Antisocial, p.26
Antisocial, page 26
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In normal times, White House press briefings make for boring television. Robert Gibbs, Jay Carney, and Josh Earnest, the three generic-looking white guys who served as successive press secretaries under Barack Obama, could walk through most American cities without being recognized. Only rarely was a clip from one of their briefings—for example, a testy exchange between Carney and Jonathan Karl of ABC News debating the logistics of Obamacare enrollment—remarkable enough to make headlines.
Then came Donald Trump, a man with little tolerance for boring television. The daily press briefings were suddenly among the most highly rated programs on daytime TV, beating out General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful. Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, became a recurring character on Saturday Night Live, portrayed by Melissa McCarthy. Spicer, whose job was to speak extemporaneously on behalf of the president, was remarkably bad at extemporaneous speaking; the sketches highlighted his propensity to become tongue-tied, flushed with rage, or both at once.*
Major news networks devoted hours to nightly exegeses of Spicer’s serial self-contradictions, and to Sunday-morning sermons about how he was imperiling the First Amendment by withholding access from journalists he didn’t like. On YouTube, fan accounts with names such as Trump Mafia and Based Patriot reposted Spicer’s briefings, and other conservative outlets posted exultant compilations of his “spiciest” moments, overlaying his rebukes of reporters with images of flames and chili peppers. Depending on your definition of “news,” you could say that Spicer made news several times in every briefing, because so much of what he said was astonishing, or that he rarely made news, because so much of what he said was either garbled or obviously wrong.
Previous presidents were too busy with matters of state to obsess over the minutiae of public relations. This is why press briefings exist. In the nineteenth century, presidents could brief reporters themselves, on an infrequent, ad-hoc basis; by the 1920s, doling out information had become a full-time job, and Herbert Hoover became the first president to hire a spokesperson. Mike McCurry, appointed by Bill Clinton, was the first press secretary to allow the briefings to be aired on live TV, a decision he later called a “fatal mistake.”
President Trump apparently had plenty of time to watch TV—especially when the voices on the screen were talking about him, which they almost always were. “Look at his daily schedule, and you’ll notice how few events are held between 1:00 and 2:00 P.M.,” a White House radio correspondent told me. This was when Spicer usually held his briefings. “I sometimes feel like I’m too busy to go to the briefings, and going to them is my job,” the correspondent continued. “The thought that the president of the United States might take the time to sit through an entire briefing, much less all of them, is frankly mind boggling.” Another correspondent pointed out how often press aides delivered notes to Spicer while he was at the lectern, and how obediently Spicer seemed to respond to the notes’ directives, cutting a response short or abruptly ending a briefing. The reigning theory was that the notes, which appeared to be written in Sharpie, were messages from the president, watching live from elsewhere in the building.
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A few months into his presidency, while flying on Air Force One, Trump paid a visit to the reporters in the main cabin. “I don’t get to watch much television, primarily because of documents,” he said. “I’m reading documents. A lot.”
This was weird, even by Trump’s standards. For one thing, no one on the plane had said anything about television. For another, “reading documents a lot” is high on the list of activities it’s nearly impossible to imagine Trump doing, along with foraging, Pilates, and deep introspection. It later became clear that the impetus for Trump’s outburst was an email he’d just received from The New York Times—a list of fifty-one fact-checking questions for an article about him. When the piece came out, it reported that Trump began his days by watching TV in bed, where he sometimes “tweets while propped on his pillow.” (Trump, on Twitter: “Wrong!”)
Trump had built a career on the understanding that there was no such thing as too much media exposure. He kept picking fights, especially with reporters, in part because fights were good for ratings; he changed his mind about almost everything, but he always maintained that unfriendly journalists were scum. In May 2016, he held a press conference in Trump Tower. He spent much of the time upbraiding the assembled reporters, calling them “sleazy” and “dishonest.”
“I think you’ve set a new bar today for being contentious with the press corps, kind of calling us losers to our faces and all that,” David Martosko of the Daily Mail said. “Is this what it’s going to be like covering you if you’re president?”
“Yeah, it is,” Trump responded.
He seemed to be operating on several overlapping assumptions: that an arbitrary exercise of power would make him look strong; that it would behoove him to treat the mainstream media, one of the most disliked institutions in the country, as his foil; that he would have wider latitude to lie if he continued to assail the very notion of facticity; and that conflict is attention, and attention is influence.
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In Washington, Wintrich took a cab to the Hay-Adams hotel—a former mansion a block north of the White House, all decorative moldings and wall sconces. While he waited to check in, two men stepped up to the counter.
“It says here that The Wall Street Journal is your preferred publication, Mr. Schwartz,” the receptionist said. “Is that correct?”
“Maybe you should get the National Enquirer instead,” Mr. Schwartz’s friend said. “That’s what real Americans read.”
“Oh, is The Wall Street Journal fake news now?” Mr. Schwartz said.
“They’re globalist cucks, aren’t they?” his friend said.
The receptionist paused, her face neutral, her hands frozen on the computer keyboard.
