Drops and Jupiter

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On Saturday, President Trump was photographed through the back window of his limousine reading the New York Post’s coverage of his recent move to impose sweeping tariffs on trading partners the world over. Trump was perusing a black-and-white spread that balanced “the good” (“Automakers motor back to US plants”) and “the bad” (“Yogis, gamers pay price”) of the tariffs, though the main headline focused on China’s move to impose steep retaliatory duties and the text was laid over a full-page graph showing the Dow Jones in sharp decline. The strapline across the top of the page simply read: “WORLD WAR FEE.”

The image, in many ways, evoked the now-distant memory of Trump, the New York businessman—channeling not only his decades-long obsession with tariffs but his old-school tabloid reading preferences. In other ways, it evoked the very recent memories of Trump’s second term. Visually, the dull tones of the newsprint (itself a potential victim of Trump’s wider tariff policies, as Sacha Biazzo has written for CJR) contrasted with the striking red of Trump’s MAGA cap, with its white stitched reminder that he is both the forty-fifth and the forty-seventh president. The photo was taken, from a distance, by a journalist with the Associated Press—the outlet that Trump has (mostly) banned from his line of sight over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” quite as propagandistically as he might like. And it was taken in the environs of Trump’s golf club in Jupiter, Florida, where he teed off over the weekend despite the market meltdown that his tariffs had triggered. Later on Saturday, the White House shared an important update with the press via an official statement: “The President won his second round matchup of the Senior Club Championship today in Jupiter, FL, and advances to the Championship Round tomorrow.”

Classically, of course, golfing while the markets burn might be considered ideal fuel for negative media coverage. (The cover of the New York Post that Trump was pictured reading splashed a photo of the president on a golf buggy with the headline “What, fee worry?”; the paper’s Murdoch stablemate the Wall Street Journal juxtaposed an even less flattering photo with “market carnage,” leading the journalist Matt Zeitlin to quip that “the markets are so bad they turned the WSJ front page into the Huffington Post homepage.”) That Trump did it anyway, we were told, might reflect that he is done caring about optics. Making just that point on CNN, Maggie Haberman, the experienced Trump chronicler at the New York Times, noted that Trump has “believed in tariffs for forty years” and is now “going to do what he’s going to do.” A White House official echoed exactly the latter wording to the Washington Post, adding that, when it comes to negative headlines, Trump “is at the peak of just not giving a f— anymore.” 

Being caught with the New York Post isn’t quite the behavior of a man who doesn’t care about media coverage anymore, however. And the way he announced the tariffs certainly wasn’t the behavior of a man who no longer cares about optics. Trump organized a Wednesday ceremony in the Rose Garden at which, we were promised, he would at long last usher in America’s “LIBERATION DAY”; per the Washington Post, he only finalized the precise policies that he would announce a few hours before speaking, but he certainly committed to the spectacle, addressing a crowd that paired cabinet officials with laborers in neon vests and hard hats, and brandishing big posters in a manner that more than one journalist likened to that of a game show host. (There were supposed to be even more props, the Post reported, but the gusting wind—with a deft sense of metaphor and comic timing—put paid to that.) At one point, Trump was reading off of a giant list marked “Reciprocal Tariffs” when he got to South Africa and seemed to get distracted: “They’ve got some bad things going on,” he said. “We’re paying them billions of dollars a week, cut the funding because a lot of bad things are happening in South Africa, the fake news ought to be looking at it, they don’t wanna report it.” Soon after, he handed the list to an aide and started joking about the wind. “I brought a hat just in case it got too windy,” he said, fishing a MAGA hat from his podium, “but here, would anybody like a hat?” He threw it in the direction of autoworkers in the crowd, not his cabinet. “They deserve it more than our cabinet,” he said. “Our cabinet has plenty of hats.”

If the event—not to mention the golf trip that followed it—could be viewed less as a display of hard-headed resolve than a scary detachment from reality, commentators quickly lined up to say as much about the tariffs themselves. The Economist slammed Trump’s approach as “bonkers” under the rubric “Ruination Day”; Stephen Collinson, of CNN, wrote that “bad things can happen when presidents seem to lose their grip on reality.” The fact that tariffs were slapped on a set of remote Antarctic islands inhabited only by penguins and seals was one common source of media befuddlement, as was the formula that the administration used to calculate the tariffs as a whole. Over the weekend, Axios reported, citing the center-right American Enterprise Institute, that the formula appeared to be based on “a serious math error” that had the effect of ballooning the size of the tariffs. (An academic whose work the administration cited suggested something similar.) Saturday Night Live—dealing, once again, with a story that blurred the boundaries between satire and real life—skewered the mathematical symbols in the formula. “That’s a triangle. I don’t know what that is,” James Austin Johnson, who plays Trump on the show, said. “Up here is Xi from China, and that’s me stabbing him with a sword. And down here are some sideways boobs.”

