The Daily - Nixon Dreamed of Breaking the Media. Trump Is Doing It.

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

As President Trump set out to systematically eliminate or intimidate those who stood in his way — inspectors general, judges, law firms — the news media loomed as one of his most stubborn obstacles. Or so it seemed.Jim Rutenberg, a writer at large for The New York Times, explains how Mr. Trump is circumventing and undermining the fourth estate in a way no president before him ever has.Guest: Jim Rutenberg, a writer at large for The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine.Background reading: President Trump’s blueprint for bending the media to his will has Nixon written all over it.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobargo. This is The Daily. As President Trump set out to systematically eliminate or intimidate those who stand in his way, from inspectors general to judges to law firms, the news media loomed as one of his most stubborn obstacles. Or so it seemed. Today, my colleague Jim Rutenberg, on how Trump is both circumventing and undermining the Fourth Estate in a way no president before him ever has. president before him ever has. It's Tuesday, March 25th.

Jim, we are talking today about the state of the news media under President Trump in his second term. And when we brought this subject to you, a student of the media for... Many... I'm not going to say how many... Decades? We don't talk in decades in my household. We don't talk in decades. Many years.

Yep. Former media columnist here at The Times, you're writing a book about the news media. When we brought this subject to you, you kept pointing us to Richard Nixon. Former President Nixon. Why? Well, in many ways, we would not be where we are in the media sphere were it not for Richard Nixon. And I mean that on a couple of different levels. Nixon was the first president to really face the full force of an independent,

truly challenging press corps. It started, Johnson was facing some during the Vietnam War and was very angry about it. Nixon inherits this news media that's in its kind of full flower of independence. — Direct from our newsroom in New York, in color, this is the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. — It is challenging presidents and government in ways that weren't non-existent, but weren't as common. — The big question is whether the Vietnamese can take over and hold on as the United States withdraws. — In his view, the media was hounding him about Vietnam. The bugging of the Democratic Party headquarters in Washington's Watergate Hotel was back in the news today with the name...

And then, of course, we move into these stories about the break-in at the Watergate. Good evening. The country tonight is in the midst of what may be the most serious constitutional crisis in its history. The president has fired special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Fox. So it's just ramping up along with Nixon's own fury. And I've spent a lot of time in the Nixon archives and you see the memos every day where Nixon's aides are sending him the scripts from the evening news because the evening

news especially Walter Cronkite of CBS, I mean, they are kind of this behemoth. They are getting tens of millions of viewers every night and they are calling it straight, but they are not calling it in favor of Nixon. And so Nixon would get these scripts and circle them like, who's talking to them? And just Cronkite, I'm going to stop that. You know, he's just yelling at his aides to get on top of this. We have to stop this. Do just crank it. I'm going to stop that. You know, he's just yelling at his aides to get on top of this. We have to stop this.

Do something about it. Do something. And he began a campaign to beat back what he and his aides called these unelected communication powers. They start politically just going after the press. No reporter from the Washington Post, just ever, to be in the White House again. And no photographer either.

No photographer. Is that clear? Yes or no? Very unusual to this degree from a White House. They see about using kind of the mechanisms of power, using, for instance, the Federal Communications Commission, which you know is the FCC, to punish stations for their licenses. They try to stop the New York Times from publishing the secret war history known as the Pentagon

papers. They go to court, but they lose. When they try to do things at the FCC, they realize it's kind of a bridge too far. They can try to enact some changes of regulation, but that's years away. They can't really just snap their fingers. And ultimately, what Nixon can't do is stop the railroad train coming at his White House of Watergate. And basically, it is ultimately the powerful independent press that gives him no option but to resign. You know the media is always talking about the imperial presidency, the power

of the imperial presidency. I think we ought to hear a little bit of discussion of the imperial media and its power. So in the end Richard Nixon's relationship with the media is he's furious with it, wants to weaken it, wants to stop it, can't, and the media quite literally conquers him. Yeah, the press, the power of the press prevails. And the reason I've been thinking about it a lot lately is that the echoes to that moment, to that period in time, are so loud in these early days of the new Trump administration. Strikingly so.

