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A
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to save history as it happens June 16, 2026 Journalism in the age of Trump. And maybe that's a question you should ask China. Don't ask me. Ask China that question. Okay, Mr. President. And we're going to be going in quiet. You're really obnoxious.
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A
I'm not obnoxious, but I'm trying to ask you, what about your plans?
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B
You are obnoxious.
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A
I'm not obnoxious, but I am when
- [01:24]
B
you report fake news. No, when you report fake news. Fake news, which CNN does a lot. You are the enemy of the people.
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A
President Donald Trump is suing CBS News for $10 billion.
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B
You are a rude, terrible person. You shouldn't be working for cnn. I'm on Meet the Press, a show now headed by sleepy eyes Chuck Todd. He's a sleeping son of a bitch. I'll tell you. Every president complains about the press. The current White House occupant has made feudal with reporters and their companies a pillar of his presidency. Donald Trump is on our screens, in our ears and our faces nonstop. He actually loves the attention and some media organizations can't do without him either. That's next with Chuck Todd as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:14]
A
Donald Trump understood how to use the media ecosystem that was so bending towards his comfort zone. And that's what happened. I've always said Donald Trump never changed. The media became more like him, more superficial. It came closer to who he is rather than him coming closer to what the media was say in the 80s.
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B
From the moment Donald J Trump descended a golden escalator at Trump Tower in New York City, coincidentally on this day, June 16th in 2015, 11 years ago. From that moment, American politics and journalism would change dramatically, maybe in ways no one truly anticipated at the time. When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best, they're not sending you, they're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we're getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. Trump proved a master manipulator of the mainstream media and social media, convincing his supporters that reporters lie and that he tells the truth. And he was tilling fertile soil. Public trust in the news media has dropped dramatically, according to every poll out there. So back to a decade ago, in a crowded Republican field for the presidency, Trump was interviewed everywhere, and he loved the attention. No matter how much he would complain about the fake news, a term he made his own, inversing its actual meaning, really the word. I think one of the greatest of all terms I've come up with is fake. I guess other people have used it perhaps over the years, but I've never noticed it. And it's a shame. And, and they really hurt the country because they take away the spirit of the country. And among the many journalists who interviewed him was NBC's Chuck Todd, the moderator of Meet the Press.
- [04:20]
A
Well, joining me now is the first of four Republican presidential candidates who are on with us this morning. It's Donald Trump. Mr. Trump, welcome back to Meet the Press.
- [04:28]
B
Good morning.
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A
Let me ask you, first on the
- [04:30]
B
Supreme Court, that was in February 2016. Seems like a different age because it was. Trump eventually and shamelessly attacked Todd publicly as he asked to dozens of reporters and their corporate. And now in his second term, he has sued news organizations and won millions in settlements. CNN's a very corrupt organization, but with a corrupt reporter standing right there. Never smiles. She never smiles. A young, beautiful woman never smiles. I never see a smile off her face. I see her standing there with hatred in her eyes, like she has hatred because we have borders. The man demands obedience and he is receiving it from some, like Bari Weiss at CBS News. She is a fake journalist. President Donald Trump will be remembered for a lot of things. One will be the way he mastered media manipulation in the age of the 247 presidency. To borrow the headline of an article by the Miller center at the University of Virginia. As cable markets grew by 1992, the 247 news cycle had become, in the words of one aide to Bill Clinton, a giant monster that has to be continually fed. Either you feed it or it feeds on you. The article goes on to say the place of the spin doctor became romanticized during the era of the 247 presidency as these masters of the media became celebrities themselves. Historians have only recently begun to explore the roots of these changes in media culture, highlighting the ways in which attitudes toward the media shape regulatory policy and communication strategy, and I will share a link to that article in the show. Notes to this episode. So Donald Trump has carved reality into two competing realities, one where the only truth is what he says is true. Parroted by pro Trump cable channels, podcasters and YouTubers. But his lies and fathomless corruption have been ruinous for our politics and for Trump's own legacy. He'll be remembered as a cancer on the body politic. There's no way we lost Georgia. There's no way that was a rigged election. So how did we get here? It is a very long story. And Chuck Todd has had a front row seat. The former NBC News political director and host of Meet the Press now host the Chuck Toddcast on YouTube. Chuck Todd, welcome to the show.
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A
Thanks, Martin. Good to see you.
- [06:52]
B
It's an honor to have you here. I usually interview academic historians, so it's nice to have a fellow journalist, if I can still call myself a journalist on the show.
- [07:01]
A
So I've been calling myself a political anthropologist. In some ways, I feel like that's the most accurate description of what I do. Trying to figure out how do these crazy tribes interact with each other? As I'm observing them poking at each
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B
other, you always had more leeway to be a little more opinionated anyway, you
- [07:20]
A
know, it's like I have strong opinions about the system, less about ideology and partisanship, which I think are both sort of scourges on our, on our system. Like, you know, those are certainly everybody has them, but I wish technocrat were something that people would understand. It's like, you know, I just want this system to work better. I mean, at the end of the day, we're 350 million people. If you don't subscribe to pluralism, you're not going to succeed in this country. If you want to be a partisan and try to manipulate the process, left or right, go to it. Right? That's the beauty of it. That's the activism part. But that's sort of always where I've tried to center myself.
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B
Yeah, I just had a historian on my show who said we're back to the days like the 717 90s where opposition is not legitimate anymore. The only time an election isn't rigged, in the view of President Trump, for instance, is when his side wins.
