White House Reporters Fear a Return of Fire and Fury

It was just a small news item about a seemingly mundane bureaucratic decision. But some White House reporters perceived deeper import in it last week. As CBS News reported, president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming press secretary will start work without one of the traditional trappings of the job: the spacious, high-ceilinged office in the West Wing located steps from the Oval Office. The real estate will instead go to a deputy chief of staff, bumping press secretary Karoline Leavitt to more humble quarters in the upper-press space nearby. Reporters were quick to read it as a sign: The president’s chief emissary to the news media was being symbolically downgraded before she even officially started.

The reaction suggests it doesn’t take much to trigger the people who cover the president. After Trump’s chaotic first term, and a bruising campaign this past year in which he declared he was out for “retribution” against his perceived adversaries, journalists are sensitive to even small tremors. On the eve of Trump’s second term, they’re bracing not just for his usual rhetorical lashings but for much worse.

Will Trump throw disfavored reporters out of the White House briefing room? Suspend daily press briefings? Ditch the presidential press pool, or close the White House grounds to the news media altogether? Will he continue to sue news organizations? Will he try to “zero out” funding for public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS, or monkey with commercial broadcasters’ TV licenses?

None of these are theoretical considerations, given that Trump has either done all of these things or threatened to do them previously. To be sure, Trump’s attacks against the media have grown more surly and intimidating since he lost power in 2020. He has sued Washington Post legend Bob Woodward, Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and her employers, The Des Moines Register and Gannett, CNN, and ABC News (winning a $16 million settlement from the latter in December). Trump demanded CBS surrender its broadcasting license as punishment for its editing and promotion of a Kamala Harris clip from a 60 Minutes interview. Ditto ABC when its moderators fact-checked him during his debate with Harris. (A spokesperson for The Des Moines Register has said the lawsuit is without merit, and attorneys for Selzer have released a statement asserting that it violates long-standing Constitutional principles.)

The prospect of a second Trump term seems especially alarming to some White House reporters because the terms are different this time around. Trump will be a lame duck from day one, and thus won’t have to moderate his worst tendencies to position himself for reelection. “I don’t think he intends to pack reporters off to Guantánamo, but who the hell knows,” a veteran cable news journalist told me this week. “My guess is that he’ll be in attack mode from day one. Why would we think otherwise?”

The journalist (who spoke on background because he wasn’t authorized by his employer to speak on the record) noted that Trump has some powerful new allies in his war on the news media. Elon Musk—the world’s richest man and the proprietor of X—routinely spread pro-Trump misinformation to his 212 million followers during the campaign (Musk will be cochair of Trump’s ad hoc budget-cutting commission, the Department of Government Efficiency). A second tech multibillionaire, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, banned Trump from his platforms after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, but has lately been Trump-friendly too. After meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg announced last week that Facebook and Instagram would dispense with independent fact-checking, opening wider the sluices for Trump’s distortions and outright lies.

A second broadcast journalist, a former White House bureau chief during Trump’s first term, said Trump could do “serious damage” through his control of federal agencies. Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has proposed banning pharmaceutical ads on TV, potentially undermining a major financial supporter of network and cable news programs. Meanwhile, a politicized Justice Department could scuttle proposed media mergers, as Trump’s Justice Department attempted to do in 2018 when CNN’s parent Time Warner sought to merge with AT&T.

Even relatively obscure agencies can get in on this act. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Trump appointee Brendan Carr, “can cause misery” for broadcast companies like Disney and Comcast by holding up license renewals, the second broadcast journalist said. During his first term, Trump tried to manipulate the work of federally funded Voice of America; his pick of MAGA-friendly conspiracy theorist Kari Lake as VOA director suggests he’ll try again.

The most dangerous figure of all may be Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI. Patel, a Trump loyalist and holdover from his first administration, told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on a podcast in 2023, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” Placing Patel atop the FBI would give him full control of the government’s investigative machinery, potentially turning his rhetoric into reality.

For all his fulminations against the mainstream media, of course, Trump has a parallel record of courting it, craving its attention, and using it for his own ends. Some journalists optimistically suggest that he will need the megaphone of the press corps more than ever. The logic: Truth Social, Musk, and Joe Rogan may be great for reaching the MAGA faithful during an election campaign, but Trump can’t ignore news outlets that collectively reach tens of millions of people every day if he wants to build a broad consensus for his ambitious agenda—from tax cuts to tariffs to a mass deportation program.

