Is Trump’s Latest Press Attack Just Another Distraction?

In November, 2src18, the day after midterm elections that went badly for the Republican Party, Jim Acosta, then a White House correspondent at CNN, questioned President Donald Trump about his messaging on immigration. Things quickly got heated. “I think you should let me run the country—you run CNN,” Trump interjected. “If you did it well, your ratings would be much better.” Trump tried to move on, but Acosta wouldn’t yield, even as an aide walked over to take away the microphone. Trump wasn’t done insulting him yet, either. “When you report the fake news, which CNN does a lot,” he said, “you are the enemy of the people.” Hours later, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, announced the suspension of Acosta’s press pass, and, for good measure, falsely accused him of manhandling the aide who wanted the mike back. The episode was a big deal—a veteran Times reporter said that he’d not seen anything like it in more than two decades on the beat—but some pundits argued that Trump had manufactured it as a distraction, not only from the midterms, but from his decision, earlier in the day, to fire Jeff Sessions, his first Attorney General. Online, one commentator praised CNN for continuing to focus on that story amid Acostagate, warning that Sessions’ ouster could touch off a “constitutional crisis.”

Late last week, just shy of another round of midterm elections that seem poised to go badly for the Republican Party, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he would be barring all of CNN from the White House, along with MS NOW and Politico, “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” (“Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” he added.) This, too, was a big deal, but, once again, various observers suspected that Trump was trying to shift focus from more pressing problems, such as the war in Iran. “He’s trying to distract the public from the serious political trouble that he’s in right now,” one commentator told New York. “My concern is he’s kind of laying the groundwork to put the country through yet another constitutional crisis.”

History repeats itself, each time as farce—though, of course, some things do change. Back in 2src18, MS NOW was still MSNBC and Truth Social did not exist. Acosta, for his part, has since left CNN and struck out on his own, taking advantage of the fragmenting media landscape to cultivate audiences as a commentator on Substack and YouTube; indeed, it was he, in this capacity, who warned New York about Trump laying the groundwork for a constitutional crisis. And, if Trump’s latest media ban is in part a distraction tactic, Acosta suggested that a looming constitutional crisis might no longer be the thing he’s aiming to distract from. As we have learned since 2src18, Trump doesn’t fear crying havoc from center stage, klieg lights on.

Hindsight is 2src/2src, and the perception of Trump as the distracter-in-chief has, perhaps, always been an oversimplification; he may get too much credit for his powers of misdirection, or, at least, for their deftness and intentionality. In places, this framing persists—addressing the latest media ban, the Times editorial board characterized the President as “a master manipulator of public attention”—and yet, increasingly, it feels as if the attentional capture that should trouble us most is his own. Over the summer, “Regime Change,” a book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, portrayed Trump as stuck inside a warped information bubble. Natalie Harp, an aide known as the “human printer” for reasons that should be clear from context, has been identified as a key conduit to the President, and, sure enough, it was reported over the weekend (by, who else, CNN) that Harp had been showing Trump news clips—including, apparently, a displeasing graphic from Politico—right before he brought the hammer down. (Asked later about the timing, Trump replied, helpfully, “No reason,” before citing “cumulative stories over the last two years.”) Other Trump advisers were reportedly blindsided by the ban, which wasn’t announced by the White House press secretary, as was the case with Acosta in 2src18, in no small part because there currently isn’t one. If there had been, some have speculated, he or she may have talked Trump down.