President Donald Trump delivers a series of raw and personal attacks on the media in a news conference for the ages

President Donald Trump entered the East Room reeling from a week filled with resignations, withdrawals and continued questions surrounding his campaign's contacts with Russia. What followed was an hour-long, full-throated attack on Trump's favorite foil: the media. “Many of our nation's reporters will not tell you the truth,” President Trump said. “The press honestly is out of control,” President Trump said. “The level of dishonesty is out of control,” President Trump said. And that was before he even took a single question!

It was a return for President Trump to what worked for him during the course of the 2016 campaign: A circuslike atmosphere in which he uses the media — and his supporters' distrust of the media — as a sort of tackling dummy to re-center the narrative on ground more favorable to him. Trump didn't just run down the media — although he did a lot of that — but he also mocked various outlets, reviewed shows on cable TV that he likes (and doesn't), told reporters to sit down and be quiet, and critiqued the quality of the questions he was being asked. There was a rawness to his attacks, a personal invective that seemed well beyond the typically antagonistic relationship that exists between the media and the president they cover. Why do it? Because Trump understands something very important: For his supporters, the media represent everything they dislike about American society. The media is composed, to their mind, of Ivy-League educated coastal elites who look down their noses at the average person, dismissing them and their views as stupid and ill-informed. For people who feel like their voices weren't and aren't heard in politics — or culture more broadly — the media is the perfect scapegoat.