Further, for all his boastful talk of a mandate, Trump will have a tiny majority in the House and a narrow one in the Senate. If he wants to convince Congress to, say, buy Greenland, usurp Canada, or declare war on Panama, he’ll need to keep selling his initiatives through the mainstream media.

“This is a president-elect who is more familiar with the pace of governing, and with how the press functions, than he was in 2017,” Ed O’Keefe, CBS News’ senior White House correspondent, told me last week. The White House, he stated, “wants to be covered. Trump wants to be covered.”

No one expects Trump to abandon his Stalin-esque “enemy of the people” shtick or his loose and uncertain relationship with facts; those are baked into his persona and populist branding. But there have been some mildly encouraging signs for the mainstream news media since the election. Many of the important scoops about his incoming administration—names of cabinet nominees and trial policy balloons, for example—came from leaks to reporters from mainstream outlets, such as the Times, the Post, and CNN. During the transition, Trump has given interviews to Time magazine and Meet the Press and has held two postelection news conferences at Mar-a-Lago—not the profile of a man intent on slamming the door on reporters.

Despite Trump’s accusations, White House reporters were never enthralled by Biden, who routinely avoided contact with the press. Biden held fewer press conferences during his term than almost any president of the past 100 years and gave interviews sparingly. His inaccessibility helped fuel the international shock at his addled performance during his debate with Trump in June, and led right-wing critics to accuse White House reporters of complicity in covering up his “true” condition—which reporters could only glimpse in passing.

Leavitt, whom Trump appointed in November, will lead the Trump White House’s daily interactions with the news media. She was a low-level press staffer in the first Trump administration and later ran unsuccessfully for Congress in New Hampshire. She earned Trump’s support after serving capably as his campaign and transition spokesperson. Just 27 years old, she will be the youngest presidential press secretary in history.

Reporters expect Leavitt to be combative at times (it’s practically a job requirement for any press secretary, let alone one speaking for Trump). But reporters also say Leavitt has been willing to engage with them off camera and is reasonably plugged in to Trump and his inner circle, two qualities they often doubted about Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre.

So far, Leavitt has displayed a fine balance between accommodation and Trump’s scorched-earth tendencies. During a postelection interview on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, she declined to take up Hannity’s suggestions about how to bully and diminish reporters, such as replacing “legacy” media journalists who traditionally occupy seats at the front of the briefing room with Trump-friendly “new media” reporters.

Leavitt declined to commit to anything in particular but sounded suitably MAGA, saying Trump had exposed the media during the campaign as “incredibly hostile and fake” and that the election confirmed that “the American people are no longer buying the [legacy media’s] lies.” In a brief email exchange with me last week, Leavitt declined to elaborate, but said her comments on Hannity’s program “remain true today.” (When Leavitt more recently visited Hannity’s show—this time while guest-hosted by former Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany—she spoke of bringing “podcasters and social influencers” into the briefing room.)

Trump, of course, likes to act as his own spokesman, and his press secretaries typically don’t last long. Leavitt will be the fifth person to hold the job. One of his appointees, Stephanie Grisham, never conducted a press briefing after Trump peevishly decided to suspend them for more than a year.

But that, apparently, was then, according to one Trump loyalist. Trump’s first White House press secretary, Sean Spicer told me that Trump now has a more experienced inner circle, including chief of staff Susie Wiles, that knows how to manage and engage with the news media. Trump himself has evolved, too, he said: “He’s had four years to think about this. He’s coming in in a fundamentally different way” than eight years ago.

Spicer, now a podcaster, said he’s offered Trump’s incoming press team a few suggestions, such as how to utilize technology to expand the number of people asking questions in the briefing room (during his six-month tenure as press secretary in 2017, Spicer used Skype as a conduit to pipe questions from local journalists and conservative talk-show hosts around the country).

The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents the press corps on access, facilities, and scheduling issues with the administration, declined to comment for this article. Its president, Politico reporter Eugene Daniels, cited “sensitive conversations” that are ongoing between the organization and incoming administration officials, though he offered no details.

Peter Baker, the New York Times’ veteran White House reporter, doesn’t expect Trump’s second term to be any less turbulent than his first. Trump will try to make reporters “toe the line and seek to [punish] them when they don’t,” he told me last week.

But Baker says that shouldn’t matter. “It won’t stop us from reporting vigorously and fairly, and from doing tough-minded journalism,” he said. “We’ll be prepared for whatever happens. We’re prepared to do our jobs.”

It doesn’t appear it will be easy. A collision between a belligerent president and the press seems inevitable. The only questions are when, how often, and how damaging it will be.