- [08:07]
A
So, you know, this is something that I've been thinking we don't address enough in this current era, which is, you know, it's possible. And I don't want to presume your age. I think you're a little bit younger than I am maybe. But I think I grew up in an outlier era and I think we grew up. I think the Cold War was an outlier era. And if you actually look at our polarization at the moment, a majority of the years that America has been around has been more like this than the period where we were, where we had presidents with 60 and 65% approval ratings. We had an existential threat. We were a different behaving body politic. And then the Wall falls in 89, and by 92 we start going back to our more polarized ways of the late 19th and early 20th century.
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B
I was born when Gerald Ford was president, if you can believe.
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A
Okay, so you're a little closer to my age. Yeah, I'm a Nixon baby.
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B
Tell us where you got your start in journalism, when and where?
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A
So I was sort of a political junkie in high school a little bit. I had a cousin who I looked up to after my dad died that had worked in political campaigns. And so I got the bug to just work in politics, whatever that meant at that moment, which meant, all right, I'm gonna go to college in D.C. i gotta be in D.C. that's where all the action is. Would not tell you that I was, you know, I'm not one of those going, I wanted to be Tom Brokaw or David Brinkley or, you know, some media person. If you were to ask my 18 year old self like, hey, I want to run a presidential campaign, that's what I would have said then, you know, after a couple years, I did some door to door canvassing for an interest group. I was part of a presidential campaign for a brief period of time as a sophomore in college doing FEC compliance, which weirdly was a skill set that would come in handy as I understood the campaign finance system later on. Then got an internship at something called the Hotline. They were a digital publication that nobody knew what the hell that meant in 1992. But by 1996, 97. It was definitely on the cutting edge. The newsletter culture of today was essentially created and invented by the hotline.
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B
92. That is early.
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A
That's where I just caught the journalism bug. More of an information broker. The more information, the better. And if you could package the information and explain it better, that's what we did best. That's ultimately what I like the most about journalism is taking a whole bunch of complicated things and being able to explain it so that anybody can understand it. If I were to have a North Star about political journalism, it is doing whatever I can to make the system seem more accessible. You know, the hotline sort of stood alone. Then the note came along, then Politico, then all of this stuff. Unfortunately, the culture became how to make politics, how to put more velvet ropes around it, how to make it harder to understand, how to make it more kabuki theater, how to make it harder to access it is the beginning of how trust was broken.
- [10:57]
B
This subject we're going to discuss here is a huge one. We'll try to focus it a little bit because it entails discussing changes not only in the substance of coverage surrounding presidents, but also just the changes in the media landscape itself, the amount of coverage that there is out there. I guess one major milestone, if you will, was Vietnam, Watergate.
- [11:19]
A
In all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think too that I can say that in my years of public life that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I burned everything I've got.
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B
The way the press handled, especially presidents prior to Vietnam and Watergate compared to afterward. What are your thoughts on that?
- [11:47]
A
I've always said that the press is a lagging indicator of where the public is at. If the press is a stand in for the public, then that actually makes a lot of sense. Right? And a good press score is reflective of where the public is not trying to tell the public where they should be. Right? There's a distinction there. Look, the experiences of Vietnam and Watergate on real people, and certainly Vietnam more so than Watergate. Watergate was an insider story that helped explain why certain things were happening versus Vietnam was something I think a lot of people were collectively experiencing in one form or another, either via loved ones that were drafted and fighting or what they saw. The public sort of lost its faith in the institution of government and distrust of government. And, you know, the press is at its best, is always supposed to be a populist organization. It is supposed to be channeling where the people are. And so I think that was in some ways, looking back on it. It wasn't the press making a decision. It was the press following the public. The public became more skeptical of institutions and leaders in power. I have a friend of mine who believes the worst thing to happen to journalism was the movie all the President's Men because it turned the idea of being a successful journalist into somebody who takes somebody down. Journalism lost its soul when it stopped being service oriented. Right. Ultimately, journalism at its best is helping people live their lives. Sometimes it's helping them save money, sometimes it's helping them find out who's corrupt. But it actually is all serving the same larger goal, which is helping them live their lives. You know, being able to represent them when they don't have a chance to be represented. Yeah.
- [13:34]
B
The turn to our covering scandal I think has been mostly negative when it comes to personal scandal. Not something like Watergate, which was a legitimate.
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A
That was government scandal. That was government corruption.
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B
Criminal enterprise, huge difference. Criminal enterprise being run out of the White House. We also have to define who we mean by the press. In those days it was the major TV networks. There was also radio and a ton of newspapers. And I guess there was a consensus that everyone had been too trusting and that that can't happen again now. It did again with the Iraq war. The press, in a certain climate in the country after 9 11, went along with too much of the government's claims about weapons of mass destroyed.
- [14:12]
A
And by the way, you know, the question was whether, and I was certainly uncomfortable at how jingoistic the press had gotten. If you had said that at the time, you'd have been canceled. Right. So there was almost like this weird fear. Right. The public became uber patriotic. The part of the press corps that was, again, in some ways it was the same phenomenon that got the press corps to be more antagonistic in the 70s. 911 made the press corps more, shall we say, trusting of government. But it was in some ways out of the same motivation. It's where the public was. I'm not saying that's the right way or wrong way to do this, but I'm just trying to explain. The press doesn't change on its own. Right. It is ultimately going to change the way its customers change.
- [14:51]
B
Yeah. I mean the so called liberal New York Times had op EDS and a lot of reporting that went along with the Bush administration's claims about Iraq. And I think you're right, it was Hard for a long time after 911 to heavily criticize the direction of the government.
- [15:07]
A
I mean, Barack Obama didn't feel like he had to conform to the flagpain guilt trip period that we were living in in that first decade. And what did he end up doing? Just put on the fricking flag pin and let it go. And he did.
