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Last month, President Trump used a planeload of reporters as an unwitting decoy during a real assassination threat, subpoenaed the journalists who reported that something was amiss, and then stood up at a black-tie dinner and told those same journalists how lucky they are that he tolerates them at all.
The episode highlights the grossly dysfunctional relationship between the president and the media, which puts up with ever-escalating abuses as the price of access, and routinely normalizes Trump’s erratic and even criminal behavior.
The old switcheroo
The saga began on July 8, when Trump was returning home from a NATO summit in Turkey.
Two days earlier, Trump flew to Ankara on his Qatari bribe jet, newly renovated using billions of tax dollars. But for the return trip home, he initially boarded one of the old blue-and-white Boeing 747s that ferried presidents around for the past four decades, only switching back to the bling jet during a stopover in the UK.
On July 9, the New York Times reported that Trump had taken the old jet “as a security precaution related to the resumption of hostilities with Iran,” which the US had resumed bombing during the summit. (Media reports of the war’s demise turned out to be greatly exaggerated.)
The following day, the paper followed up with a story asserting that the Secret Service had insisted on the swap due to concern that the new plane “lacks the same defensive countermeasures that were security features of the old model, including its advanced antimissile capabilities, according to multiple officials who have been briefed on how the jet was retrofitted.”
This confirmed prior reporting by the AP that the Qatari jet (which Trump plans to take with him in 2029) “is not equipped with at least some of the same missile detection and countermeasure systems as the outgoing Cold War-era jets.” And in fact the Air Force admitted back in June the team that retrofitted the plane made “trades on some of the less commonly used mission sets.”
And yet the White House went berserk.
On the evening of July 10, FBI agents showed up at the homes of Julian Barnes, Eric Lipton, and Eric Schmitt, three of the New York Times journalists bylined on those stories. The agents served subpoenas ordering the three to testify before a grand jury on the 15th about an “alleged violation of federal law.” (Apparently the FBI failed to serve reporters Adam Goldman and Tyler Pager.)
Later it emerged that the DOJ had also subpoenaed phone records for the reporters’ family members. One request sought records going back to January 1 — months before the articles were even published.
This is not a one-off. In January, the FBI raided the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, seizing her phone and laptop. In February, the administration subpoenaed Times freelancer Matthew Cole demanding sources for a story about a failed top secret mission in North Korea in 2019. In March, it subpoenaed the Wall Street Journal over reports on the lead-up to the war in Iran.
All of these were challenged in court, and of course the Times moved to quash the July subpoenas as well.
Their motion cited binding Second Circuit precedent and federal regulations requiring the government to exhaust investigative steps before subpoenaing journalists — something which could not possibly have happened in the few hours between the story’s publication and the appearance of armed FBI agents on the reporters’ doorsteps.
The DOJ’s conduct here was beyond inappropriate — they clearly deceived the magistrate judge about the facts and the law. After a tense hearing before Judge Arun Subramanian on July 23, the government agreed to withdraw the subpoenas.
In light of this week’s reporting, these subpoenas look even more illegitimate now.
Step out the back, jack
On Monday, the Washington Post published a four-byline story scooping that Trump did not fly out of Ankara on the old 747. Instead he boarded the plane and then immediately snuck out the back in a catering truck, which ferried him to a third aircraft.
Trump flew to Britain’s Mildenhall air base on a C-32A along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and then contrived to sneak back onto the 747 and get himself filmed exiting at 10:56pm local time.
Throughout the subterfuge, the White House press corps remained on the 747, where they had been instructed to close their window shades — presumably so that no one would notice the catering truck secreting the president off the aircraft.
As the New York Times put it: “Reporters on the older plane were not told that Mr. Trump had not flown with them from Turkey to an air base in Britain, making them unwitting participants in the ruse and leaving them, along with some White House staff members, to serve as unknowing decoys.”
In short, the president made a choice to leave the flight crew, journalists, and members of his own staff in a position to be targeted by potential Iranian assassins as a means of avoiding that risk for himself.
Trump spent years calling the media “the enemy of the people,” “fake news,” and even “treasonous.” He’s filed dozens of garbage lawsuits against media outlets, forcing them to spend millions to fend off patently ridiculous complaints. And his own staff accused reporters of lying about this very event, with Steven Cheung calling MSNOW reporter Carol Leonnig “a complete fraud.”
All the while Trump was using those same reporters as human shields, happy to sacrifice them if it meant he could get away safely. And then, when they accurately reported his subterfuge, he sent armed FBI agents to their homes demanding that they reveal their sources.
No lessons learned
After a decade of Trump’s attacks on the media, most observers were disgusted but unsurprised to see those same journalists fete the president at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
The event had to be rescheduled after a deranged man tried to rush security in April, canceling the original dinner. Naturally the White House cited this as proof that anyone who opposes his illegal ballroom — which would anyway be far too small for the WHCD — is trying to get the president killed.
But on July 24, a little over 24 hours after the DOJ folded in Judge Subramanian’s courtroom, Trump addressed the assembled journalists as guest of honor.
“In this country, we believe in freedom of speech. We settle our differences not with bullets, but with open and vigorous debate, and no deranged loser with a gun will ever change that,” said the man whose FCC Chair spent months gunning for Jimmy Kimmel and the ladies at The View.
“Some of you are lucky that our last dinner was cut short, because I had brought with me what would possibly have been — I’m telling you, I had something. I was going to go after you,” he snorted, laughing at his own malevolence. “I feel so badly doing this. It’s got to be such a letdown.”
“You people have no idea how lucky you are when I’m gone. You’re all going to be broke,” he rambled.
CBS’s Weijia Jiang, the head of the White House Correspondents Association, delivered what passed in the room for a spirited rebuke.
“President Trump, I’ve covered you for a long time and so have many reporters in this room. When we ask questions, you push back, you give us answers, and we push back,” she said, beaming. “You have always been a deal guy. Well, that’s the deal. And the First Amendment is a done deal.”
But of course that’s bullshit.
(As was Trump’s rationale to reporters for why he was on the C-32A as this newsletter was being finalized last night.)
The First Amendment is only as “done” a deal as the government allows it to be. The Justice Department just staged a frontal assault on the First Amendment because journalists accurately reported that Trump’s bribe plane is less secure than the one it replaced. And it’s overwhelmingly likely that the newly-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche will try it again to figure out who leaked the story about Trump ducking out in a catering truck.
In these circumstances, it’s more than a little craven to rub elbows with Stephen Miller at nerd prom, even as he paints a target on the back of every journalist in the country. But that pales in comparison to the clanging impropriety of yucking it up with a man who uses reporters as a human shield and then threatens to lock them up for reporting on it.
You cannot speak truth to power when you’re sipping cocktails with it — and certainly not when that power is waiting in the parking lot with a subpoena and pair of handcuffs if you report something he doesn’t like.
That’s it for today
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An important article. The media’s normalization of Trump 2.0 is infuriating. Even NPR dutifully reports headlines as if they aren’t freaking bonkers.
Excellent juxtaposition—the journalists serving as unwitting decoys and scapegoats and the journalists serving as willing pawns at the Correspondents Dinner.
Another contrast that has been lost in the sauce is Trump (MAGA’s great macho wonder) cowering in a food truck and Biden (supposedly a doddering wimp) secretly traveling to Kyiv by train in the midst of a major war. Has there ever been a more pusillanimous pustule than Trump occupying the presidency?