Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story

WASHINGTON — The White House
press secretary, Sean Spicer, has taken
to slapping journalists who write
unflattering stories with an epithet he
sees as the epitome of low-road, New
York Post-style gossip: “Page Six
reporter.”
Whether the New England-bred
spokesman realizes it or not, the
expression is perhaps less an insult
than a reminder of an era when
Donald J. Trump mastered the New
York tabloid terrain — and his own
narrative — shaping his image with a
combination of on-the-record bluster
and off-the-record gossip.
He’s not in Manhattan anymore. This
New York-iest of politicians, now an
idiosyncratic, write-your-own-rules
president, has stumbled into the most
conventional of Washington traps:
believing he can master an
entrenched political press corps with
far deeper connections to the
permanent government of federal law
enforcement and executive
department officials than he has.
Instead, President Trump has found
himself subsumed and increasingly
infuriated by the leaks and criticisms
he has long prided himself on
vanquishing. Now, goaded by Stephen
K. Bannon, his chief strategist, Mr.
Trump has turned on the news media
with escalating rhetoric, labeling
major outlets as “the enemy of the
American people.”
His latest swipe — pulling out of
Washington’s so-called nerd prom —
came via Twitter on Saturday. “I will
not be attending the White House
Correspondents’ Association Dinner
this year,” Mr. Trump wrote. “Please
wish everyone well and have a great
evening!”
He has made a sharp break from
previous presidents — and from his
own comfortable three-decade tango
with the tabloids.
“New York is extremely intense and
competitive, but it is actually a much
smaller pond than Washington, where
you have many more players with
access to many more sources,” said
Howard Wolfson, who has split his
career between New York and
Washington, advising former Mayor
Michael R. Bloomberg and Hillary
Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
“In New York, you can create a
manageable set of relationships in a
smaller universe,” Mr. Wolfson said.
“In Washington, that becomes a lot
more complicated.”
There is another fundamental
difference: During his Page Six days,
Mr. Trump was, by and large,
trafficking in trivia. As president, he
is dealing with the most serious issues
of the day. They involve the nation’s
safety and prosperity, and it is the
role of news organizations to cover
them.
If Mr. Trump’s slap-and-tickle
relationship with reporters had a
model back then, people close to him
say, it was the gregarious,
unavoidable-for-comment style of
Edward I. Koch, the three-term New
York mayor. But his mood in
Washington has turned darker, and
over the last week he has executed,
alongside Mr. Bannon and Mr. Spicer,
what amounts to the most sustained
White House campaign against the
news media since Richard M. Nixon’s
second term.
“It’s like Nixonian times again,” said
George Rush, a veteran New York
gossip columnist who has covered Mr.
Trump for decades. “I just thought he
would have a thicker skin.”
Linda Stasi, who chronicled Mr.
Trump’s up-and-down marriage to
Marla Maples in the 1990s for two
New York papers, said she could have
predicted the presidential agita. “He
would plant stories and he would get
mad if they didn’t come out exactly as
he wanted,” she recalled of earlier
dealings with Mr. Trump. “It never
occurred to him that he couldn’t
control everything.”
Now, Ms. Stasi said, “he is shocked
that he is not in control of the press.”
Attacking the news media, which has
an abysmal approval rating among
Republican voters, is sound politics in
the short term. But Mr. Trump’s fury
is less strategic than heartfelt. He
watches cable TV at night and exhorts
aides like Mr. Spicer and his policy
adviser Stephen Miller to be tougher,
according to White House aides.
His anger is compounded by his belief
that he should still be able to plant
and steer stories. That was a lot easier
to do when he was running a close-
knit real estate and branding business
with an aggressive legal team that
demanded that nearly everyone in his
orbit sign nondisclosure agreements.
For the first time in his life, Mr.
Trump is on the public payroll and
subject to a tangle of laws and rules
no businessman — especially one
accustomed to overseeing every aspect
of a relatively small family business —
would tolerate.
To some extent, the clash with the
press was inevitable. Mr. Trump may
be noisier and more confrontational
than many of his predecessors, but he
is being force-fed lessons all
presidents eventually learn — that the
iron triangle of the Washington press
corps, West Wing staff and federal
bureaucracy is simply too powerful to
bully.