- [15:20]
B
The Monica Lewinsky affair. We'll get to Trump in a second because this whole, whole point of this conversation is try to chart how coverage of the President has changed and the challenges facing the news media today that you of course know very well. Donald Trump attacked you. And you also interviewed him many, many times, one on one. The Monica Lewinsky affair. I have historian Nelson Lichtenstein's book about the Clinton presidency open here to page 322. He says for more than a year the Lewinsky affair consumed the nation. The Associated Press assigned 25 full time reporters to the story who wrote more than 4,100 pie an average of 11 a day. Cable news coverage, which was also a coming of age during this period was almost nonstop. And on the evening news, the three major networks devoted more time to the scandal than to the next seven topics combined.
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A
But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Gentlemen, Ms. Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie. Not a single time. Never. These allegations are false and I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.
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B
A little bit later in this book, Lichtenstein is talking about the deregulation of the financial industry and something called derivatives. And there was a firm called Long Term Capital Management that went bust. And it was a harbinger of the crash that would come a decade later. And Lichtenstein talks here about on a day in Washington on Capitol Hill, there was a very important hearing before the House Banking Committee that year about Long Term Capital Management that basically no one attended because all the TV cameras were off covering Kenneth Starr and his report and all. I look back on the coverage of the Lewinsky scandal and this was not good. This was not right. Yes, there had to be some, but it was just so over the top. To my earlier point about the emphasis on personal scandal, I have a different
- [17:25]
A
theory of how we got there on Monica. It all began with a football player, former football player named Moj Simpson. And I don't think we fully appreciate. I think the single biggest mistake any mainstream outlet made in America was the decision to go Wall to wall with the O.J. trial. When CNN made that decision, it started the mainstream news media down a path that essentially culminated with the election of Donald Trump. This is my theory of the case.
- [17:55]
B
I never thought of OJ in this context.
- [17:57]
A
So let me walk you through the OJ Thing. All right, so if you were of a certain age, the OJ Story was. It was rightfully an obsessive story. Holy cow, everybody loves OJ and I tried to explain it. I have a 19 year old son. And I said at one time, explaining O.J. i said, it's as if Peyton Manning were accused of double murder. It would be shocking to Peyton Manning. That guy's not going to kill anybody. Peyton Manning, somebody's friend. That's the way we all felt about O.J. o.J. Wasn't just a retired football player. He was this incredible face. He was the guy who sold Hertz. He was the funny guy in Police. Not the Police Academy, Police Squad movies, you know, Naked Gun.
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B
Yeah,
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A
Please throw down your guns. Everybody loved OJ I don't know how else to put it right. He was that iconic. So when that happened, it was understandable that it was a feeding frenzy. And one of the most important fork in the road moments was there was all this pretrial coverage. And we had at the time, cable TV had just become this 2 and 300 channel monster. At the time, that was a big deal. And we had something called Court tv. And Court TV was covering this stuff wall to wall. Thanks to TV cameras in the courtroom in California, CNN was getting killed in the ratings. So CNN makes a decision for the very first time in a major news story. They decided to cover something that the public wanted, not necessarily that the public needed. It is the beginning of creating reality tv. Because if you think about it, we didn't have reality TV before OJ now look at Monica through that prism, right? And here's what happened with O.J. believe it or not. News organizations, TV news organizations at NBC, ABC, CBS in particular, but even CNN, nobody was expecting them to be profit centers. But O.J. o.J. Made a S ton of money for the media. Roughly 18 police cars picking up Simpson's trail as he and another man, Al Cowling, rode along a Los Angeles freeway in that white Ford Bronco that you see in the center of the screen
- [19:56]
B
and that you see now turning into
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A
the driveway of O.J.
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B
simpson, Simpson's home. That's when the pursuit began.
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A
So what did that do to the executives that run these media companies that own these news organizations? They said, oh, Instead of news being a loss leader, which was the accepted premise of General Electric when they owned NBC in the early days, Cap Cities when they owned ABC back in the day, ditto with Westinghouse, they understood the news division was the loss leader, the crown jewel, whatever you want to call it. And it was accepted that it was not there to make money. It was just, don't lose money. That was the mantra. OJ Happens. And suddenly you're like, you can make money on the news if you just cover more interesting stuff. If you think about what happened, right? There's a real line of demarcation. Cnn, pre OJ Every hour was a different topic. They literally thought, hey, we're a 24 hour news channel. And they had an international hour, they had a money hour, they had a sports hour, they had a politics hour, but they actually were trying to cover a lot of different stor their 24 hour news channel. OJ happens. And then suddenly that's when the TV shows start, and that's when you, oh, look, you got to now have commentary about what we saw. And then, you know, they created programming around it. NBC News made a ton of money. The Today show went all OJ in the morning, and that became a raider juggernaut. Good Morning America became all OJ in the morning. You know, doing the post trial. So for two years, this happens.
- [21:18]
B
Yeah, this. Then OJ Goes a year and a half.
- [21:20]
A
That's right. And then Monica hits. Right. It wasn't very long because you got two bites at the apple with OJ you got the criminal trial, then you got the civil trial. And how obsessed were we about OJ With a civil trial? I remember telling some students this who just couldn't believe. I said, during the State of the Union, we did a split screen. The president is giving the State of the Union, and we're getting a reading of the civil verdict on OJ in the other screen happening simultaneously. That is how obsessed the country became with O.J. and in fact, I believe that O.J. which right now I had this conversation with Jeff Zucker, who ran the Today show during OJ I've had this conversation with Andy Lack, who ran NBC News. And I've given them my theories and they're. And they want to push back. And one of the arguments they'll say is it was a real racially divided story. It mattered to a lot of people. I said it only became a race story because of the media coverage of it. Right at the initial consumption of the story was not about race. Certainly there was a Racial component, thanks to the actual substance of the trial itself due to actual cop who, I mean, couldn't make it up.