He's going after the press in ways that are very similar to the ways Nixon did, but he's going farther than Nixon did already in just the first couple months. At the same time, he's completely able to make an end run around the press, around its journalistic narratives, to this huge new media sphere that will present the world only on the terms that Trump wants it presented on. And that is something that Nixon could have only dreamed of. So talk to us about the mechanics of how Trump is doing what Nixon couldn't, realizing Nixon's

fantasy of a relationship with the media, starting with Trump's ability, as you just said, to go around this monolithic media. Let's start with the baseline he had even the first time around, his first administration. 2016, 2020. Yeah, in 2016. So he already had Fox News, which always was very friendly to Republicans, especially its prime time host, for Trump after a bumpy period in the beginning, they really get into his corner and that just grows

through his administration. They're even more in his corner night after night kind of parroting what he's saying and he's kind of sometimes parroting them and there's a real symbiosis and that for its time was really new. But then when he leaves office, in just the short period of time, it's only, we're only talking four years, right? When Trump is shooed out of Washington following the violence of January 6th, the media will go on to radically change.

And perhaps most importantly, it's changed in a place where so many people now get their news. And that's of course social media. And you know where I'm going, right? Where I'm heading here now is to talk about X, formerly Twitter. Since 2020, it goes through this enormous change. Of course, it's come under the control of Elon Musk. And he goes on to reconfigure it from a place where, think about this, Trump couldn't even post by early 2021.

He'd been completely banned after the insurrection. So now, it goes from that to being a real megaphone for his message, for his supporters' message. It's reaching tens of millions of monthly active users in the US, many more globally. And by the way, it's a place where information moves out algorithmically to the top of people's feeds and that is controlled by said Trump fan, Elon Musk. That's huge.

Can I just pause? I think it's worth just describing this. If you open up X, what used to be Twitter, under Elon Musk, and now in the era of Donald Trump, you experience something very different than what you did a couple of years ago. I mean, I could open mine and show you this, but essentially, whether it's Elon Musk himself coming on to praise President Trump or a bunch of conservative accounts I had never followed suddenly are very prominent on my feed. I used to just follow a bunch of journalists and use it for informational purposes, but

very much it now feels like a daily megaphone for Trump and the entire MAGA movement. In my experience, radically same for you. My too and people have done experiments because these algorithms are still bafflingly among the least understood things in American politics right now. But that is my experience, that's the experience of people who try to do neutral studies. And that's a big deal for Trump because it's, as you note, these are Trumpian narratives that take over the platform and support whatever he's saying that day. Right.

And it just seems important to note that suddenly one of the most important, widely used social media platforms in the country, if not the world, is being managed for the president. Empirically, it seems that way. Musk won't always say that. Sometimes he'll deny that. Often he'll deny that. But it's just universally, study after study finds that. And that is directly tied to something

that gets a ton of promotion on X, but it's its own media sphere. And it's emerged in this entirely new way, and that's this world of male-dominated media, largely podcasts often referred to as the Manosphere. Which has grown exponentially since Trump was last in office. A number of shows and popularity. So who are these people?

These are like, they're kind of just bros. The best way to describe what they do is bro casual. They're reaching this disaffected young male audience that's historically been very hard to reach. These guys have, are talking to them and they're talking to them about video games or silly pranks or mixed martial arts, or professional wrestling. If you'd like to, yeah. Yeah, we're rolling out.

These are nice. I haven't seen one of these. Some high quality mics. That's pretty cool. And Trump starts showing up on these shows. My son's a big fan of yours, Barron. Really, Barron is? He just graduated high school, right? That's right. He just said he knows you very well.

He said, Dad, he's big. Wow. You're a big one. That's cool. That's where it is school, right? That's right. He just said he knows you very well. He said, Dad, he's big. Wow. You're a big one. That's cool. That's where it is nowadays, right? Yeah, well, it's interesting. He actually credits his son, Barron, for showing him that these shows could be a powerful way

to reach what his team termed low propensity voters. I like doing stuff like this. You know, I like it. I like doing stuff like this, you know, I like it. I like conversation. And it plays to Trump's personality. It's like perfect for his freewheeling style. And so he proves to be quite the match for a lot of these shows. And if you bring down the cost of energy and if you do some very basic things...

