated an indictment from Soviet Russia when he called five major news outlets “the enemy of the American people.”

For Trump, that Twitter broadside was just the latest round in what he calls his “running war” with mainstream journalism—a strategy equal parts deliberate and instinctual, and one we’ve never seen from a sitting president.

But what kind of conflict is it, really? And how much is it going to matter?

To the extent that Trump is indeed waging a war, one way to understand it is as a form of asymmetrical warfare. Like the Bolsheviks who began purging their own “enemies of the people” a century ago, Trump styles himself as a (nonviolent) revolutionary who seized power by using guerilla campaign tactics to overthrow the established order. Before he took office, some commentators saw a clear parallel with military insurgencies in Trump’s approach to politics. His campaign employed the unorthodox methods of fighters battling more powerful adversaries, using diversionary harassment to compensate for their dearth of conventional resources.

Traditionally, insurgents abandon their guerilla tactics once they have ascended to power and taken over the apparatus of government. But what’s striking about Trump’s presidency is that he hasn’t: Indeed, he continues to act more as rebel comandante than the duly elected president of a republic, opening new fronts against the judiciary, his own intelligence agencies and his favorite adversary, the media establishment. In a classic technique of asymmetrical warfare, Trump’s ambush attacks on the press masterfully use mainstream journalism’s core values against itself. His daily barrage of tweets and off-the-cuff insults, often unhinged and disconnected from anything approaching reality, consistently hijacks the news cycle, crowding out more significant events as reporters are invariably forced to chase the president’s latest outrages. The media cannot ignore Trump’s antics, no matter how outlandish, because of the traditional journalistic convention of treating what the president says as newsworthy. In fact, the more outrageous the remarks, the more newsworthy they are. And the media’s norm of objectivity insists that the president be quoted fairly, even if what he says is patently false.

This asymmetry has been accompanied by a kind of role reversal between the president and the press. Historically, the chief executive has acted—or tried to act—almost as a national father figure, a symbol of stability and steadiness as the representative of the world’s leading government. If that means the White House is guarded or even boring in how it communicates to the American people—well, that’s the price of holding power. Reporters, on the other hand, have customarily been the nimbler outsiders, throwing curve balls in the White House press room to try to shake loose unrehearsed news nuggets.

But now, even as they occupy the executive mansion, Trump and his band of warriors continue to act like outsiders, issuing a blizzard of slapdash executive actions, turning their news conferences and rallies into careening performances in which the president and his press secretary bait and badger reporters as if in an agitprop play. In comparison, mainstream journalists can come across as lumbering if not timid beasts, staid representatives of dreaded Washington officialdom—the grown-ups in the press room, hobbled by old-fashioned constraints that no longer seem to apply to the improvisational interlopers who have taken over the White House.

And so Comandante Trump seems to be holding his own, at least for now, against a media barrage that would likely have destroyed almost any other politician. The man who pledged to drain the swamp is using it as his cover, like a sniper picking off a regiment of soldiers whose job is to march steadily forward in formation, day after day.

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All of this is unfamiliar territory for the modern media. But in the long arc of the White House’s evolving relationship with the press, Trump’s guerrilla tactics are also part of an established historical tradition of presidents figuring out new ways to exploit the media’s institutional weaknesses.

In the early 1800s, when politicians had no “mainstream media” to reckon with, Thomas Jefferson and other presidents simply funded their own newspapers to propagandize on their behalf—and to eviscerate their enemies, Breitbart-style. Jefferson’s attack dogs helped expose the extramarital affair of his rival Alexander Hamilton, and the pro-Hamilton Richmond Recorder responded in kind by revealing that Jefferson fathered children by his slave “concubine” Sally Hemings.

Andrew Jackson and his allies took it to the next level, actually rewarding newspapers that had backed his candidacy with lucrative government printing contracts and putting more than 50 pro-Jackson editors on the federal payroll. The majority of these journalistic patronage jobs—postmasters, clerks, watchmen—were spread around the country, but the most influential were in Washington, in Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet, a precursor to Steve Bannon and his acolytes in the White House.

And more than a century before on-the-make developer Trump phoned New York tabloids to boast about his business and sexual conquests, posing under the bogus PR-agent aliases “John Miller” and “John Barron,” a young and ambitious Abraham Lincoln also used pseudonyms and anonymity to plant newspaper articles that promoted his career and denigrated his opponents. As historian Harold Holzer found, one of Honest Abe’s broadsides, co-written with his wife, Mary Todd, attacked a rival as “a fool as well as a liar”—and escalated to the point that the two men arranged a duel that was called off only at the last minute. After he was elected president, Lincoln used subtler tactics, reaching out directly to the public in open letters, a Twitter-like approach meant to circumvent press gatekeepers.

In the 20th century, as the news media grew in size, scope and sophistication, the White House became savvier about exploiting journalists. To ensure that he received regular coverage, Theodore Roosevelt established work space for the press inside the White House, briefed newsmen in person during his daily shave by the presidential barber and leaked confidential information to muckraking reporters. TR became America’s first truly modern media president, systematically shaping the news to advance his agenda as no chief executive ever had before.

When radio was the Twitter of its day, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously used the new medium to go over the heads of conservative newspaper owners with folksy fireside radio chats that created a feeling of intimacy with millions of Americans—allowing him to broadcast his political message straight into people’s homes. (FDR’s media mastery, which included flattering and bantering with reporters on a first-name basis, may even have helped quash negative publicity about his polio paralysis, which was downplayed in ways that would be inconceivable today.)

A generation later, as television eclipsed radio, the young and charismatic John F. Kennedy used the medium to seduce the public even more directly, showcasing his urbane wit and telegenic young family in live news conferences, debates and interviews. Kennedy also courted journalists and news executives by doling out scoops and social invitations to White House dinners.

