Trump’s attacks on the press suddenly sound more frantic

Donald Trump has spent a decade treating the press as an oppositional force to be delegitimized. His attacks used to have the swagger of a man who believed he was comfortably in command. Now his frantic Truth Social posts have the pitch of a man who suspects he might be losing — and the White House currently has no press secretary to clean up after him.

With just nine weeks remaining in a midterm election cycle threatening to hand a severe rebuke to the White House, Trump’s grip on the national narrative is slipping. His public approval hovers near a dismal 38% — historic lows reminiscent of the political wipeouts faced by George W. Bush in 2006. Facing the reality of a looming lame-duck status and an increasingly skeptical public, the administration has dropped any remaining pretense of respecting democratic norms around a free press, exposing an administration terrified of accountability.

But it’s the response from major news organizations that signals that a crucial threshold has been crossed. Rather than retreating into the troubling complicity that defined earlier periods of the Trumpian era, the targeted outlets issued immediate, robust defenses of their journalists.

Trump’s desperation was on full display over the weekend when he flew into a rage against NBC’s Kristen Welker for accurately reporting on the mixed outcomes of his primary endorsements. Trump responded by insisting that his record was essentially perfect and threatening to seek FCC “rebuke or punishment” for Welker.

It was, as CNN’s Brian Stelter put it, Trump’s most explicit attempt yet to weaponize a federal regulator against a specific broadcaster’s specific reporter for a specific sentence. Trump wants the FCC to function as his private ministry of truth, one that can punish reporters for the crime of declining to repeat his preferred version of reality. Yet the FCC is not empowered to police a journalist’s characterization of a politician’s political fortunes. The agency cannot lawfully act as a viewpoint censor. Broadcast outlets retain editorial discretion, and federal law and the First Amendment sharply limit the commission’s ability to interfere with the content of news coverage.

Trump’s weekend tirade was not limited to NBC. On Friday, he launched vicious, personal attacks against New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman following a report detailing his plans to skip a Manhattan ceremony commemorating the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in part because the event has barred remarks from public officials since 2012 and he wanted to speak. He never actually disputed the fact that he would be at the Pentagon instead of Ground Zero. Instead, he attacked Haberman’s appearance and called her a scammer, a phony and a stalker. His language echoed a familiar pattern in his treatment of female journalists, which Axios documented in an analysis of his public attacks on women in the press. That pattern emerges elsewhere in the administration.

The administration also lashed out this weekend against a separate report from the Times, which published an investigation into deportees describing being shackled, beaten and held in what they called freezing conditions during a 14-hour deportation flight to Liberia. The Department of Homeland Security called the story a hoax and insisted no one is tortured or denied care in ICE custody, while separately arguing that reporting on abuse allegations is itself responsible for a documented spike in assaults on ICE officers — an argument that manages to blame journalists for violence against agents without ever quite getting around to denying that the alleged abuse of detainees happened.

A parallel panic is also engulfing the Pentagon, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his loyalists are scrambling to contain a massive internal leak. 

On Sunday, the United States struck two Iranian missile launchers on Larak Island near the Strait of Hormuz, marking the first American strike on Iran since late July. Iran responded with ballistic missile attacks on U.S. forces in Jordan. It’s a reminder that whatever the administration’s private assessment of the war’s trajectory, its public posture remains one of escalation, seven months in, with an increasingly thin margin for error and, reportedly, an increasingly thin stock of cruise missiles.

A bombshell Washington Post report published on Sunday revealed that top military commanders explicitly warned Hegseth that a prolonged, open-ended war with Iran would dangerously drain American defense capabilities worldwide and at home. The assessment was documented in the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book, drafted by the heads of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, according to people familiar with it.

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The Post’s reporting is particularly significant because it suggests that concerns about the war are not confined to antiwar activists or political opponents. Rather than addressing the substantive crisis of military readiness, however, Pentagon officials threw a tantrum. Spokesperson Sean Parnell falsely claimed that publishing the report was a crime and accused reporters and anonymous whistleblowers of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The Post, for its part, wasted no time pushing back. 

Perhaps that explains why the administration prefers replacing independent scrutiny with ideological amplification. As the Post recently reported, the Pentagon has quietly placed conservative military veterans with substantial online followings into civilian roles while they amplified Hegseth’s message and attacked critics of the administration. The Post identified Rob Maness, Kurt Schlichter and Thomas Anderson as people with official government email accounts and reported that they were assigned to an office led by Anthony Tata, a right-wing activist associated with the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. 

Trump’s approval rating has languished in the 30s all summer. Gallup put him at 37% in July, ticking up to 40% in August. Pew had him at 34% in July, a rating the pollster noted was lower than Joe Biden’s at the same point in his term, and lower than every other president it has tracked back to Ronald Reagan except one: George W. Bush, heading into the 2006 midterms, when Gallup had him around 36 to 39% as the Iraq War dragged into its fourth year and voters ran out of patience. That year Democrats picked up six Senate seats, six governorships, 31 House seats and control of 10 state legislative chambers. 

Trump can’t even get Fox News to toe the line. On Thursday, after Trump went after Fox News correspondent Jonathan Hunt during a broadcast, accusing him of inaccurately describing the current state of the war, and telling Fox to “straighten out” its reporters, “Special Report” anchor Bret Baier directly addressed Trump and defended Hunt. 

NBC defended Welker. The New York Times publicly defended Haberman and the reporting behind her story. The Washington Post forcefully defended its own reporters after the Pentagon accused them of wrongdoing for publishing information in the public interest. In a media landscape too often marked by timidity, calculation and access-driven self-censorship, those responses represent something important: institutions remembering that their job is not to please the president. Let him panic.