Get rid of the windmills. That's why I didn't go to Coachella this year, because when you drive to Palm Springs, you got to rid of the windmills. The windmills are- That's why I didn't go to Coachella this year, because when you drive to Palm Springs, you got to see all the windmills. And ever since you said that, it just pisses me off when I see all the windmills. How about the old ones that are sitting there rusting? Just kind of shooting the breeze,

sometimes about politics, but all sorts of other things. So we know how it's like a constant weave. Remember how he would do the speech, he would call it a weave because he would weave all over the place. These things are built for that. The dude hits the fingers too.

And you know what? He plays golf and he plays well. He hit a perfect drive with me. I said, do you play? But no one at that world is more important. And I would say fewer more important now in modern media than the prototypical star of the Manosphere and that is Joe Rogan.

I was 100% a left-leaning person who lived in Los Angeles. I never voted Republican my whole life. I was very left-leaning. But California went nuts, man. Joe Rogan has incredible credibility with this crowd because he was a Bernie Sanders guy. His podcast is really breezy. Well, they canceled The Apprentice when you were running for president, correct?

No, they had Arnold Schwarzenegger do it. And he has an interview with Trump during the campaign. Do you know Elon Musk? Yes. He endorsed me. By the way, he gave me the nicest endorsement to this, to Taffer. He said the country's gonna fail. You should do the same thing, Joe, because you cannot be voting for Kamala. Kamala, you're not a Kamala person, I know you. And get this, that interview with Trump

has racked up more than 50 million views on YouTube alone. Now, those aren't ratings points, right? We don't, 50 million views, we don't know how long those people were there, but that is a lot of people. Now we're talking like Cronkite level person. We need like a realist, someone who's like conservative fiscally and understands foreign policy and how to deal with dictators.

And he's going basically all in with Trump. Actually endorses him. Yeah. And it just came over the wires that Joe Rogan just endorsed me. Is that good? — Thank you, Joe. — And endorsements only go so far in this world. That's a big endorsement.

— That's so nice. — Right. That one went, as best we can tell, real far. — Because we see it in the exit polls and the post-polling analyses that Trump gained with young voters overall, with young men. And that's all well and good for a campaign, but here's the thing now,

is that that's all still here for Trump. And so as Trump has set out to, you know, reorder government and really push the limits of anything that establishment Washington has certainly seen, he still has this media world to promote his agenda. The Dem leadership or, you know, political leadership, they issue their instructions and their puppets carry it out. Yeah.

They're just like puppets in a puppet show. For example, Elon Musk, who's really the face, certainly the biggest spokesperson for what the administration is calling the Department of Government Efficiency, he's come on to Rogan a couple of times recently. Once was during the election, but more recently after. And both interviews were really striking for what they said about a Joe Rogan versus a Walter Cronkite, and certainly Cronkite successors, the evening news broadcasts on the main networks now.

Because their networks, a Walter Cronkite, they're rooted in news. You can like them or hate them, but they try to traffic in verifiable fact, following the rules of journalism. Rogan doesn't. He's free to say and go wherever he wants, as his guests can go on and on about things, no matter how far they may be veering from the verifiable facts. For example...

They've paid themselves enormous sums through these nonprofits. That's, it's so insane that that's been going on for so long. It's a gigantic scam. Like one of the biggest, maybe the biggest scam ever. During this last, appearance last month, Musk talks with Rogan about all the receipts, right? All the fraud he's finding. Things that the newscasters are really treating skeptically and finding a lot of flaws with, but Rogan is kind of just wowed by this. It sounds like it's feeding hungry people.

Right. People are gonna starve, Elon. This is horrible. And then you find out actually it's like $250 million for transgender animal studies. Like it's like. Literally mutilating animals. Yes.

Mutilating animals in demented studies. Yes. That are. You know, it's just because at face value it all does sound really crazy. Everybody should be celebrating that we've found a way to cut out fraud and waste. Yeah.

If you pay taxes and you don't like that you have to pay so much in taxes and then... So you could see how a show like his, again, which has a ton of credibility with his audience... You should be celebrating... ...can be a really powerful vehicle for the Trump administration as it sets out on this aggressive agenda that's being challenged

a lot of cases by journalists and certainly the courts. Right. Just to say, Jim, by my informal math, if you take X and you add in Joe Rogan alone, you are looking at an audience of what? 70, 80 million? Yeah, easily. Huge. Yeah.

