No One Wins the Machiavellian Game of Trump vs. the Press

[Commentary] What might have been, decades ago, a compact between an audience and a trusted source of information—we’ll tell you who this gif-making guy is if you need us to—sours into something repugnant. At the same moment the president claims that the press is dangerous, has too much power … a press outlet (out of an overabundance of corporate caution) does something that looks like a dangerous abuse of power. This inversion plunks us all into the darkest possible timeline—the one where a president can “jokingly” hint at violence against reporters and his adherents feel empowered to threaten it more overtly.

On July 7, President Trump spent more than two hours with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, at the meeting of the G20 countries in Hamburg, and afterward Putin (as Machiavellian a leader as anyone could ask for) joked about the journalists who hurt the president. Presidents have more power than reporters (especially in Russia, where 82 journalists have been killed since 1993, most of them covering politics, corruption, and crime). But the fix is now in: The president says you can’t trust the press and the press says you can’t trust the president. If Machiavelli is right, that’s a recipe for an apocalypse.