How a “No-Scalps Policy” Is Shaping Trump’s Consequence-Free Second Term

Since the nation’s founding, the national press has played a vital role in the system of checks and balances that undergirds American democracy. John F. Kennedy famously extolled the importance of journalism as a corrective to bad policymaking after he authorized the disastrous CIA mission to invade Cuba in 1961. “Maybe if you had printed more about the operation, you would have saved us from a colossal mistake,” Kennedy later told New York Times managing editor Turner Catledge.

Then came the Donald Trump era.

Call it Trump’s law of political antigravity. In his second term, negative news reports are motivating Trump to double down rather than moderate. This dynamic had its most prominent display yet when Trump hosted El Salvador’s strongman president, Nayib Bukele, in the Oval Office on Monday. For weeks the media has reported on the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man whom the administration admitted to having mistakenly deported to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center. The Supreme Court ruled last week that the administration needed to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. Trump, with Bukele at his side, mocked a CNN reporter who asked if he was planning to comply with that order. Microphones later captured Trump telling Bukele he needed to build five more prisons so that El Salvador could lock up American citizens convicted of violent crimes.

Trump seems to be using Abrego Garcia’s case to send a bigger message: The mainstream media will never influence what he does. (Whether the courts can compel him is another, perhaps even darker question.) Or rather: The intensity of reporting on Trump’s breaking of a rule or norm dictates his instinct to continue doing so. This strategy is part of the MAGA movement’s authoritarian project to delegitimize the media—a fact those in its sway are not particularly shy about.

“No one cares what The New York Times says. Or any of you guys. None of this bullshit and none of the lies are going to make a difference,” a prominent Republican close to the White House told me.

One of the principal goals of Trump’s second term is to correct what the president views as the mistakes of his first. Trump has reportedly told people that one of his first-term regrets was forcing his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, to resign after it was revealed that Flynn had lied about conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States. This may help to explain why Trump stood by Pete Hegseth, his embattled defense secretary, even after reports detailed episodes of alleged excessive drinking and that he had paid a $50,000 settlement to a woman who had accused him of sexual assault. (Hegseth has denied the allegations.)

Trump’s ignore-the-media strategy also influenced his decision to publicly support his current national security adviser, Michael Waltz, after Waltz mistakenly added Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal group in which administration officials were texting about military strikes in Yemen. Another Republican close to the White House told me Waltz was saved because Trump has a post-Flynn “no-scalps policy,” as the source described it.

The dynamic has proven remarkable for even seasoned presidential reporters.

“This is a president who doesn’t believe in admitting mistakes—period. And that trickles down to the people who work for him,” New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker told me this week. “So when a news outlet points out something that went wrong or corrects inaccurate statements, the default setting is not to fix the error, as other presidents might do, but to double down. Taking action in response to a news report would be seen as an admission of weakness, and nothing is a bigger cardinal sin in Trump’s mind.”

It amounts to a toxic cycle of escalation that doesn’t show much sign of abating anytime soon. Authoritarian regimes often fail because their leaders refuse to course-correct when presented with outside information. In an interview more than a year after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy lauded the role journalism could play in preventing future crises.

“It is never pleasant to be reading things that are not agreeable news, but I would say that it is an invaluable arm of the presidency, as a check, really, on what is going on in the administration,” he said.