Greg Sargent

At his rally on Aug 30 in Indiana, President Donald Trump unleashed his usual attacks on the news media, but he also added a refrain that should set off loud, clanging alarm bells. President Trump didn’t simply castigate “fake news.” He also suggested the media is allied with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe — an alliance, he claimed, that is conspiring not just against Trump but also against his supporters. “Today’s Democrat Party is held hostage by left-wing haters, angry mobs, deep-state radicals, establishment cronies and their fake-news allies,” President Trump railed.

The report from the Department of Justice’s inspector general on the handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation finds that the FBI’s decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton was untainted by bias or politics. This lays waste to one of the most important narratives pushed by President Dionald Trump and his allies in the quest to undermine special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation by claiming law enforcement is riddled with anti-Trump corruption.

May 15 is the deadline for President Trump to file his financial disclosure form for 2017. 

[Commentary] Here is one thing we learned about the new Trump White House: It views the institutional role that the news media is supposed to play in our democracy with nothing but total, unbridled contempt. We may be looking at an unprecedented set of new challenges for the media in covering the new president. What remains to be seen is how it will respond.

The New York Times reports this morning that journalists are deeply alarmed by statements made by Trump’s top advisers over the weekend, in which they faulted the media for reporting accurately on his inaugural crowd size. But I fear these journalists are understating the problem. This isn’t simply a matter of signaling bad relations. Rather, what President Trump and his advisers are doing is explicitly stating their contempt for the press’ institutional role as a credo, as an actionable doctrine that will govern not just how they treat the press, but how they treat factual reality itself.

[Commentary] One of the most cherished assumptions about this race, one explicitly voiced by Donald Trump and even entertained by some neutral observers: Trump can win through sheer media dominance alone.

In a recent episode, Trump gained enormous amounts of media attention by publicly hallucinating about video of the cash transfer to Iran. But did he really gain anything from all that attention, other than widespread ridicule, at a time when his poll numbers are tanking? Press coverage tends to get harsher when a candidate gets weaker, and that’s what this episode brought. Trump himself has repeatedly said, in various ways, that his strategy is premised on sucking up all the media oxygen.

After Melania Trump’s convention speech was revealed as plagiarism, Trump said that all the publicity devoted to the speech was a positive, because “all press is good press.” Before that, Trump flatly stated that he had an advantage in the general election because “I have the loudspeaker.” But it’s becoming increasingly obvious that “the loudspeaker” is turning voters against Trump, perhaps to a point from which there will be no coming back. Trump’s ongoing battle with the Khan family drew enormous media scrutiny, but, given that it brought with it widespread media coverage of Republicans and military figures criticizing his conduct, all this attention has been simply awful for him. Indeed, the Clinton team is now explicitly premising its strategy on the idea that all the coverage has grown so lethal that its best play is to get out of the way and let it continue.

The idea that Trump’s media ubiquity is largely a positive for him is merely a subset of larger myths about this race — that everything he does is shrewdly calculated and a reflection of his ingenious media manipulation, or even worse, that he possesses some species of Magical Trumpian Political Powers that allow him to defy the conventional rules of politics. Trump could still win, of course. But as of now, all of this has been thoroughly discredited.

[Commentary] The Post fact-checking team has a fun look at more than a year of statements by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. You’ll be startled to hear that they concluded that Trump lies a lot more often than Clinton does — and a lot more outrageously, too. Out of 52 statements by Trump, nearly two thirds were deserving of Four Pinnochios, which is to say that they were absurdly outrageous lies. Out of 35 statements by Clinton, a much smaller percentage qualified for that distinction.

However, they also made a point that I have not seen made anywhere else, one that sheds light on an important ongoing debate over how Trump and Clinton treat the press. They noted an important qualitative difference in the process of adjudication that goes on between each of their campaigns and the media. Even if you think Clinton's motives for stiff-arming the media are absurd, it should be acknowledged that her attitude towards it it simply has no equivalence to Trump’s total contempt for the basic functional role of the news media in our democracy. His entire campaign is functionally an exercise in trying to get it to wither away and drop off of our body politic, like a gangrenous limb or frostbitten finger.