SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
When he ran for president first back in 2016, Donald Trump would often get the audience at his rallies to boo all of the reporters in unison. As President Trump, he has continued to berate the journalists who cover him. But this year, his actions toward the press corps have been more than verbal attacks. Just this week, in fact, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration is considering physically moving the White House press corps out of the White House. The White House counsel also sent a letter to Politico this week telling them to retract stories or face consequences.
We're going to talk about all this with Ruth Marcus, a longtime Washington Post columnist, now a contributor for The New Yorker. Thanks for coming on.
RUTH MARCUS: Thanks for for having me.
DETROW: Let's start with this New York Times reporting. As we know, as we've talked about on this show, the White House is already trying to limit some White House access for major outlets like The Associated Press, like CNN with those legal cases ongoing. But Trump has reportedly told his staff he wants to get rid of the White House briefing room. He wants to turn it back into the pool that it was during the Roosevelt administration. What, to you, would that mean? How serious would that be?
MARCUS: Well, it would be serious, but it would all - and I think you're totally right. In the second Trump administration, he has operationalized the animus towards the press. But I do want to say, though, that many presidents, Republican and Democrat, have been frustrated with the media coverage that they've gotten. And they have also toyed with/fantasized about the notion of moving those pesky reporters out of the White House.
DETROW: Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS: OK? This would be petty. It would be vindictive. It would be bad for the media, but it wouldn't actually be that helpful for the president. Yes, it would get reporters out of your hair. But look at the experience that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of - I say - defense has had since he kicked reporters out of the Pentagon. It has not stopped Pentagon reporting. Reporters are going to report. Even if you kick them physically out of the space...
DETROW: Yeah.
MARCUS: ...They are not going to stop doing their jobs, full stop.
DETROW: So obviously, that would be a symbolic move. It would have some repercussions. Like you said, reporting would continue anyway. That all being said, what, to you, are the one or two most frightening, most concerning actual steps taken? Because, like I said, I feel like we've gotten numb to President Trump criticizing the press, but it's gone far beyond that lately.
MARCUS: Well, you know, if you only surround yourself or expose yourself to questions from reporters who are, say, fawning over your presidency or in line with your ideology, you are not going to get tough questions from the media, and that is not just a problem for us as reporters. It's a problem for the public that relies on us to ask tough questions. That's No. 1. No. 2, I would say, is the threat of using government power to punish especially broadcasters who've...
DETROW: Yeah, this is through FCC direct threats or investigations or lawsuits over coverage and seeing networks settle or then clearly water down their coverage in response.
MARCUS: Exactly. And I would combine that with these frivolous but still expensive and energy-sucking defamation suits.
DETROW: We saw the Justice Department, in trying to investigate leaks over the new Air Force One gift that Trump got and the problems with it, we saw them show up at reporter for The New York Times homes. Though that's something the federal courts pushed back on. Given that track record, what did you make of what's been going on with Politico this week. Politico reported - what was interesting to me is it's just kind of, like, staff-level gossip. It's about the chief of staff and the president, so it's of note, but still it's not anything that you could claim is national security. And yet there's this fierce response and the promise of a threat from the White House counsel toward Politico. What did you make of that?
MARCUS: I thought it was astonishing, in particular, that the White House counsel, whose job is fundamentally to represent the president but also to uphold the Constitution, was threatening Politico if it failed to retract its story. Politico made a mistake in the story. It corrected that mistake. But there is no basis or cause that I'm aware of to call on Politico to retract its story. And this is part of what should be the normal give-and-take and the normal tensions that are going to occur between any administration and any set of reporters covering them. But in this administration, it has been ratcheted up...
DETROW: Yeah.
MARCUS: ...In a way that I think doesn't serve the administration's interests in the end, but it certainly doesn't serve the public interest.
DETROW: I'm curious what you make of the dynamic that Trump is certainly much louder, much more aggressive, much more likely to follow up his threats with actions than other previous presidents, and yet he seems to be the most media-attuned president we've probably ever had. How do you think about that symbiotic relationship that still exists even with all of these threats?
MARCUS: The most media-attuned and also the most media-accessible. He thrives on that - the hostile interchanges that he has with reporters, but he also needs the attention. And when there were those couple dark days when the pool balked at covering him because he had excluded people from the pool, that's like cutting off Trump's oxygen. So in the end, he needs us as - you know, at least as much as we need him. We can do our jobs calling White House sources, reporting behind the scenes, but if we're not there, we're not serving as his foils and we're not serving as his amplifiers.
DETROW: That is Ruth Marcus, contributor for The New Yorker. Thank you so much.
MARCUS: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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