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B
He just felt.
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A
He actually wrote a letter to his boss saying, I'm too racist to be a cop. He actually put that in his employee file. Yes, he did. Right. All these news organizations realized if you can serialize the news, if you can create drama, so everything shifts. By the way, in 1994, there's one cable news channel covering O.J. simpson. In 95, by the end, Fox and NBC say, you know what, we're going to start cable news channels. And do you think they thought, hey, we're going to start a cable news channel because there's not enough 24 hour news? Or they saw how much money CNN made on O.J. and said, hey, we want a piece of that right in line. Monica hits in 97, 98. We go right into the 2000 election, which was also covered like a reality TV show. And then we go right into 9, 11, and then we go right into the financial crisis. And we've been. I would argue that essentially what happened is O.J. reoriented news executives and O.J. reoriented bean counters. Number one, O.J. created the conditions that made media executives believe you could make money on news divisions. So then news divisions had to make money. Well, then you're going to let the public be your managing editor. And that's essentially the original sin of all of this. We're going to give you news that you want to watch, not the news that you need. And it became a profit juggernaut. So I don't think you can properly tell the obsession over Monica without fully understanding how the entire media landscape got changed by O.J. simpson in the coverage of that trial.
- [23:52]
B
You know, you raised so many excellent points there about audience capture and of the dawn of cable television and turning news into a profit vehicle. The notion that you can't get enough news of something. So my view is a more old fashioned one, maybe like yours. News is not meant to be consumed all the time. There isn't enough news to have a 24. 7 news channel.
- [24:13]
A
How are you going to reorient at society around that mindset now? I mean, I agree with you 100%. Like, can you imagine trying to rewire the country's brain on this?
- [24:21]
B
I think at this point, you know, it's funny, I think some people might start to revolt because they're all unhappy. They're not even watching TV anymore. They're getting it on their phones and making themselves unhappy. And they're expecting, you know, I guess during the first Trump term, I knew people like this, you know, every day, waiting for the next big headline to drop, where this is the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency. They finally got him. You know, I knew, remember?
- [24:42]
A
Well, this is what made my favorite during the first Trump term, John Mulaney's horse in a hospital bit. Did you ever hear that?
- [24:48]
B
I didn't. I missed that one.
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A
Oh. Listen, as soon as we're done, okay,
- [24:52]
B
I'll go get it.
- [24:52]
A
Trust me. The whole thing's about Trump, but he never says Trump's name. But he talks about this phenomenon, about how obsessed everybody was with having to know what the latest. He goes, there's a horse in the hospital. Oh, my God. The horse is in the NICU unit. This guy being the president, it's like
- [25:07]
B
there's a horse loose in a hospital. It's like there's a horse loose in a hospital. I think eventually everything's gonna be okay,
- [25:17]
A
but I have no idea what's gonna happen next. And neither do any of you, and neither do your parents.
- [25:24]
B
Cause there's a horse loose in the hospital. It's never happened before.
- [25:30]
A
No one knows what the horse is gonna do next. Least of all the horse.
- [25:34]
B
He's never been in a hospital.
- [25:38]
A
He was capturing the absurdity. And so that's why he turned it into the metaphor of a horse in a hospital. Yeah.
- [25:43]
B
Who expected that one man would dominate our lives like this? Especially in politics, which most people don't enjoy and only pay attention to for a short amount of time? And there's election coming around the corner.
- [25:55]
A
I wrote a whole column about Trump's appearance in Atlanta, in Fulton county, and maybe it was fall of 23, spring of 24, where the motorcade was being followed by helicopters. And I'm going, we're doing it again, guys. What are we doing? Stop this. I was still technically employed by NBC. I was an op ed I wrote for the Atlantic. It was about to be published. I had to go get approval, and NBC wouldn't let me publish it. You know, somebody else ended up writing something semi similar a couple weeks later, so I dropped the issue. You know, it's one of those things, in case you're wondering why those of us in these legacy media companies, whether we literally sometimes were not allowed to express our concern about how coverage was being warped. I mean, obviously, I was criticizing our own coverage, which they didn't want to create this idea of Chuck Todd versus NBC. You know, I do believe there's a straight line between O.J. simpson coverage and acceptance of Donald Trump as a legitimate president.
- [26:49]
B
Well, it's an interesting thesis. And, you know, the notion that the press helped create Donald Trump, it's culture,
- [26:55]
A
it's our television culture that created. Donald Trump understood how to use the media ecosystem that was bending towards his comfort zone, and that's what happened. I've always said Donald Trump never changed.
- [27:09]
B
He started winning elections, too. So it was hard not to.
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A
What changed was the media became more like him, more superficial. It came closer to who he is, rather than him coming closer to what the media was. Say in the 80s, he did get
- [27:23]
B
a lot of attention for what seemed like a fringe candidacy, but, you know, he was a celebrity and he was saying outrageous things. But then he did start winning elections. So there's so many different aspects of this. We'll try to take them on one by one during the first Trump term in some newsrooms. Again, who are we talking about here at this point? Who's the media? But in some newsrooms, the notion crept in that the traditional standards of impartiality and objectivity simply weren't good enough anymore, that Donald Trump posed a unique challenge to the press because of the asymmetrical aspect of his whole attack. He'll attack the press as liars while he lies constantly himself. And also the challenge he supposedly posed toward American democracy. Do you think the press went wrong? The press, Whoever I'm talking about.
- [28:10]
A
Well, you just got to my first rebuttal, which is, can you define. Yeah, you know, the brilliance of what he's done today is look at the White House press corps. I'll have people complain to me, how come the White House press corps doesn't do this, doesn't do that. So I said, you know, the White House press score has changed. They have planted sycophantic information brokers or news organizations that are more favorable to him into the press corps. And it. It does change the tone of coverage. It's almost like weak gazelles. It's like he's picked off the legacy media one by one. And quietly, it gets sort of.