And Ronald Reagan’s staff used the tricks of Hollywood to target media vulnerabilities—especially television’s need for compelling visuals—by positioning him with picturesque backdrops to reinforce their image du jour. “The idea was to divert people’s attention away from substantive issues,” political scientist John Anthony Maltese wrote, “by creating a world of myths and symbols that made people feel good about themselves and their country.”

Today, of course, such presidential tactics aren’t just accepted—they’re expected. Daily news conferences, weekly radio addresses, background briefings, staged television speeches and rallies, selected interviews and leaks—all are now essential elements in the symbiotic relationship between the president and the press. It has become a kind of ritualized dance, a sequence of maneuvers and manipulations based on the unstated but implicit bargain between a president who needs to get his message out and a press corps that needs access to the most powerful man in the world, in whatever way it can get it.

At first, each of these manipulations felt contrived, nakedly transactional, even destabilizing. Now, all have been routinized into American public life. The question isn’t whether such tactics will change in the future, only how—and when.

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Trump is the first president to master social media to hijack the journalistic agenda. In less than 140 characters, his inflammatory tweets can dominate the news cycle worldwide; even ambiguous or nonsensical missives, such as threatening to change libel laws to punish the media when he doesn’t have the power to do so, can generate Page 1 attention. Trump’s dual Twitter accounts—his official presidential one and his pre-existing personal one—allow him to mix his messages wearing different hats, aiming high one day, punching low the next, forever keeping the media and the public guessing about what will come next.

But Trump’s most audacious innovation has little to do with technology: It’s his unprecedented willingness to lie—openly, flagrantly, shamelessly—about matters trivial as well as important, about facts easily verifiable and falsehoods easily demonstrated. Although previous presidents often dissembled, they usually did so within certain ethical parameters, trying to maintain at least the illusion of respectability essential for maintaining trust in the White House, the one public institution universally recognized as a symbol of American authority.

Not Trump. His frequent use of the Big Lie, risking his own credibility and his government’s merely to “win” the daily news cycle, is a powerful if dangerous strategy—for both the president and his critics. If journalists openly challenge Trump’s lies, it reinforces his claim of bias or partisanship; if they don’t, they abdicate their responsibility as messengers of truth. Heads Trump wins, tails the media loses—at least for now, with his hard-core base.

But how long can all of this go on? Where and when does it end?

Guerrilla leaders—from George Washington to Ho Chi Minh—have always pursued one fundamental goal: to wear down their militarily superior enemies until they give up. “The guerilla wins if he does not lose,” Henry Kissinger famously observed. “The conventional army loses if it does not win.”

But Trump must do more than just not lose; he must actually govern, a feat far more complex than manipulating his news coverage. And unlike King George III’s Redcoats or U.S. forces in Vietnam, the mainstream news media isn’t going anywhere. Indeed, many journalists seem to be relishing their combat with Trump, finding a renewed sense of purpose in battling a man many view as unfit to be president.

At the same time, as commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet, Trump is hardly a weak insurgent battling to stay alive against more powerful forces—certainly not when it comes to the scribes he enjoys taunting.

Fortunately, Trump’s self-described “running war” with the media bears only a tepid resemblance to the real ones waged by dictators around the globe, such as his comrade Vladimir Putin, whose regime routinely imprisons, exiles and executes troublesome journalists.

But Trump must do more than just not lose; he must actually govern, a feat far more complex than manipulating his news coverage.

Rather, Trump seems more akin to an extreme version of traditional Washington outsiders, like Andrew Jackson, the presidential role model adopted for Trump by his Svengali Bannon. Jackson was also an angry champion of the white working class, a press-hating authoritarian who shocked the capital’s establishment from the day he was inaugurated, when he welcomed the rabble that had elected him into the White House with an alcohol-filled party that got so out of hand the new president had to flee from the mob.

Subsequent presidents also ran as Washington outsiders pledged to shaking up the status quo—Jimmy Carter, Reagan and Bill Clinton, to name the most recent. All, to varying degrees, were forced to compromise with the reigning political establishment to get their legislative policies passed by Congress. And all, ultimately, came to terms with the mainstream news outlets that have become an integral part of that establishment. Perhaps Trump will, too.

The last president to display such open hatred for the news media was Richard Nixon, whose Bannon doppelganger, Charles Colson, told the head of CBS News that the White House would “bring you to your knees” and “break your network.” Nixon’s men drew up an “enemies list” to single out journalists for tax audits and other forms of retaliation, filed antitrust charges against the three television networks, secretly wiretapped journalists and even plotted to assassinate an investigative reporter who had long been Nixon’s bête noire.

Of course, in the end, Nixon had to resign in disgrace, and even Trump’s most ardent adversaries haven’t accused him of plotting to murder his journalistic critics. Although it’s still early in his administration, the real danger Trump poses seems more insidious: His reckless lies and ruthless divide-and-conquer tactics risk delegitimizing the press, the judiciary, the intelligence agencies and other countervailing institutional checks on his power. Asymmetrical wars can have long-term costs that more straightforward battles don’t. And the uncertainty and distrust that drive such conflicts can curdle into deep social rifts that fracture a society long afterward.

Trump may eventually go down the way Nixon did, or adapt to Washington’s establishment, or just fizzle out in a fog of ineffective bluster. But by undermining faith in bedrock pillars of democratic society along the way, Trump’s polarizing nihilism of “alternative facts” in an alternative political universe threatens the very notion of truth itself. In such a world, anyone and everyone is at risk of becoming an “enemy of the people.”