Three of the country’s top political journalists described President Donald Trump on Wednesday in Jackson as an unreliable fact witness and characterized him as “Nixon’s revenge.”
Trump is accomplishing “things that Nixon was unable to do,” said Susan Glasser, a staff writer and columnist for The New Yorker. He is undertaking “the deconstruction of the post-Watergate state,” she said, dismantling “everything that was put in place” to prevent a recurrence of Nixon’s crimes.
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and Glasser’s husband, said Trump is “a completely unreliable fact witness [who] will change a story.” Trump makes for “a fascinatingly frustrating interview,” said Baker, who interviewed the president with Glasser twice after his 2020 election defeat.
“There’s a real fear factor in Washington. It reminds us of Moscow.”
Peter Baker
Glasser and Baker spoke as former Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus moderated an hour-long conversation at the Center for the Arts in Jackson, hosted by the Jackson Hole Book Festival. The three worked together at the Post years ago and Marcus, who splits her time between Jackson and Maryland, is a festival board member.
Baker and Glasser referenced their book “The Divider,” about the first term, which, Glasser said, reveals “the essence of Trump.” For their book, the couple found willing interview subjects — “all Republican … from inside the room,” Glasser said. Those who talked right after Trump’s first term likely did so assuming he was not coming back.
The situation today is different.
“There’s a real fear factor in Washington,” Baker said, including sources’ fear of physical harm. “It reminds us of Moscow,” where the couple was posted from 2001-2004 as Vladimir Putin was consolidating power.
Sources “are afraid,” Baker said. “They fear retribution. It’s hard to blame them.”
Trump is laying down conditions to unravel democracy, Glasser said, undermining the institutions that uphold it while leaving their shells as facades.
Trump ‘most transparent’
Baker reasoned that Trump was “the most transparent” of the five presidents he has covered, because what he talked about during his first term — like eliminating courts or judicial authority — Trump is trying to achieve in his second.
That, and a discussion about the coverage of former President Joe Biden’s age and acuity, were two moments of respite in the evening of critique. Baker said “no” when Marcus asked whether the press had dropped the ball in reporting on Biden’s mental state, then qualified his remarks.
“They hated our age stories,” Baker said of the Biden White House’s reaction to Times reporting. “We wrote about this a lot.”
Biden’s slow decline didn’t stand out in day-to-day comparisons, he said. Baker recalled a speech Biden delivered that didn’t strike any of his regular observers as unusual. But a colleague who had not attended a Biden speech in person for a year clearly saw a change in the then-president’s capabilities.
That was “something we had not picked up on in our reporting,” Baker said. The other reporter “had this perspective I didn’t,” a perspective that became the dominant national viewpoint after Biden’s disastrous debate with Trump.
Beyond Trump’s transparency and the Biden-age story, the three speakers focused on what they described as Trump’s anti-democratic and ethically abnormal actions — what Glasser called “a parade of unthinkables.”
ABC’s and CBS’ lawsuit settlements with Trump underscore the culture of fear faced by reporters whose institutions don’t back them up, the two said. Marcus herself resigned from the Washington Post after an editor spiked one of her columns. She received the evening’s loudest applause when an audience member said her resignation reflected the “highest quality of journalism.”
Glasser and Baker said they don’t think Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Wall Street Journal, will fold like other news outlets have. The Journal in 2018 broke the story on Trump’s hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels, they pointed out. It has scooped others with recent revelations about Trump’s relationship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump has sued the Journal for publishing the latest stories, but Baker doesn’t think Murdoch will follow ABC and CBS and settle. “Rupert Murdoch, I think, will not go [that] way,” he said.
Today at White House and presidential events, there’s instant hostility toward the press, Baker said. “They’re trying to use you as a prop.”
Trump borrowed a phrase from Stalin when he labeled the press “enemies of the people,” Glasser said. The intent is to separate journalists from the rest of the population and define them as the opposition.
“It is a public-interest profession,” she said of her job before quoting former Post Editor Marty Baron: “We’re not at war with the Trump administration, we’re at work.”
This article was corrected to state when the three panelists worked together and to say the White House reaction to stories about President Biden’s age regarded reports in the Times, not the Post — Ed.
Really? They did not see cognitive decline? Biden falling off bicycles, falling upstairs, falling downstairs, being guided to places to stand by Giorgia Meloni, Barak Obama, innumerable staffers, and even the Easter Bunny. Biden constantly slurring of words, using wrong words and often incomprehensible. Perhaps when Biden was interviewed by the Department of Justice for retaining classified documents and Special Counsel Robert Hur says the president is a likable elderly man with a failing memory, where was the press? Perhaps the press could have dug into the story just a bit. The tape is hard to listen to and I feel for the court reporter who transcribed the interview. Reference can be found here:
http://www.justice.gov/oip/available-documents-oip (starting 4 bullets down from the 2023 divider)
How could these reporters deflect the fact that their reporting of Joe Biden’s obvious decline was non-existent, but obvious to the casual observer?
So now they are in Jackson Hole selling a book on how they dislike Trump. It isn’t hard to see amazing bias in the national press. Even here in Wyoming, the press leans left and it isn’t the wind pushing that direction.