- [28:43]
B
He loves the room.
- [28:44]
A
Gets the room. Of course he does, because he's desperate. He loves one more than any other, and that's the New York Times.
- [28:50]
B
Yes.
- [28:50]
A
He loves hometown paper. He wants to be. You know, he literally lives the line in the song that says, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Right? Like, this is the guy whose father was prevented from being in Manhattan. He wanted to be Mr. Manhattan. You know, the Queen's guy done good. Right. So there's no doubt his obsessive nature about. About the Times. You're not wrong. I mean, and it was really complicated for my news organization more than any other, I would argue, because we were the largest news organization and we had MSNBC on one side, CNBC on another. Both of whom had their own obsessions about Trump for a while. Right. You had Morning Joe, which was sort of the house organ for Donald Trump all the way up, up until the Access Hollywood tape. And then you had cnbc, which was like his call in show in the morning. Right. You know, Donald Trump used to say to me, he goes, you know, we both are NBCRs. So that was the other thing. Because the Apprentice was on NBC, he would get angry if he got tough coverage from NBC. Be like, you know, I'm helping to pay your salary. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He would constantly think that because he worked at NBC and I worked at NBC, that we were all part of the same ecosystem.
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B
So he said to you that he. He was paying your salary.
- [30:00]
A
Yeah, yeah. At one point.
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B
Yeah.
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A
I don't think you are.
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B
I thought he's trying to assert control, but.
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A
Right. I think it's why he's obsessed with guerrilla videos. Right. Like he just wants to be king of the jungle. Right. In his own bizarre.
- [30:10]
B
Yeah, I guess my point here is I thought there was a lot of great journalism in Trump's first term, but the media did make mistakes by going down that road of eschewing traditional standards of impartiality and objectivity with some of the Russia scandal coverage that turned out to be wrong. Believing almost anything, no matter how crazy the allegation may have been, because it was fitting a narrative. But I'll let you address that.
- [30:34]
A
No, I mean, look, this is. Look, nothing frustrates me more than how the Mueller investigation was covered and how historically it's remembered. You know, I think a majority of the country thinks that it was an illegitimate investigation. And it's like, no. Everybody, including Marco Rubio and John McCain, knew the Russians were manipulating, were involved in our election process. The question was always, did Trump collude with the Russians? Right. That was what was being investigated. They never found enough evidence to say that they did.
- [31:07]
B
And there was evidence of obstruction of justice.
- [31:09]
A
There was a ton of obstruction of justice, because they didn't. You know, the problem with the Russia investigation was always we used to joke about this in our meetings. You know, there's not a lot of there there, except for the way he behaves right. It was like the most suspicious aspect of the story was always his behavior, you know. Why was he constantly obsessed with the WikiLeaks? Now look, to this day, I think WikiLeaks was something that we've not correctly reported about. There's no doubt in my mind it was curated by an American citizen. But the point was is that you're right. You had cable news who was just trying to find anything and they chase any narrative. Michael Cohen in Prague and crap like that. Just focus on the main thing.
- [31:48]
B
And to an earlier point about the nonstop nature of OJ Monica, everything that's happened after that, every night they had to fill time every night. The shows that would dedicate their existence to this story even if there was no news.
- [32:01]
A
And the success was not whether the news was accurate, the success was whether you won the demo. Here's what's really frustrating. How do you think it all works today? The algorithm of determining which news stories go viral and don't and what gets traction have essentially been programmed off of that incorrect model that the media twisted and warped and built in the 90s and the aughts. And it's why it hasn't gotten any better.
- [32:23]
B
Tap subscribe now in the show Notes to skip ads, get early access and enjoy all of our bonus content or go to history as it happens.com.
- [32:47]
A
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- [34:18]
B
So Donald Trump was pretty nasty to you, at least publicly. Now I'm going to ask you how he dealt with you one on one before or after your many one on one interviews with him, but I just want to share a piece of presidential oratory. This will go down in history right alongside the Gettysburg Address and maybe Franklin Roosevelt inaugural address. Here it is. You ever see the story Where I'm It's 1999. I'm on Meet the Press, a show now headed by sleepy eyes Chuck Todd. He's a sleeping son of a bitch, I'll tell you. Where did this all come from, by the way? The president has fallen asleep about 10 times on camera this year. But no, go ahead.
- [34:59]
A
Here's how Trump views the press. Were you ever a fan of wrestling
- [35:02]
B
when you were in for a short time, yeah.
- [35:04]
A
Yeah. Everybody goes through in All My Children phase. In high school or middle school, we all go. And if you're a dude, you go through a wrestling phase, right? Male soap opera. Right. Soap opera for boys. Remember the guy Mean Gene Okerland?
- [35:17]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [35:18]
A
He was the official press guy. He would be there to get berated by Roddy, Roddy Piper or Jake the Snake Roberts or Paul Orndorff. I'm reaching here. It's all 80s and 90s guys. It was wrestling. It was all fake. You know, Donald Trump in the 90s became really tight with the WW, then F, now WWE, because back then Madison Square Garden thought it was beneath them to have WrestleMania at the Garden. Now, of course, they'd love to have it, but back in the 90s, wrestling was still considered like a circus sideshow act. So they were looking for event space and they got it in Atlantic City. Right. Who was desperate for butts in the seats. So Trump, he always viewed the press as his mean Gene Okerlund and he was the wrestler and we were putting on a stage performance. And then when it's over, he would say things like, you know, the sob line, by the way, I remember exactly where I was when I found out about the sob line. My daughter told me about it because it showed up on her Instagram. She's 15 or 16 at the time. Look, he had attacked me a bunch. Yeah. Why?