No president has had anything close to this in terms of basically like media cheerleading and support. And on top of that, there are kind of new organisms coming out of this Petri dish, right? And they're really, we've never seen anything like them. PETER STARK Well, such as? WILL Well, I'm thinking about, in this case, Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action. Hey, everybody, today on The Charlie Kirk Show,

12 years, it's been a 12-year journey. Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action is stronger than ever. -♪ POP MUSIC PLAYING WILL And this is an organization, listeners will have probably heard of him, people on social media, Charlie Kirk is kind of the — He's the face of this. — of this organization.

And this organization, think about it this way. Take Sean Hannity of Fox News and then put him on a podcast, a big giant one, and then layer on top of that an actual political organization. It's got chapters on more than 850 college campuses. And there, they're getting people active in politics for the first time, but conservative politics, organizing people, getting people out to vote. That's basically what you have with Turning Point. Look, when I started covering media,

we talked about Fox News and Roger Ailes, and people would say derisively, Roger Ailes is like a part of the Republican Party or the chairman of the Republican Party. Charlie Kirk is running his own political operation and a giant media operation, and they're all rowing in the same direction. And that direction is Donald Trump.

It's Donald Trump. And now that Trump has moved into governing, Kirk can use this sort of get out the vote machinery meets media machine to act as something of a Trump enforcer. Just give us an example of that. There's a great example that was contained in a really good story about Charlie Kirk and turning point in the New York Times Magazine by our colleague Robert Draper, where Robert Draper is with Charlie Kirk having dinner in Palm Beach in December. Pete Hegseth has been nominated as defense secretary.

There's a lot of controversy around him. Right, accusations of sexual assault. And Joni Ernst, Senator from Iowa, is on the fence. Good Republican, but on the fence. And a key vote. Key vote. And Charlie meets us at Draper at dinner. I think we're going to have to consider primaring some, some

these Republicans who don't step in line with the agenda, who'd sort of take the Trump base for granted. And maybe we'll primary some people. And among the people he mentions is Joni Ernst. And Michael, Charlie Kirk proceeds to do just that. The funding has already been put together. Donors are calling like crazy. Primaries are going to

be launched. He says what he said to Draper, he says on his show to millions of people. You go up against Pete Hegseth, the president repeatedly, then don't be surprised, Joni Ernst, all of a sudden you got a

primary challenge in Iowa. But most importantly, her. Right. That we will potentially recruit someone to run against you got a primary challenge in Iowa. But most importantly, her. Right. That we will potentially recruit someone to run against you in a Republican primary in Iowa and make sure that you are no longer a member of the United States Senate. This will cost you your seat. The old RNC, the old way of doing things is dead, OK?

You think that we at Turning Point Action, Turning Point PAC, are just going to kind of rest on our laurels? No, no, no, no. And circulates that around on X, because it always comes back to X one way or another. Wow, feel full circle moment here. That's what I'm talking about. And then gets to announce that he has word that she will be endorsing Hegseth.

Right. In other words, Kirk has effectuated the change in vote that Hextheth needs from Joni Ernst to become the next Secretary of Defense. And what you're describing is a very new form of not just cheerleading and not just supporting, but active media coordination with enforcement of the president's agenda. Exactly. So to go back to Nixon for just a moment, what he wanted by your account most was to somehow get around journalists like Walter Cronkite, who he was so frustrated with and

so frustrated that he couldn't get around. With Trump, that dynamic has been kind of inverted, right? Trump doesn't have to go around the mainstream media. This new Trump-osphere in the media is already working with him and for him. And in that sense, Trump doesn't even need the mainstream media. Exactly. That's why you'll hear it come up again and again, slogans among this cohort. We are the media. That's their kind of thing. We're it now. Bye bye. Us.

Us. You. You. Well, they didn't mention either of us by name. As Elon says, we are the media now. So it's not just that commentators are popping up and there's all these new podcasters, but it's normal people who finally have a voice. And importantly, they can back that claim up with their numbers, with their audience. Again, you know, apples and oranges in the metrics.

But no matter what we see it in the views. Millions and millions of people are inhaling this stuff. People are just hungry for independent voices who are authentic and honest with their audiences. So this is really now a completely uncharted media environment that we're only beginning to understand. No president has had anything like this, nothing close. And yet for all of that, it's not enough for Trump.

