Donald Trump tweets with reckless vitriol, mobilizing hordes of nameless imitators who are only too eager to echo the president’s venomous sentiments. The subject of Trump’s ire is in for a rough 36 hours, but the ordeal is a fleeting one. Those individuals and institutions that have suffered Trump’s wrath watch their stocks briefly dip or see their reputations momentarily blemished. But the recovery process takes not weeks or even days but hours, and Trump’s transactional view of the world ensures that his grudges are usually ephemeral.
This is the chief flaw in the Trump White House’s strategy of elevating the media industry to the lofty status of “opposition party.” The “media” will not occupy a column on the ballot next November and this focus, therefore, distracts partisan Republicans from the real political fight against Democrats. What’s more, Trump’s alternative to the political press—his vaunted tweets—are ineffective. For evidence of that, look no further than the rambling display that was the president’s press conference on Thursday.
Trump deserves credit. Presidents don’t often appear before mainstream political reporters for 77 minutes, delivering a set of candid answers to unscreened questions during the same week in which his administration was forced to fire its national security advisor, backed off its signature executive initiative, and lost a Cabinet nominee to opposition within the president’s own party. It’s been a singularly bad week for this White House, so it’s understandable that Trump would want to rekindle the burning antipathy so many conservatives feel–not without justification–toward the political press.
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