- [36:23]
B
What was all this animosity from.
- [36:25]
A
I don't know, because Maggie Haberman is, was his love affair with the New York Times and I was his TV guy because Meet the Press is who the TV guy. And I was Meet the Press. Right. We don't have a phone relationship anymore, but we did. And I mean, it would be constant. I remember one time I'm in bed with my wife and he's calling me up looking for poll numbers. And I'm like, calling you for poll number? Yeah, this is in October, wanting to know what we were showing or something.
- [36:51]
B
Because you interviewed him many times when he was running.
- [36:54]
A
And all of a sudden he's, he calls me up and I'm laying in bed and I just hold the phone like this, like my wife just can't believe. And there's Donald Trump's voice. I'm like, yeah, you know, he consistently. And he still does this today. Right. He loves talking to reporters.
- [37:06]
B
That's ridiculous. And it's, and they all know it's. Yeah, they, they now they'll say, I just talked to Trump.
- [37:11]
A
He says, well, and this is where
- [37:13]
B
Iran is agreed to everything Iran is going to. And then of course, later, and it
- [37:17]
A
is, he manipulates it. And now it's like, you know, I do think journalists need not report their phone calls with them. I'm sorry, I just wouldn't do it,
- [37:25]
B
you know, not on the Iran war. He has no credibility on this issue.
- [37:28]
A
But, yeah, he's been ending it for 45 days.
- [37:31]
B
Yeah, he's been like, floats ideas.
- [37:33]
A
He's always right around 8:50am in the morning, markets open at what time?
- [37:38]
B
Trial balloons via the press. Yeah, but, you know, I guess some people might laugh when they hear this clip now, but at the time, you know, this is the President of the United States. He's singling you out, calling you a son.
- [37:49]
A
No, I mean, look, do you remember the pipe bomber guy?
- [37:51]
B
Yeah.
- [37:51]
A
Who was sending pipe bombs to the press. My face was on his van. It was like myself, Rachel Anderson, I think Stephanopoulos. And I can't remember the fifth person was. I remember the FBI comes to my house. I will give the FBI credit. They literally waited. They were sitting outside in a car, waited for my kids to leave for the bus stop. It was a Monday morning because Monday was my off day after being on the show on Sunday. And then these two very young FBI agents come and they go, well, we wanted to let you know that the Pipe bomber has done. Did research on you, so, you know, be careful opening your mail. And I said, well, no offense, guys, but I thought my picture being on his van was the towel, that I ought to be careful.
- [38:28]
B
Gosh, that's scary.
- [38:30]
A
But it was. It was clear that the FBI was just a little cya. Like, hey, we told him, you know, we wanted to let him know that he was under threat. I'd be like, am I getting extra protection? No. You know, I will say this. NBC had a lot of good ex NYPD folks. So, you know, Arlington Police Department for years used to add an extra. You know, I've had my tires slashed. And I will tell you another story that I feel comfortable publicly talking about now. So right after he gets elected, but before he takes the oath, Steve Bannon decides to invite the main television press. You know, so it was myself, Lester, and the news president, and every network was sort of the Sunday show, the chief anchor and the news president. We were sitting around this table being lectured by Steve Bannon and Donald Trump about our coverage. Nobody was pushing back. So I finally spoke up. I said, Look, Mr. President, I said. And I was specifically talking about how he used to single out our correspondent by name, Katie Tur. Now, she's written about this in her book. The amount of harassment I got when he had singled my name out was a lot. Try being a woman.
- [39:31]
B
Yeah.
- [39:31]
A
I mean, it was 10x.
- [39:33]
B
Yeah. He just recently called a woman piggy.
- [39:35]
A
There's growing controversy today over the President's treatment of a reporter aboard Air Force One. Yep, he really did call a female reporter piggy. She was peppering him with uncomfortable questions about the Epstein files. Trust me, I know all the crap I had to deal with. Throw on misogyny on it, and it's a whole level of hate. And I'd say to him, I said, Mr. President, I know you don't mean it, but when you single out people's names, you put a target on their back. You can complain about us all you want. And he said, just complain about us generally, not specifically, because the specific naming of people literally put people's lives in danger, number one. And number two, caused a lot of anxiety for those individuals. There's quite a few members of colleagues of mine. I mean, think about everybody that was. That was covering American politics in 2017 and how many of them are still here.
- [40:28]
B
It was also inaccurate. He's the liar.
- [40:31]
A
He weaponized the country's frustrations with politicians and turned their ire towards the press. And that's why I think it was so such a successful political move on his part.
- [40:40]
B
Yeah, I guess some might say it, it was an ingenious move the way he was able to demonize the press while using it at the same time to launch his political career. So a couple of points you brought up there. I mean, every, every president has complained about the news media. Of course, often in private, there's a famous phone call. Maybe I'll find it. Lbj phone call during Vietnam where he dials up the president of CBS News after Morey Safer.
- [41:08]
A
Morally safer.
- [41:08]
B
Yeah, morally. Morley Safer broadcast a segment about US Soldiers burning down a vill. LBJ said, you know, you let your reporter, he shat on the American flag. He said something like that to him. But this was, again, this is all private.
- [41:21]
A
I'm just telling you frankly that I think your industry is wrecking all of us now because I think, first of all, y' all have political motives to serve. LBJ is always an example. If, if LBJ got the coverage that Donald Trump got, LBJ would not be a very revered president.
