The last constituency Trump wants to win
A media debate 🥊 on the 2Way platform 🖥️.
This week as I was watching 2Way Tonight — the novel, interactive online show spearheaded by Mark Halperin — John Podhoretz unleashed a fashionable, if not predictable attack on traditional media: Again, he opined, they were getting schooled by Donald Trump. At issue was Tuesday’s Mar-a-Lago press conference, in which the president-elect batted around questions on his obsession with acquiring Greenland, his commitment to Ukraine, pardons for January 6 convicts and the Hamas hostage negotiations. To Podhoretz, and a somewhat lesser extent Halperin, Trump was steamrolling reporters on his own terms and dominating another news cycle in his trademark overpowering fashion. To my eyes, reporters were doing the work required of them in the moment, crafting substantive questions on Trump’s designs on the world and testing his level of seriousness with follow-ups like, Has he tasked his staff with a plan for Greenland? (The answer was “no,” tellingly.)
In the same segment, Halperin then asserted that he believes Trump has washed his hands with the mainstream media and no longer cares about their analysis or coverage of him, or at least cares much less than he used to. I find it hard to believe the 78-year-old Trump who blossomed by leveraging Gotham City’s glare can give up chasing the coverage of The New York Times or Morning Joe. In fact, I take the position that winning over hostile establishment media is Trump’s last constituency to conquer — and that he’ll continue to seek their affirmation as the capstone to his second term.
I sent Mark a note on my thoughts and he generously invited me on his program to debate these twin topics. You can watch the debates HERE. It starts at about ten minutes in and begins with a conversation on Joe Biden’s legacy before hitting the two aforementioned media-centric topics at the :30 minute mark. Again, you can watch the 2Way debate by clicking on the image below >