There is a point when the reporting seems so biased that the ideal of a free press has simply disappeared. 100% of NPR is registered Democrat. How about Axios’s Alex Thompson saying “But being truth tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it.”
(It is recorded in the video http://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=706081248651405 starting at about 3:40)
The Press simply looked the other way covering the Biden administration while denying the Hunter Biden laptop, failing to investigate the “Russia hoax” and heck not even mentioning that Biden would not visit East Palistine, Ohio after a disaster (he did eventually find Ohio a year or more later). George Bush flies over land devastated by Katrina and we never hear the end of it. Seriously, we should ignore the bias? Isn’t it rich that these New York reporters write a book titled “Divider”, when the press has done division since long before the turn of the century.
The founders truly wanted a free and active press to sustain the republic. Oh, the Irony when the motto of the Washington Post is “Democracy dies in darkness” and they actively try to keep us in the dark.
We will never hear the end of the cry “election deniers”. Hageman is an election denier! Chuck Gray is an election denier! But it seems that the Democrat Convention is rigged… repeatedly. That would be a fun interview asking Trump and Bernie Sanders together, if the Democrats rig the nomination process. Probably one of the few things that they can fully agree about.
There is a point where we cannot trust the press. I post here because WyoFile will link to primary documents in stories or post my links in comments. Wyoming is better than most. There are newspapers I do not trust in Wyoming. There are unethical reporters whom I will never speak to ever again. But there are a very select few I will speak with at WyoFile and sometimes elsewhere.
The two reporters highlighted in this article should have written “Divider” about the failures of enormous bias in the press and their own reporting that ends up leaving the country in darkness. Cover stories with facts and without bias and let them run where they may, and the press can strengthen the republic.
Mr. Lewis you eloquently said what most of America is thinking. I think that former POTUS Biden supporters did a disservice to their party that will show consequences for years. Thank you for the truth.
Richard and Doug, did you even read this article before condemning it as left wing propaganda?
Did you read the paragraph about Stalin calling the press the “enemy of the people”? Isn’t that exactly what Trump has been saying repeatedly through the years to rile his MAGA base with Fox News’ help? How exactly is that American?
Come on guys, you’ve got to look outside once in awhile and see the harm this administration is doing to this country and the world this time around. You can’t argue that Fox and right wing media aren’t as bad, if not worse, in their bias’s as the left. They continually perpetuate lies and conspiracies to cover for an administration that’s unequaled in their level of corruption and deceit.
Doug, the lifeboats are indeed full and the citizens in steerage (meaning the majority of us) are suffering because of it thanks to Trump and his acolytes dismal attempt at governing. Richard, if it weren’t for the “ridiculous howling of the left” (I assume you meant anyone other than Fox News), this administration would be able to get away with even more extortion and grift than we’ve seen so far. God help us if the free press and the judiciary fails in stopping, or at least slows down, this Trump train wreck that’s in progress.
The apple and orange comparisons of Trump to Stalin are baseless. Let me know when Trump marches all his generals out and has them shot or kill more people than Hitler
The comparison is between Trump and Stalin’s similar retoric regarding the press and not the physical actions taken by Stalin again’st his people.
I feel that Trump’s repeated vilification of the press, unless he’s covered favorably, is at it’s core un-American. His skin is far too thin and his ego far too massive to tolerate any form of criticism as president of the United States.
I hope that clears up the apples and oranges for you Richard.
I’ve been a news junky for a long time. What is happening now reminds me of the Soviet News Agency Tass. It used to be quoted a lot and it was kind of a joke. Anything they came out with was pretty much propaganda and not true. That’s what Trump wants American news sources to become. Nothing but happy talk about him and don’t you dare say anything negative. He is systematically taking apart television and the written press with ridiculous law suits. The sad part is that they are complying.
What are the lefty’s whining about? We hired this man to do what he said he would do, and now there blowing up , the majority voted for this and now you’re surprised, America is coming back to normal, get rid of illegals and stop letting the criminals get hand slaps. We work hard to pay our taxes and we get to vote, so get over it!
Like the Washington Post or any of their reporters has any credibility…….
Members of the Trump Cult parrot his attack on the free press. He is.using every financial threat. The attacks on the justice system is equally dangerous to 250 years of democracy.
The reason Trump gets away with what he does is because everyone ‘folds’ under pressure from the Hitler want-to-be. It’s up to the PEOPLE to force him out of office. I would have to say that I’m surprised that America is so weak. I guess we have a weak population. We have allowed the bad guys to take the power.
The ridiculous howling by the left never ceases to amaze. The press as a whole has bent, twisted and stretched the truth for so long now that no one cares.
And the constant pandering to President Trump by politicians, media, and all things Republican also is ridiculous and asinine. Yes, unfortunately there are too many ill informed people that rely on social media as their primary fact finding source. People are no longer capable of having an independent thought, or heaven forbid to do a little research on their own. We have become a nation of loud mouth bully’s, and the loudest and most prolific of these is President Trump. Lead by example…….
Elitist lifelong propagandists.
They rearranged the deck chairs on this sinking ship for decades. And now that the lifeboats are full and citizenry in steerage suffers, they feign horror and outrage.
Laughable.