Yesterday, Trump’s real-life advisers toured the Sunday shows in what may have been a coordinated attempt to clear up confusion around the tariffs, but, if that was the case, didn’t work—some of them suggested that the tariffs are a negotiating tactic designed to bring foreign countries to the table, while others cast them more as an unbending attempt to remake the US economy. The formula came up, as did the penguins. (Margaret Brennan, of CBS: “Why do they face a 10 percent tariff? Did you use AI to generate this?” Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, laughing: “No.” Brennan, laughing back: “Why are they on the list?”) Reviewing the whole display, Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary turned academic (whose pronouncements are often treated with oracular reverence by mainstream outlets), said on CNN that he’d “never seen as much incoherence and irrationality as we saw on television today.”

Portions of the right-wing media were kinder on Trump: reliable boosters like Sean Hannity, of Fox, were reliably boosterish; late last week, Fox as a whole was accused of downplaying the market chaos caused by the tariffs in favor of more reliable culture-war fodder. (“FEMALE FENCER TAKES KNEE, FORFEITS IN PROTEST OF BIOLOGICAL MALE OPPONENT.”) Some voices on Fox, however, were critical of the tariffs, or at least acknowledged the sharp uncertainty around their short-term economic impact; so, too, did other prominent voices in right-wing media, including Ben Shapiro, who called Trump’s vision of international trade “I’m sorry to say, mistaken.” Trump’s recent behavior might suggest that he is living in something like a right-wing media echo chamber these days. (He’s certainly susceptible to the fringiest of its fringes: while preparing his tariff policy on Wednesday, he found time to invite the social media extremist Laura Loomer into the Oval Office—and appeared to then fire supposedly disloyal national security officials on her recommendation.) But this idea belies what we know about his longer-term media consumption habits. We know, at least, that he has read the New York Post recently—and that paper has been at least somewhat critical of the tariff rollout.

We live in an age when so much information gets filtered through nakedly ideological prisms before reaching news consumers—and oh so much ink has been spilled on the fact. Some commentators have suggested that that might not be the case this time: Jon Passantino wrote in Status over the weekend that “for many Americans—especially those living paycheck to paycheck—it’s hard to imagine the spin will hold when they’re staring down bills that keep climbing and hearing Fox News hosts make light of it”; John Ganz wrote on X that “everyone will know someone whose business goes under, everyone will know someone who loses their job,” adding, “there are no bubbles or echo chambers anymore.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. The more abstract aspects of Trump’s tariff policy might prove spinnable; we don’t yet know exactly how the policy will play out from here; and there are very real economic issues that are at least theoretically at stake—not least around the hollowing-out of industrial jobs—that different people will, for perfectly legitimate reasons, see differently. But if the markets continue to tank—and prices start to skyrocket—it’s fair to assume that news consumers of all stripes will at least notice without needing to consume the news to do so.

In addition to the persistent Trump-era discourse around media echo chambers, the events of the past few days have made me think of the more recent Trump-era discourse around “sanewashing,” or the idea—in vogue among media critics during the election campaign last year, but since relatively on the back burner—that journalists too often quoted Trump in ways that imposed sense on speeches and proposals that were actually nonsensical, be that out of some misplaced desire to treat him the same as his opponents or a broader journalistic “bias toward coherence,” as The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg once put it. Under this theory, the coverage of Trump’s tariff speech could be viewed as a continuation of the problem (the media critic Dan Froomkin, for one, accused reporters at major outlets of downplaying just how “insane” the policy is); to the extent that a lot of commentary has centered the incoherence, it could equally be viewed as pre-election chickens coming home to roost. Back then, of course, many people seemed to vote on what they were feeling about the economy—more so than what the news was telling them, and in what language; for me, the sanewashing of Trump was a problem to the extent that it failed to convey the full truth of his proposals, which is the media’s job regardless of what people do with the information—and as I wrote at the time, the same could be said of the media failing to proportionately cover Trumpian threats that were all too coherent. The tariff story shows, perhaps, that there’s no contradiction in Trump following through on a perfectly coherent, decades-old preoccupation in a way that is perfectly incoherent. The challenge, still, is to cover both, and more besides.