Because he still really does care what the mainstream media has to say, what this old media sphere has to say. And he's been making it increasingly clear he wants it entirely either out of his way or solely serving his interests. We'll be right back. Jim, as we turn to Trump's efforts to try to break the back of the traditional mainstream media, I think we have to ask the very simple question of why this remains a priority of his. If he has the enormous influence in this new Trump adjacent media you just described, he

doesn't in some sense need, it would seem, the mainstream media. The mainstream media has significant economic problems we've talked about for years on this show with you. And trust in the mainstream media, I believe believe is at an all-time low. So why is Trump so determined to try to? Cripple it right. Well, let's just say if you listen to people around Trump like Elon Musk Crippling it would apparently be like the nice thing to do after Trump's election. Musk, for instance, wrote on X literally, the legacy media must die. That's the real quote.

Wow. But there's one sort of easy answer, and that is that there are still millions of people who watch network television. There are still big newspapers doing journalism, and they get scoops about his administration that his sort of podcast friendlies don't get, right? They're digging stuff up.

Some of that is like winding up in these court cases against his agenda. I think he just sees it as, hey, they're still part of the media system. For all of the advantages I have elsewhere, this old part is still out to get me and I got to cut it off. It's in the way. Aaron Powell Just the way Cronkite was to Nixon. Jason Kuznicki Exactly. Aaron Powell So with that in mind, how is the president

in this second run at being president attempting to go after and maybe even destroy the mainstream media. Well, let's start with the courts. He's been bringing some pretty aggressive lawsuits. And where he has done this in the past, now that he's kind of won the popular vote, he's feeling more powerful, we're watching as he's getting very different results. Hmm.

Just explain that. Well, there have been a couple that Trump filed from even before he became president. And one that everybody probably remembers was against ABC News, which settled for $15 million. People saw it as a real capitulation, a real shrinking in the face of a threat. But let's focus on the one he brought against CBS' 60 Minutes and CBS' parent company, Paramount. This one was based on his view or this idea that when 60 Minutes interviewed Kamala Harris

during the campaign, it had edited one of her answers to make her sound better. Because in two different places, two different excerpts of this same interview, they showed different answers to the same question, which is really just different parts of a longer answer. And this was like unheard of, to sue over this idea that somehow CBS was playing games with the sound to help her in her campaign.

I mean, it was just like, as far as First Amendment lawyers are concerned, a no brainer that this would not stand. It was almost like a frivolous lawsuit. Mm-hmm, and what happens? Well, something shocking happens. Word gets out that CBS's parent company, Paramount, is preparing to enter talks to settle this

lawsuit. And this is happening just as Trump is taking office. And this has huge ramifications inside of CBS News at 60 Minutes, which by the way, we can talk about network news not being what it once was. 60 Minutes is still a giant television show. It's like the last of them. And it is a serious journalistic operation. So the idea that the parent company is going to make them settle this lawsuit about an

actual answer that the Democratic nominee and sitting vice president made, I mean, that's just unbelievable to them. But there's a bigger thing at stake involved in this. Which is what? Behind the scenes, the Trump administration is dangling a basically punishment against Paramount and its primary business interests. Because Paramount is trying to affect a sale to another media company called Skydance. Right. to another media company called Skydance. That deal is going to need approval

from the federal government, including the Federal Communications Commission, which controls station licenses for CBS News. And so the fear is that the FCC will somehow seek to block this merger because of Trump's personal peak at the network. Over this edit of this interview with Kamala Harris. Yeah. And so here's Paramount wanting to just get this out of the way by folding on this very

kind of central question about freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And sure enough, the man who Trump had just recently appointed as the chair of the FCC, Brendan Carr, opens an investigation based on a complaint that the FCC under Biden had just dismissed, and that involves CBS's handling of this interview edit. And Carr will even go on to say fairly explicitly that approval of that deal could hinge on what the FCC finds. So now CBS has asked, show us your script, show us your raw material, and CBS complies, which yet again in journalism world is seen as this complete caving.

Right. And we should say, I think it's during this process of CBS participating in this FCC investigation that we all finally get a look at the original transcript and the editing, and basically we all learn simultaneously that there's nothing to see here. This is a very natural editing process. There was no effort to protect Kamala Harris. Right. It's just how the editing process works.