- [41:40]
B
And Nixon, of course, attacked the press privately as part of the Watergate scandal. If his enemies. But you said there when you confronted him, you know, Mr. President, I know you don't mean it. That's the hard thing about Trump when it comes to anything. How much of this does he actually believe? How much of it is for show? How much of it is a performance by a reality TV performer? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter because it has the same consequences. But when it comes to the news media, I mean, I can't say for sure. I don't think he really hated you personally. I don't think he, you know, it's reckless though, to call you a sleepy eyed son of a bitch and all that. But he was able to. I'll keep quiet in a second here. He was able to, his audience effectively discredit the press so his followers would not believe anything that's reported about him, while then at the same time using the newspapers to launch his political career.
- [42:31]
A
That's exactly right. It is what he pulled off. And he's created this false sense of equivalency because nothing drives me crazier. Like there's this whole family of conservative activists who have made a now multi generational career off of, of claiming that all media is biased against conservatives. The Bozell family, I think they're a bunch of clowns, and that's my words. You don't.
- [42:52]
B
No, I agree. I don't like them either.
- [42:53]
A
Go ahead when they were first around, there was a few people that worked for them when I was at the hotline that I liked. They were smart media analysts. And I used to say pre Fox News, they were not wrong on some of their critiques. Right. It was more than blind squirrel. Correct. Okay. And I would say, I said, but here's your problem. Why you guys have no credibility with me. I said, because are you concerned about bias in the press, or are you only concerned about bias if you don't agree with the story? Because Fox is not a straight news organization. They're a biased news organization. They choose to have a bias towards the right rather than a bias towards the left.
- [43:30]
B
They're partisan.
- [43:31]
A
But you. They're very partisan in some ways. They don't hide it. So it's clear to me that you're just looking. And this is the frustration I have. Just because someone's not a conservative doesn't make them a liberal. And just because someone's not a progressive, it doesn't make them maga. This is what put me in a vice grip as a guy who covers politics. The left thought I was a closet Republican and the right thought I was in the tank for the Democrats. Because that is the conversation these activists all have with each other. They cannot accept the premise that maybe the dogs don't want to eat their dog food. And so instead of accepting the premise that they don't have majority support for their ideas or their movement, it must be the press's fault for stifling or manipulating what the people think of their ideas and their product. And that's, you know, that just is what it is.
- [44:20]
B
Press has made many mistakes over the centuries. But, you know, I've worked in major newsrooms, Bloomberg News.
- [44:27]
A
You know who's made more mistakes in the press? Government.
- [44:29]
B
Yes. And the thing is, good organizations will publish corrections. I work for Bloomberg ap. Other places that had standards. They had standards editors. All the reporters I've worked with over the years, we all kind of knew what each other's personal politics was. But we were professionals. We had professional code of conduct. We weren't being partisan or partial. I don't know. I guess some people simply don't understand how it works. I don't want to sound like an elitist snob. You don't know what we're doing.
- [44:57]
A
Well, but in fairness, the press is. There's never been one set of rules and one set of standards. I mean, look, the 19th century press corps was incredibly partisan. Every. Every local community had three or four newspapers. All were Named after the political leaning that they had. Like today's Tallahassee Democrat really was back in the 19th century, the democratic Party's paper in Tallahassee, and there probably was a Tallahassee Republican, and the Waterbury Republican is still an active news organization in Connecticut. And I'm sure it was at one time, there was probably the Democratic paper of Butterbury. I mean, that is actually how the newspaper wars of the 19th century existed. I'm obsessed with 1880 and the Garfield election. The show. I knew too much and I was disappointed. Like, I. It glossed over way too much. It's at least a nice start. And I was glad to see that people liked it. So it made me think, because I think Garfield, of all the political assassinations and of all the what if presidencies, he's one of my what ifs. Like, I think if he lives, the Civil Rights act of 1964 gets signed in 1884. He was going to bring Reconstruction back. Who knows if it would have taken. I'm obsessed with that era for a variety of reasons. Anyway, when you do research and you're trying to get. When you're digging into the archives of that era, there are usually three or four different versions of every story that happens, happen. And it's really difficult to figure out, well, which one do you think is the truth? And so what you end up doing as an historian and then when you're writing these things is you. You know, there might have been five different reports on something that happened between Congress and Garfield on something, and they all had a different take on it. Really. There is no one definitive take. You could try to do your best to piece it together, but it's also a reminder why usually the politics of the historian is what ends up coming through when you have to make a choice like that. But the point was, we've only had this sort of standardized press core that you were talking about, really basically post McCarthy. Right. And I would say it. It probably ended with Trump's election. Right. We're going to go back. The new fragmentation, the YouTubification of. Of everything, I think is going to be seen as sort of a line of demarcation.
- [47:14]
B
That's a good point.
- [47:15]
A
When this version of mainstream media ended,
- [47:17]
B
yeah, it's a new era, but it is a return to a prior era. We're just openly partisan publications. Yeah. Anytime I've read, and I've read many, many books about the lead up to the Civil War, historians always make a point of saying when they're citing a newspaper Report from that era, which party the newspaper represents. You had to last thing here, Chuck Todd. We all remember Gary Hart, who was a major candidate for the presidency in 1988, was photographed with a woman who was not his wife, with a very unfortunately named boat they were going to take a sailing trip on called the Monkey Business that ruined his candidacy. I think actually the pendulum has swung all the way to the other end
- [47:58]
A
now, maybe too far the other way. This is what we do actually.
- [48:01]
B
There's almost nothing now that can get some politicians disqualified. Do you think we're kind of in a post scandal? I mean, Donald Trump broke all.
- [48:12]
A
You know, look, I. I will say personally, you know, I do subscribe to the notion that character is destiny. The ultimate historical take on The Trump era. 20 years from now. It's going to take a little bit of time for us to get there. I'm one of those who believes that you really can't properly assess an era. You can't go more than about 30 years, but you can't start sending 20.
