On Monday afternoon, Donald Trump gathered network executives for a ceremonial butt chewing.
“It was like a f---ing firing squad,” one source said of the meeting. "Trump started with [CNN President] Jeff Zucker and said, ‘I hate your network, everyone at CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed.’"
Trump also said that the New York Times was scheduled to drop by the next day, apparently so that they could also line up against the wall. But if the purpose of these meetings was nothing more than to humiliate the press and show them that Trump had no intention of playing nice, he worked out an extra level of stick-it for the Times.
That change and that cancellation both were news to the newspaper.
The Times’s senior vice president for communications, Eileen M. Murphy, responded:
“We were unaware that the meeting was canceled until we saw the president-elect’s tweet this morning. We did not change the ground rules at all and made no attempt to. They tried to yesterday — asking for only a private meeting and no on-the-record segment, which we refused to agree to. In the end, we concluded with them that we would go back to the original plan of a small off-the-record session and a larger on-the-record session with reporters and columnists.”
The network execs Trump harangued on Monday agreed to meet off-the-record, a condition that allowed Trump and his team to characterize the meeting however they liked while journalists were forced to bite their lips and mumble in response. It was a power-play that drew raves from white supremacist web sites, where the scream session was seen as an extension of Trump’s penning up the press for the amusement of those at his rallies.
... after details of Mr. Trump’s hectoring leaked on Monday in The New York Post, it seemed the meeting was being used as a political prop, especially after Trump-friendly news outlets trumpeted the session as a take-no-prisoners move by a brave president-elect.
“Trump Slams Media Elite, Face to Face,” blared the Drudge Report. “Trump Eats Press,” wrote Breitbart News.
For some, the agreement of network news’ finest to line up and serve as Trump’s whipping boys (and girls) was nothing short of astounding.
“They learned *nothing* over past 18 months of covering Trump,” tweeted Erik Wemple of The Washington Post.
It’s likely they didn’t learn anything on Monday, either. Oh, and if you think that Trump would let this go at a single tweet… well surely we’ve all learned more than that.