Mr. Trump’s relationship with the
press during the 2016 campaign was
rocky and paradoxical. He was, at
times, accessible — frequently calling
reporters to kibbitz, complain or make
news.
But as the resentments piled up, his
staff, led by Corey Lewandowski, his
first campaign manager, made a point
of snubbing journalists it did not like
and confining reporters to a small pen
at rallies. Mr. Trump quickly realized,
aides said, that his attacks on the
“dishonest” news media were as
popular as his hits on “crooked”
Hillary Clinton.
The addition of Mr. Bannon to the
campaign team last summer gave the
jostling hostility a sharper edge. Last
month, Mr. Bannon described the
Trump-media relationship as “a war”
in an interview with The New York
Times.
“I want you to quote this,” he said.
“The media here is the opposition
party. They don’t understand this
country. They still do not understand
why Donald Trump is the president of
the United States.”
Things have deteriorated since then.
The White House, on the defensive last
week after a series of missteps and
leaked stories, sought to shift to
offense, targeting the news media as
an enemy, in the absence of any more
formidable foil in a city now firmly
controlled by Republicans.
Mr. Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs
executive and Hollywood producer
who made a fortune from the
syndication of TV shows, described the
“corporatist media” as the “opposition
party” in a speech on Thursday. The
next day, Mr. Spicer excluded selected
news organizations, including The
New York Times, Politico and CNN,
from a closed-door version of his daily
briefing.
Then there was Mr. Trump’s 10-
minute attack on “fake news” during
his speech at the Conservative Political
Action Conference on Friday, which
was met with shouts of approval from
the conservative faithful.
Reporters back in New York, however,
knew that the president’s call for an
end to “sources” — meaning
anonymous sources leaking damaging
details of his campaign’s relationship
with Russian officials — did not jibe
with his onetime role as a no-
fingerprints gossipmonger, trumpeting
his business dealings and romantic
life in late-night phone calls.
“I’m against the people that make up
stories and make up sources,” Mr.
Trump said. “They shouldn’t be
allowed to use sources unless they use
somebody’s name. Let their name be
put out there. Let their name be put
out.”
“He used to be the one leaking!” Ms.
Stasi pointed out on Friday from her
office at The Daily News, where she is
a columnist. “He was leaking about
himself. He would call up with fake
accents and pretend it wasn’t him. He
would tell us 100 times: ‘Now listen,
I’m going to tell you something, but it
didn’t come from me.’”
Mr. Trump, who taunted his blind-
quoted critics on Friday — “Let ’em
say it to my face!” — hid his own
identity to push self-promoting stories
in the 1980s, posing as his own public-
relations man under the fake names
John Miller and John Barron.
Despite his dominance of social media,
Mr. Trump still retains a slightly
anachronistic view of the press. He
prefers ink to pixels, asking staff
members to print out online articles
and reviewing the day’s newspapers
— black Sharpie in hand — with Mr.
Spicer in the Oval Office at the end of
each work day. Mr. Trump reads
bylines and remembers them.
He also keeps obsessive track of his
presence in the press. During an
interview at Trump Tower last spring,
the future president proudly showed
off a boardroom filled entirely with
stacks of magazines and newspapers
featuring his visage.
The publications, which covered an
entire conference table, ran the
spectrum from The Wall Street Journal
to The Hollywood Reporter to
Newsweek and Time. Framed copies
of Playboy, TV Guide and Variety hung
on the walls. It was a living,
expanding shrine to his political rise
— and a physical manifestation of his
media fixation.
Still, for a sophisticated consumer of
news, Mr. Trump retains a brutally
simple, almost Manichaean view of his
coverage: good stories are good, bad
stories are evil. It could prove an
untenable attribute for the most
scrutinized man in the world.
“He loves the press; he lives for it,”
Howard Stern, a frequent Trump
interviewer and friend, said this
month. “He wants to be liked; he
wants to be loved.” Being president,
Mr. Stern added, is not “going to be a
healthy experience.”
Correction: February 25, 2017
Because of an editing error, an earlier
version of this article referred
incorrectly to Sean Spicer’s upbringing.
He was New England bred, having been
raised in Rhode Island; he was not
“New England born.” (Mr. Spicer would
not go on the record and give the
correct facts pertaining to his
birthplace.)