Abstract
Many American journalists found Donald Trump impossible, but his successor is not always the friend they had expected
With apologies to Oscar Wilde, the US media might have discovered that there’s one thing worse than a political leader denouncing you every other day and that’s a political leader who doesn’t say anything to you at all. Readers may remember the relationship between the press and President Trump as being somewhat testy. But at least there was a relationship – his successor does his utmost to avoid journalists.
Joe Biden pledged to reset the White House’s relationship with the media, to be more transparent, respectful and truthful. His press secretary, Jen Psaki, and her deputies have certainly delivered, holding daily televised press briefings for White House reporters after they had stopped happening for months at a time in the Trump administration.
The anti-media rhetoric has also gone, although there have been lapses, such as when a hot mic caught Mr Biden calling a Fox News reporter a “stupid son of a bitch” after he asked him if inflation “is a political liability in the midterms”. The president later phoned the journalist to apologise, insisting it had been “nothing personal, pal” when, given he worked for Fox News, one of the very few US media outlets consistently giving Biden a hard time, it most certainly was.
The exchange illustrated how the president has become increasingly frustrated to be thrown tough questions in public. In fact, when another Fox reporter at the same White House event asked Biden why he was waiting for Vladimir Putin to make the first move with Ukraine, he responded under his breath: “What a stupid question.”
It was especially unfortunate that only hours earlier that same day, Ms Psaki had told reporters that “the President has shown that he respects the value of the freedom of the press”. That Mr Biden doesn’t like it up him from the media is no longer up for debate and surely offers the best explanation as to why he’s been so loath to engage with it. In his first year, Mr Biden has conducted far fewer press conferences than any of his recent predecessors – including Mr Trump.
In fact, he held just two full-scale solo press conferences at the White House and four on foreign trips during his first 12 months. And in that same period he gave just 22 news media interviews as president – a fraction of the 92 Trump did, or Obama’s 156. The pandemic cannot alone explain this super-shyness. After all, he has so many challenges – Covid, his stalled legislative programme, rising inflation and rising tensions overseas, his pitiful approval ratings – he’d surely want to talk about.
“What is he hiding?” has become a familiar parlour game way beyond the Washington Beltway. Many assume it’s simple cognitive competence – a sphere in which he’s always had issues – and remain vigilant for supporting evidence. They got some at Biden’s first anniversary press conference when he was happy to answer media questions off the top of his head until they turned to Ukraine – a subject too serious for Uncle Joe gaffes – at which point he studiously started reading from his notes (but still managed to suggest that the US might not respond to a minor Russian incursion).
That scepticism about Biden’s mental faculties seems to underpin growing unease about a president who just isn’t there – not there to answer their questions most of the time, and on the rare occasion when he does, giving an impression of a leader, now 79, who is far from on top of his brief. And, of course, the media might be feeling doubly uneasy as these questions about his capacity and coherence were asked long before he was elected but, desperate to do whatever it took to get rid of Trump, the Democrats’ friends in TV and the press fell into line and dismissed them as crude Republican slurs.
Biden, of course, vanquished a string of much younger “progressives” to win the Democrat nomination as the moderate candidate. When he won, many expected him to face resistance from left-wing Democrats and their friends in a media that – no doubt reflecting many of the younger journalists increasingly filling its ranks – has also increasingly slewed in that direction. Instead, after months of trying to convince both wings of his party that he was their ally, Biden threw in with the left, backing huge spending plans and infuriating moderates.
But with soaring inflation threatening economic recovery, the debacle of the Afghan withdrawal, and Biden’s Covid response thwarted by the variants, his high approval ratings at the start of his presidency have withered away, especially among core party voters such as black people, women and young voters. Studies show that what most preoccupies likely swing voters is the need to tackle inflation and put economic recovery before defeating Covid. What often turns them off is progressive “wokery”, such as calls to defund the police and moves by left-wing city leaders and prosecutors to “go soft” on crime. Biden has instead been fighting the “culture war” issue of voting rights, gratuitously comparing his opponents to notorious white segregationists.
It might play well with the folks at the Washington Post and MSNBC, but if he has, as some claim, been “captured” by his party’s left wing, he needs to free himself quickly or the Democrats will suffer humiliating defeat in the midterm elections this year. They stand to lose control of both the House and Senate, destroying his chances of getting anything significant done in the second half of his presidency.
