View from the Left: The White House press corps's 'slippery slope to collaboration' with Trump

Daily Kos Staff

Saturday January 21, 2017 · 11:00 AM PST

2017/01/21 · 11:00

The White House press corps is taking fire from all sides but, most pointedly, from the incoming administration and popular vote loser Donald Trump. I do not envy their predicament. Unfortunately, it looks as though they're preparing to simply enable their abuser in a futile effort that will do little to shed light on what Trump is actually doing. Witness this response from the vice president of the White House Correspondents Association, Margaret Talev, after Bloomberg's John Heilemann asked her how she felt about Trump's raucous press conference last week.

MARGARET TALEV: Well for many of the reporters watching that, startled, because it's not the way you normally think of a president-elect or a president dealing with his press corps, particularly at a time that he's promising to unify the country and get off to a good start and all of that. But look I think as a press corps, we all need to have a tough skin and to differentiate between unusual or guerrilla tactics that we need to learn how to live with and things that cross a red line. And this is something that we're going to need to be mindful of and adjust to, but I think it's a matter of keeping the eyes on the prize, which is the ability to ask questions of incoming President Trump and his top staff on the record and get answers. And to have access to these buildings, into the briefing rooms, the venues, for these questions take place.

I know Talev from when I worked as a White House correspondent in the early Obama years—she's both a good reporter and a good person. I also know the press corps takes seriously its responsibilities and is trying to make lemonade out of lemons. And yet her answer reminds me of two things: first, how much it resembles that of someone in an abusive relationship; and second, journalist Masha Gessen urging us all to "shift from realist to moral reasoning" in the age of Trump.

Trump is unabashedly abusive toward just about everything in this world. Anyone he can't control or anything that doesn't conform to his worldview, such as unflattering press coverage, becomes the focus of his ire. Talev knows Trump's behavior is outrageous. "It's not the way you normally think of a president-elect or a president dealing with his press corps," she admits. But in the next breath, she advises her colleagues to collectively toughen up and learn how to "differentiate" between deplorable behavior ("guerrilla tactics") and unacceptable behavior (the so-called "red line"). In other words, it's the press corps's responsibility to learn how to deal with our new pr*sident because he is fundamentally incapable of conducting himself in a reasonable way. Put differently: If we just suck it up and adjust our behavior, we'll be able to stay in a relationship with this tyrant. The onus to make the relationship work is always on the abused.

Talev's advice also emphasizes a focus on outcomes rather than on right and wrong. In an essay called, "Trump: The choice we face," Gessen actually reflects on her own journalistic experiences under the Putin regime and the compromises she made along the way.

Gessen worked as editor-in-chief of a well-read Russian science magazine, Vokrug Sveta, that Putin took over in 2012. "I felt a slow rot setting in at a magazine I loved," she writes. Still, she continued to do the work, figuring that she could still facilitate good journalism even if in a diminished capacity. But when she refused to send a reporter to cover something that Putin wanted covered, the publisher fired her. Putin ended up calling her back in and offering to give her job back.

I hesitated to say no: I loved that job, and I thought I could still edit a good magazine and keep some fine journalists employed. [...] Fortunately for me, my closest friend said, “Have you lost your mind?,” by which she meant my sense of right and wrong.

Gessen didn't take the job. As she notes, "There is always a strong argument" for compromising yourself, for trying to make the best of a bad situation. But she warns that laboring to salvage what's possible under Trump—such as simply maintaining the ability to ask on the record questions—is a "slippery slope to collaboration." Instead, she suggests that we all, especially those of us who work in the realm of politics, begin to view our professional decisions through the lens of personal morality.

We cannot know what political strategy, if any, can be effective in containing, rather than abetting, the threat that a Trump administration now poses to some of our most fundamental democratic principles. But we can know what is right.

Finally, I must remark at the culture of scarcity Trump is already creating. He thrives in fear-based environments—there's winners and losers, it's kill or be killed. It's an arena in which there's never enough for everyone. In many ways, Trump has already conquered the press corps and they are left to scrape for crumbs that should be a given—like asking him questions and retaining access to the work spaces journalists have utilized for nearly 50 years.

We can expect this scarcity mentality to seep into all aspects of American life. Trump is already picking winners and losers among companies and lawmakers and countries. Perhaps scariest, he and Mike Pence will likely begin swiftly doing the same among demographics. It is unconscionable and it is up to us, as citizens, to guard against this corrosive, insidious force at every turn.

As Gessen reminds us in her essay, we all have individual agency. Solidarity, community, and compassion are all antidotes to a leader who thrives on division. March this weekend. Find strength in numbers. But also trust in your ability to make personal choices that won't feed the power of a man who was never worthy of the position he now holds.

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