You see it, it's kind of boring, right? But it shows you can torque anything into anything, and the FCC is expected to kind of know that, it had known that, but here we were. Right. And the reason this would seem to matter, back to this question of how is Trump trying to break the back of the news media, is that he seems to be pretty effectively transforming the regulatory body that oversees, especially, TV news and turning

it into this pretty invasive weapon that can be wielded against the major news outlets and presumably have a chilling effect. If you're CBS 60 Minutes or anything else inside CBS or if you're any of the shows at NBC, you're thinking to yourselves, we have to be really careful about how we cover Donald Trump, because if we get crosswise with him, then the FCC might come after us. Yeah, and it does something that Nixon was only threatening to do. In the Nixon years, they were threatening to bring the FCC after the biased networks in New York and LA, Washington, whatever. They were threatening FCC power. They held

back from really asserting it. And it's not clear that this will end with the FCC, which is a regulatory body, right? A few weeks ago, Trump gave a speech at the Department of Justice. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Pam. Where he essentially argued that he would like to transform the DOJ itself into a cudgel against the press. And I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6 percent bad about me or political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they're really corrupt and they're illegal.

He literally said that the press, in reporting some stories he personally didn't like, was probably acting illegally. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal. It's influencing judges and it's really changing law and it just cannot be legal. I don't believe it's legal. Right. And even if he's only musing at this point, this once again adds to the chilling effect we've seen in TV news. But also I think we should add in print, where we've seen the owners of the LA Times and the Washington Post block their editorial boards from endorsing Kamala

Harris as both plan to. It's been widely noted in the case of the Washington Post that its owner Jeff Bezos has a lot of government contracts before Trump, and Trump has threatened his government contracts in the past. So we have a clear sense now of how Trump is using both the courts and the power of the federal government against the media. Exactly. But these actions he's taking in the courts with the FCC possibly now, DOJ, they take time.

And so in the interim, he's doing what he can now to curtail access and punish outlets for not going along with his narrative. And I think the best example of this is what he did against the Associated Press. As you may remember, he has declared that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America. The Associated Press has not updated its style book on the Gulf of America. And the White House was very angry about this. So the Associated Press was pulled out of the press pool. Excluded basically from access to things like an Oval Office meeting between Trump and the leader of a foreign country.

Yeah, and by the way, that's one thing for us, right? The New York Times, we write a story a day or how many stories out of that. The AP is a wire service. It goes to newspapers across the country. It feeds 15,000 other media outlets, a lot of them who can't afford to have it. The AP is kind of the eyes and the ears for a lot of local media around the country. Thank you. You said it better than I was saying it.

That's why you're... That's the job. That's what you do. And this was, again, kind of... This was unheard of. And again, put the press on notice that now you need to use the language that the president wants you to use or you are going to be punished. And there's something else that's going on here that's very important, not to maybe the average listener until they think about it, but because the press needs to be independent,

it has always insisted that it will control the pool at the White House. The people covering the White House determined who each day was going to be assigned to play this role. Right. So for the first time in memory, the Trump White House, a White House, is saying, no, we're controlling the pool. We're going to decide who's in the room. And why exactly does that matter? Well, the whole press pool, the whole tradition looks, is starting to look very different. And what's an example of that?

There was a really stark example of this recently. Well, thank you very much. It's an honor to have President Zelensky of Ukraine. When President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine came to the White House to discuss war and peace in his country. How they were going to end this rank death and destruction in Ukraine. And in this setting, one of the new members of the pool, a gentleman from Right Side Broadcasting,

an online, very pro-Trump network, was given a question. That would not have been a good situation. What was your second question? My second question for President Zelensky. No. Do you ever, why don't you wear a suit? And that question was, why are you, President Zelensky, dressed like this in the Oval Office?

Just want to see if you own a suit? Yeah, yeah, problems. A lot of Americans have problems with you not respecting the dignity of this office. I will wear a costume after this war will finish. Which President Trump had already made a crack about that he didn't like it, that President Zelensky was, as he often does, wearing kind of a more of a military field uniform, not a suit.

A pretty vivid example of what a new pool looks and sounds like. It kind of looks like journalists parroting Trump. Parroting Trump on a thing that has nothing to do with the life and death matter at hand, but very much pleases this president who loved seeing that play out while he's having these talks. But more than that, it was a question that played to President Trump's ankle that day, which was to take a newly hard line with Ukraine in a way that isn't necessarily comfortable or popular with the American public.