Mr. Schwartz turned to her and smiled. “We’ll take the Journal, and also the Times and the Post if you’ve got ’em,” he said. She chuckled with relief.
I glanced at Wintrich to see whether he was offended or flattered by this exchange, but he wasn’t paying attention. A reporter from Politico had just emailed him asking for an interview, and he was crafting his reply.
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Wintrich met up with Hoft, who would accompany him to his first briefing the next day. “I hate traveling, but I had to be here for this,” Hoft said. “The Gateway Pundit, this blog I started in my basement, made it all the way to the fucking White House? Are you kidding me? This is gonna be so epic!”
Shortly after the election, Hoft said, he emailed “Trump’s people” to ask about press credentials “and they encouraged us to apply.” He wouldn’t say which people, but he had known Steve Bannon, then Trump’s top strategist, for many years, and Sean Spicer had been aware of Hoft’s work since at least 2012, when Spicer tweeted a link to a Gateway Pundit story about voter fraud. (The story turned out to be false.) While Hoft spoke, Wintrich emailed Hope Hicks, then Trump’s director of strategic communications, asking a logistical question; she replied within three minutes. “She’s incredible,” Wintrich said. “And gorgeous, obviously. I hope I can convince her to be my friend.”
Over dinner at a nearby steakhouse, Hoft and Wintrich brainstormed questions they might ask the next day. They were joined by two conservative filmmakers from Chicago who would document their arrival at the White House. “Just make sure everything has ‘fake news’ in it, Lucian,” Hoft said, passing him a Hay-Adams notepad. “Every question you ask with the words ‘fake news,’ you get a ten-dollar bonus. We’ll add that to your contract.”
Wintrich sipped a martini and jotted a few notes. “Sean! Over here, Sean!” he said, pretending to raise his hand. “In the last month alone, there have been at least twenty fake news stories in the failing New York Times. Does fake news like this get in the way of the president’s ability to proceed on policy?”
Hoft cackled loudly enough to startle a woman at a nearby table. “That’s fucking hilarious,” he said. “Should we do something about SNL, maybe?”
“A follow-up, Sean, if I may?” Lucian said. “Do you think the failing show Saturday Night Live will be canceled, or can it be made great again?”
“That’s hard-core,” Jeremy Segal, one of the filmmakers, said.
“Genius,” Hoft said.
Andrew Marcus, the other filmmaker, had directed Hating Breitbart, a flattering feature documentary about Andrew Breitbart. “I was with him pretty much every minute from 2009 until shortly before he passed,” Marcus said. “Remarkable man. Prophetic man.”*
For a moment, Wintrich seemed to get cold feet. “Should we have a couple of backup questions that are specifically about policy?” he asked.
“Policy schmolicy,” Hoft said.
Segal agreed: “Fuck policy. Politics is downstream from culture. That’s what I learned from A.B.” These, of course, were the initials of his departed role model, Andrew Breitbart.
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The next morning, in a room at the Hay-Adams, Marcus pulled back the drapes to reveal a perfectly framed view of the White House, with the Washington Monument in the background. “So awesome,” Marcus said. “I want my deathbed to be in this room.” While Segal filmed, Hoft and Wintrich discussed their plan for the day. They had just received an email informing them that Spicer’s daily briefing had been canceled; instead, President Trump would host a joint press conference with the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, who was at the White House for a state visit. They scrapped their questions from dinner and started to research Trudeau instead.
Wintrich’s bravado had returned. His hair was fashionably mussed, and he wore a tie printed with elephants in pastel colors. Skimming an article on his phone, he said that Trudeau “apparently loved Castro. Fawned over him.”
Hoft, wearing a black suit and a yellow Trump-brand tie, improvised a few questions. “What appeals to you about Communist dictators, Mr. Trudeau?” he said. “What offends you about freedom?”
Wintrich thought the attack could be sharper. “Not to use the gay angle right out of the gate,” he said, “but we could say, ‘You’ve voiced support for Castro, who imprisoned gays, and for Muslims, who kill gays—what do you have against gay people?’”
“That’s epic,” Hoft said.
“I think it’s trollier, from a trolling perspective,” Wintrich said.
“Love it,” Hoft said. “Google ‘Castro jails gays’ or something, see what you find.” Sitting at an antique wooden desk before an open laptop, Hoft clicked on a headline: “Trump Claims America Should Never Have Given Canada Its Independence.” The post, on a site called the Burrard Street Journal, quoted a Trump tweet with the hashtag #MakeCanadaAmericanAgain. “Is this real?” Hoft said. “I follow the news. I feel like I would have heard about this.” It seemed obvious that the Burrard Street Journal—whose logo was “BS Journal,” and whose other top headlines included “Alex Jones Selected to Host Next White House Correspondents’ Dinner”—was a news parody site. But Hoft spent several minutes vacillating. He googled “Make Canada American Again” and saw that no mainstream newspapers—the kind that he and the president had taken to calling “fake news”—had picked up the story. “It must be bullshit,” he concluded. “God, I hate bullshit sites.”