When I wrote about sanewashing last year, I noted the persistent violence of Trump’s rhetoric: he talked, on one occasion, of a “bloodbath” in the US auto industry, a remark that was confusing in context and was dissected in a lot of coverage as a result; on another, he predicted that removing immigrant gangs from the US would be a “bloody story,” a remark that was clearer and seemed to get less coverage. We’re now balancing these stories again, or something like them; this week, the administration faces key judgments in court cases linked to its deportation policies, including a deadline of tonight to return a man the administration has admitted to wrongfully deporting to a prison in El Salvador, and a likely verdict as to whether officials should be held in contempt for apparently defying a court order not to curb migrant flights to that country. Politico noted this morning that these cases “would normally dominate the news cycle, were it not for the ongoing economic mayhem.” But news cycles are not some act of Jupiter; it’s still in our gift to cover both with due urgency.

Yesterday, Trump spoke to reporters on Air Force One as he returned from Florida to Washington. He was asked about the market declines, and his response—that “sometimes, you have to take medicine to fix something”—quickly made headlines; he was also asked about deportations, and said that he “loves” the idea of sending certain US citizens to El Salvador. The first question, however, was about how his golfing weekend went. “Very good, because I won,” he said. “It’s good to win. You heard I won, right? Did you hear I won? Just to back it up, you were there. I won. I like to win.”

Some personal news: I’m out this week with a new book, What Is Journalism For?, drawing on my work over the years for CJR and interviews with journalists from Myanmar, the US, and the UK. This morning, CJR has an excerpt from the book, in which I make the case that part of a journalist’s job is to constantly criticize the world around them. And on Saturday, I’ll be launching the book in conversation with Joel Simon, the founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and a regular CJR contributor, at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy, at 12:35pm local time. More information about the event, which will also be available to watch online, is here. If you’re going to be in Perugia, please get in touch at jallsop@cjr.org. 

Other notable stories:

• Last month, Israeli forces in Gaza shot and killed fifteen aid workers whose bodies were later found in a mass grave. Israel said that soldiers did not “randomly attack” the workers, claiming that vehicles had been “advancing suspiciously” without “headlights or emergency signals”—but video found on the phone of one of the victims has since shown that “the ambulances and fire truck that they were traveling in were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights,” according to the Times. Israel has since said that its initial account of the attack was “mistaken.” Officials said that nine of the aid workers were affiliated with terrorist groups and have reportedly continued to insist that six of them were operatives with Hamas—but, according to Fox, have not offered evidence of this despite repeatedly being asked.

• The recent furor over Michael Waltz, Trump’s national security adviser, accidentally adding The Atlantic’s Goldberg to a sensitive group chat about strikes on Yemen left a key question unresolved: How did Waltz add Goldberg’s contact in the first place? According to The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell, a White House investigation has concluded that Brian Hughes—then a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign, now in the same role at the National Security Council—forwarded Goldberg’s number to Waltz last year after Goldberg asked the campaign for comment on a story about Trump’s attitude toward wounded service members. Waltz did not call Goldberg, but apparently his phone ended up saving Goldberg’s number under Hughes’s name.   

• Late last week, Eugene Robinson, a prominent columnist at the Washington Post, said that he was moving on from the paper, citing the recent “significant shift” in its opinion section’s mission as mandated by owner Jeff Bezos. In other media-jobs news, Radhika Jones is stepping down as the editor of Vanity Fair; she told staff that she has achieved all her goals in the post and has “always had a horror of staying too long at the party,” though New York’s Charlotte Klein reports that it comes amid a “malaise” at the magazine. And Nancy Dubuc, the former CEO of Vice, is back in media, as executive chair of Togethxr, a startup focused on women’s sports.

• Recently, Anthony Albanese, the prime minister of Australia, called national elections that are set to take place early next month. On the campaign trail last week, Peter Dutton, the conservative opposition leader who is hoping to replace Albanese as prime minister, took aim at the public broadcaster ABC, declining to name his favorite ABC journalist when asked, criticizing “partisan players” at the organization, and suggesting that it could face a review as to how “efficiently” it spends taxpayer funds should he take office. The Guardian’s Amanda Meade has more details.

• And The Oregonian’s Douglas Perry has the story of Gene Klare, a labor activist and former reporter, and his involvement in an epic strike against the paper in the early sixties. The strike, begun by a stereotypers’ union, “proved volatile from the start,” Perry writes—delivery trucks were blown up and a cousin of the paper’s owner was shot—and ended with the unions involved being crushed. Klare “never got over it,” one source recalled. “The strike was kind of the fulcrum of his life.”

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