That remains to be seen. So now you have the pool kind of echoing the strategy of the White House. I'm sorry, that is fundamentally different than what we have seen heretofore in these major moments of war and peace. So, Jim, where do you think all of this goes from here? seen heretofore in these major moments of war and peace. So Jim, where do you think all of this goes from here? I think you have demonstrated very powerfully just how radically the media ecosystem has changed in between the two

Trump presidencies and how willing he is to change the government's relationship to the media. Based on all your reporting and your observations here, where does that go? Well, there are two ways to answer that question. On the one hand, I think in terms of the way our government works, Trump has shown that he can, in ways he didn't quite pull off the first time around, create his own reality and then move government policy based on that reality, no matter how far away from actual facts or accuracy it is, that he has this whole other world that will give him the power to create any justification to do anything, and then the courts take over whatever.

So what the mainstream press does to fact check becomes less and less powerful, and at the same time as he makes these moves against the networks, against reporters, against news organizations, there's no way to argue that that doesn't further weaken the press and further erode trust. At the same time, if they'd already basically killed journalism, disempowered journalism, they wouldn't be bothering with all of this. But if we're being honest, is it the case that the mainstream media, both in terms of audience and these attacks, appears to be in a losing battle against this approach to government and this approach to

media? Yeah, there's no question. If the mission of the mainstream media, basically a traditional American journalism, is to keep the, in part, the national debate honest, to tie it to facts, to inform voters based on what's happening in corporal reality. That mission has never seemed more challenged in our lifetimes than it does now. And I'm not saying, by the way, that the press is always functioning at a science level, not at all.

But I want to say one thing that's optimistic for American journalism, for the MSM, but for the traditional role the press has played. I think you're allowed. You are an embodiment of the traditional media. And that is that we didn't talk about this, but there was a point when Nixon was going after the press where he thought he won. Because Watergate started breaking. A lot of the big stories happened toward the end

of his reelection campaign. They were even on Cronkite, the CBS News. Nixon was very angry about that. But what happened was Nixon won that election in a landslide. And after that, they said, literally, to major people in the press, we're coming for you now. We do not like how you treated us, you're gonna pay.

Made all kinds of threats, very similar to right now. And as we all know, Nixon couldn't outrun the facts or the truth, and journalism was vindicated. It's a reminder that we don't know what's around the corner. And we can't assume that what we're experiencing in these first few months, the whole country, says what we're going to be experiencing months from now. But there's no question that the fundamentals are really challenging and Trump is going to do everything he can to make them more so over the next four years.

Well, Jim, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Since we spoke with Jim, President Trump's attacks on the traditional media have only intensified. On social media over the weekend, Trump issued highly personal attacks against two White House reporters for The New York Times, Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker, as well as Baker's wife, Susan Glasser, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, suggesting that all three of them are biased against him. In response, the Times defended both White House reporters and said, quote, intimidation tactics against Times reporters or their family members have

never caused us to back down from our mission. Meanwhile, Republican allies of Trump in Congress are scheduled to hold a hearing tomorrow, in which they will make the case that NPR and PBS present biased and partisan coverage and are no longer worthy of federal funding. The Republican Congresswoman who will oversee the hearing, Representative Marjorie Taylor Green said, quote, I want to hear why NPR and PBS think they should ever again receive a single cent from the American taxpayer. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The White House has confirmed an extraordinary breach of national security involving top

government officials, including Vice President J.D. Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who discussed plans for military strikes in a group chat that inadvertently included a journalist. Instead of using highly secure government channels to discuss their war plans, the officials exchanged messages over the commercial messaging app, Signal, and included Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine on all their messages.

And in the most sweeping move of its kind, West Virginia has banned foods containing most artificial food dyes and two different preservatives, citing their potential health risks. The action, signed into law by the state's governor on Monday, suggests that states are moving faster than the federal government to restrict food additives, a target of the Trump administration. At least 20 different states are considering similar restrictions to West Virginias.

Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Michael Benoit and Patricia Willens, was fact-checked by Susan Lee, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Pat McCusker, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Wawarro. See you tomorrow.