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Outside the hotel, Wintrich lit a cigarette for the three-minute walk to the White House. Four days earlier, The Washington Post had reported that General Michael Flynn, before being sworn in as Trump’s national security adviser, had discussed sanctions with Russian officials, and had subsequently lied to cover up those conversations. As we crossed Lafayette Park, I asked Wintrich what he thought about the many allegations of coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.
“You mean the pee tape?” he said.
“I mean the whole thing,” I said. “Manafort’s visits to Ukraine. The timing of Kislyak’s meetings. Apparently Rex Tillerson, before he got the Order of Friendship medal, traveled to—”
“It’s all a media hoax,” Wintrich said. He declined to elaborate. I’d expected, if not something more plausible, then at least something trollier, from a trolling perspective. But his heart wasn’t in it. “I keep trying to read up on Russia stuff and I always get bored,” he said. Just as Cernovich had dismissed birtherism as old news, Wintrich didn’t try to rebut accusations of Russian collusion; he simply dismissed it as a played-out narrative, which was, by his lights, an even more stinging rebuke.
We lined up outside the northwest gate of the White House, waiting to be issued gray temporary passes. The long-serving correspondents with red “hard passes” were waved to the front of the line. April Ryan, the White House correspondent for American Urban Radio Networks, made small talk with the guards while placing her purse and keys on a conveyor belt.
“Hoft? Wintrich?” A Secret Service agent slapped two gray passes on the desk. Hoft and Wintrich took the passes, making gleeful, surreptitious eye contact. They walked through the metal detectors, and a White House aide led them through a door at the back of the shed. They were inside the gates.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Narrative of Public Life
The White House briefing room has seven rows of seven seats—tattered blue folding chairs without much legroom. The ceilings are low. The carpets are stained. A narrow hallway leads out of the briefing room, past a row of tiny edit bays, and toward a kitchenette, where there’s a lunch table bolted to the floor and a vending machine that sells Snyder’s pretzels, Rice Krispies Treats, and cans of Bumble Bee tuna. (“Who would be tempted by vending-machine tuna?” I heard someone ask.)
The front row of seats is reserved for the Associated Press, Reuters, and the biggest TV networks; reporters from Politico and Real Clear Politics sit near the middle; BuzzFeed and the BBC are in the back. The seating chart is the purview of the White House Correspondents’ Association, an independent board of journalists who, with the somber secrecy of a papal conclave, assess news organizations according to a number of objective and subjective factors—circulation, regularity of coverage, centrality to the national discourse. There are also correspondents who might be called floaters—those who have White House credentials but no assigned place in the seating chart. In normal times, when press briefings are half empty, floaters can find vacant seats. In the early days of the Trump administration, when each day’s briefing was oversubscribed, floaters packed the aisles, angling for a spot with a sight line to the podium.
The paradigmatic floater was Raghubir Goyal, a cordial, absentminded man in his sixties. Goyal claimed to be the White House correspondent for the India Globe, a newspaper that, as far as anyone can tell, was either defunct or had never existed at all. Nevertheless, he had attended briefings since the Carter administration, and had asked so many questions about Indo-American relations that his name had become a verb. “To Goyal”: to call on a reporter who is likely to provide an innocuous question, or a moment of comic relief. All press secretaries got cornered, and all of them, on occasion, had to Goyal their way out. But no one Goyaled like Spicer.
For years, by tradition, the first question of each briefing had gone to the Associated Press. At Spicer’s first briefing, his first question went to the New York Post, a conservative tabloid whose reporter, sitting in the fifth row, was clearly surprised. “When will you commence the building of the border wall?” he asked. In Spicer’s next briefing, his first question went to a reporter from LifeZette, who asked why the administration hadn’t taken a harder line on immigration.*
Calling on the reporters in the front row wasn’t only about appealing to their egos, a longtime TV correspondent told me. “It’s also about maintaining a sense of predictability, a sense that eventually the substantive questions will be answered,” he said. “Throwing that into chaos—‘Maybe you’ll get a question, if you shout loud enough, who knows?’—makes everyone desperate and competitive and makes us look like a bunch of braying jackals. Which I don’t think is an accident.” Another reporter, a former White House correspondent from a major TV network, claimed that he didn’t mind the Trump administration “bringing in conservative voices. Personally, I don’t even mind them fucking with the front-row guys, the Jonathan Karls of the world. Those guys are a smug little cartel, and it’s fun to watch them squirm, at least for a little while. But at what point does it start to delegitimize the whole idea of what happens in that room? When does it cross the line into pure trolling?”
In 1988, Joan Didion wrote a long and forceful essay decrying groupthink in political journalism. She aligned herself with normal Americans and against the slick media shills—“a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite . . . who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.” This was before Twitter, before MAGA, when the worst that could happen to the country was either Michael Dukakis or George H. W. Bush.
When I read Didion’s essay, nearly two decades after it first ran, I nodded along, scribbling my passionate assent in the margins. All things being equal, it’s cooler to be a rebel than a conformist, and the twerps on the TV news were conformists of the worst kind. They were like haughty distant relatives—except that, instead of enduring them once a year at Thanksgiving, you had to listen to them every day, and you never got to talk back.