- [48:34]
B
It takes time for the documents to become available.
- [48:37]
A
Right. You need eyewitnesses still alive, but you need the consequences to be super low about them speaking out. Right? Like, that's the sweet spot. I say all that because that if you do believe character is destiny, all you have to do is point to these two terms. Everything he's doing, the stories about Donald Trump's life gave you evidence that he was capable of doing this. Was he going to use government to make money for himself? Was he going to sell pardons? It was all there, right? We saw how he operated his business, how he'd done these things. You know, he left other people holding the bag, borrow money from somebody else, let somebody else. Right? This is. It was all there. So he, to me, is proof of the phrase character is destiny. You know, something happened along the way. And I do think what we in the press corps didn't fully understand early on about Trump, we thought, boy, these character things, there's just no way this is going to work, is that the public had decided that all politicians were of bad character. And if you think the entire system is corrupt, you might actually think, you know, sometimes it's a crook that can help you find a crook. Right? Catch me if you can.
- [49:45]
B
He's honest about his dishonesty.
- [49:47]
A
I used to say he's authentically inauthentic. You know, I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with Trump voters that go, I know he's. I know who he is. I wouldn't trust him with this or with my daughter. All these different things. He goes, but he makes you mad. And the people he doesn't like are the people I don't like. He's their foot soldier, he's their av, whatever you want to call it, he's their vehicle. He's their middle finger to the elites. I also think, I mean, let me riddle you this. If Bill Clinton had resigned the presidency in 98, I was one of those who thought that the right thing to do was resign, even if impeachment was wrong. And the reason was at the end of the day, and you know, I've really hardened on this the older I've gotten. The second my daughter turned 20, I remember thinking about this. The President of the United states with a 20 year old intern, that's a fireable offense. And yet it's not an impeachable offense. Right. Like it was a weird, there was a weird line. And so one of my, I'm a huge fan of alternative histories because I think there's always a butterfly moment. Right. I've always wondered if Clinton had resigned and the Democratic Party had basic. The only way he resigned is because the Democratic Party would have said, we're not supporting this. If he thought he didn't have the support of the party, he would have resigned like Nixon did. And Donald Trump never happens. Bill Clinton surviving is how Donald Trump, I think, and especially because Hillary Clinton was his opponent, I think it became the permission slip. If Bill Clinton can be seen as a successful president and he's been credibly accused of pretty much everything that Donald Trump had been credibly accused of. And there's a reason why Trump brought all of the accusers, Clinton accusers, with them to those debates. That's right, because he was sending a message to those undecided voters who may not like his character. Don't forget who they are. I wonder if post Trump we get it out of our system. Okay, fine. There's your revenge on Clinton. Right. It always irritated those on the right. That said, Democrats care about feminism, except if they, you know, over here and then vice versa. Those on the left say the Republicans care about family values. Unless it's Donald Trump over there. Right. Perhaps after Trump, that's when the country says, you know, we're going to care about character again. And what gives me some hope that that is happening is it is hard to get elected trying to be a Trump imitator. It doesn't quite take look at Nancy Mace. Right. There's only One Trump.
- [52:12]
B
Here's my final remark about this. This is what I want to your point, I want a return to a time where oversight can take place in Congress regardless of who the president or the party, the president in power. Cuz we're at a point right now that when it's our guy in the White House, we're not going to investigate anything. And if it's your guy in the White House, we're going to investigate him for everything.
- [52:34]
A
I think it's the Japanese diet that has something akin to the following, which is the oversight committee in Japan's legislature is always chaired by the opposition party. Look, there's another way I choose to look at the Trump era. At my core, I'd like to believe that we can sort of use this moment to build something a little bit better. I do think Trump's served as a useful mri, for instance, all these loopholes. You know what turns out the pardon powers probably needs to be reigned back in. You know that just simply hoping shame would work, right? Shame was one of the most important parts of the guardrails of American politics that we had. And then Trump showed that if you're shameless enough, you can break that. You don't have to be governed by shame. And so if we're not gonna have shame as a way to enforce a norm, which is pretty clear we're not anymore, then we're gonna have to codify these things. We're actually gonna have to pass some laws, we have to change some ways. I think oversight's a big one. I'm hoping that members of Congress are aware that when you write a list of 3, 1, 2, 3, that most people put the most important thing in line one, the second most important thing on line two, and the third most important thing on line three. Why do I bring up that 1, 2 and 3? Because I don't think members of Congress have read the Constitution. Article one, the legislature. Article two is the executive and article three is the judiciary. Article one. The way we govern right now, the legislative branch behaves like it's number three, right? The presidency is number one. The judiciary is number two, especially on the war. We are not going to to have a functioning republic until the legislative branch gets its act together.
- [54:22]
B
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. On the next episode of History as it happens. You think we're living in weird times now? As America 250 approaches, we're going to take a trip back to 1976 and the bottom bicentennial that is next as we report History as it Happens. Make sure to sign up for my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History as it Happens. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great.
- [55:07]
A
You love the host. You seek it out and download it.
- [55:09]
B
You listen to it while driving, working out, out cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to Libsynads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com Today,
- [55:40]
A
this Week at Safeway and Albertsons. Red, green or black seedless grapes are $1.99 per pound limit six pounds. Member price with coupon and fresh boneless pork shoulder country style ribs value packs are $2.49 per pound member price plus selected sizes and varieties of General Mills cereals or Treat bars, Nature Valley granola bars, Mott's Fruit by the Foot or gushers are $1.99 each member price when you buy. 3. Hurry in. These deals won't last. Visit safewayeralbertsons.com for more deals and ways to save.