And so many of the US mainstream media are in a quandary when it comes to the burning issue of whether Joe runs for a second term. The question of whether it will be good for the US to be run by a president who will be 86 (as he would be at the end of a second term) is certainly one that should be debated, and particularly if that someone is already apparently having no shortage of “senior moments”.
The media asked such questions about Trump, and – before him – about Ronald Reagan. And yet, any discussion of Biden’s age and health is hard to find on CNN or the comment pages of The New York Times, with Democrats dismissing it as intrusive and Republican scaremongering.
What’s different this time? Apart from the obvious fact that – unlike with Trump and Reagan – the US media overwhelmingly want to keep the Democrats in power rather than boot them out, it’s also true that discipline in the current administration is pretty strong. The Trump presidency was a leaky ship, rife with backbiting, so insiders leaked endlessly negative stories to the media. There’s been little of that so far in the Biden White House.
However, it’s also obvious that what’s really focusing minds for many in Washington and the media is the 2024 presidential election and whether Trump will run again. He remains the clear favourite to win the Republican nomination, and with the apocalyptic scenario of a second Trump term to keep left-wingers awake at night, there’s inevitably a natural tendency not to want to rock the boat too much for the man who beat him in 2020 and could conceivably do it again in 2024.
Biden insists that, health allowing, he will run again but everyone knows that if he didn’t say that, he’d become a lame duck for the rest of his term. He might, he might not (it’s actually quite early for him to have to say) but at least the media are slightly more realistic about his abilities now. “The three striking similarities between FDR and Biden” was the headline on an article by CNN political analyst David Gergen in April last year – one of many admiring media pronouncements. Suffice to say, they’re rather thinner on the ground nowadays.
That said, the Democrats might yet have to pin their colours to the Biden mast once again. He was, you may remember, heavily sold during the last election as a stopgap, running principally just to get rid of Trump. He’d win and then eventually step down to make way for his running mate. But what few expected was that the running mate has proved to be even more unpopular than he is. Kamala Harris currently has worse poll numbers than any vice-president in recent history – including even Mr Charisma, Mike Pence.
Nobody puts Trump in a corner
Some Washington observers warn that the Democrats and their media allies risk falling into a potentially fatal trap if they don’t force the issue and get Biden to admit that, no, he’s not running again, and also accept that the so far unimpressive Harris cannot just walk into the nomination. Given the Washington tradition of not challenging a sitting president for the party nomination, the Democrats, it’s claimed, are wasting valuable time in which other candidates could throw their hat in the ring and be considered.
Complicating the picture further, Biden has insisted that he’d be more likely to run again if he was facing Trump. So what can we say of that other lion of the last election? The former president tells supporters asking if he’s running in 2024 that they’ll be “very happy” with what he decides. Which obviously allows for a lot of wriggle room. Ditto his pledge at the beginning of the year that “we are going to take back the White House”. Is that the royal we are or the party we? “Trump is done,” conservative pundit and former Trump fan Ann Coulter told The New York Times recently. “You guys should stop obsessing over him.”
Other conservatives agree with her but this sentiment seems to contain a big dollop of wishful thinking. Trump might have disgusted the party establishment with his conduct when supporters stormed the Capitol but he remains immensely popular with the party’s rank-and-file.
Fox News, once his main cheerleader, has stopped regularly covering Trump rallies but they still attract huge crowds – right-wing cable channel Newsmax says it usually gets 50,000 viewers on a Saturday night, but that figure soars to at least 1.5million when it’s covering a Trump rally. It’s possibly because no other channel is covering them but, still, it shows there’s a decent audience out there. Meanwhile, Fox News has hardly totally forgotten him, recently airing an interview he gave to the station’s host Sean Hannity, who was as obsequious as ever.
Trump has been denied his once-notorious outlet on Twitter, where he’s been permanently suspended, as he has been on the other major social media platforms. Trump confederates are convinced that this has actually worked in his favour by keeping his often-inflammatory pronouncements and views out of the public discourse – his poll ratings are still more negative than positive but they’re not as bad as they were a year ago.
“I don’t know a single person in Trump world who regrets that this has happened, not a single one,” a Trump ally told The Wall Street Journal recently of the social media ban.
The strategy is that Trump keeps his powder dry, leaving Biden to keep shooting himself in the foot. Will it work? Will, indeed, either of them end up standing in 2024 (when Trump will be 78)? The gunsmoke has yet to clear though many believe that a second Trump run would be the best thing for the Democrats after everything he did in his first term. But the American media underestimated the Donald in 2016 and got it horribly wrong. Blinded by hatred they may be, but surely they won’t be caught out twice.
