Sorry, media: Trump has already won his war with you

Joe Scarborough tried last week to warn Donald Trump that there's no way Trump can win a war with the media. The media will always have a bigger megaphone, Scarborough insisted, and if nothing else they can outlast and outtalk any president. This has been conventional media wisdom for decades. And it's wrong. Trump has already won his war with the media, no matter how his presidency goes. Even if his presidency goes badly and he's constantly under siege by the media - to the point where his approval ratings crater and he fails to win re-election - the media are mortally wounded. They will never again be the force they once were.

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The reason Scarborough and others don't see this is that Trump is playing a much longer game than what they're seeing, which is to say he's changing the rules of the game, permanently. Other presidents will follow Trump's lead. Now it's certianly possible a more conventional politician may succeed Trump in office, and may get there in part by publicly renouncing Trump's combative tactics. But once in office, even a president like this will largely follow Trump's playbook - albeit maybe not using the same style as Trump. Here are a few things that will never be the same in the president/media relationship:

• From now on, presidents will use social media and other tools they control as their primary method of speaking to the American people. It was said that Ronald Reagan knew how to go over the media's heads directly to the public, and this is why he was called the Great Communicator. What made Reagan so effective at this was his excellent ability to express himself and connect with ordinary people. Trump isn't nearly as good at that, but Trump understands that he has tools in today's world that Reagan didn't have. Future presidents will talk to the public via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube before they call press conferences. They'd be crazy not to.
• Future presidents will not be afraid to attack the media if they are dishonest or reckless with the facts. Even if it's not entirely clear who's right and who's wrong, Trump has shown that you can launch an all-out assault on the media and - assuming you don't lose your nerve - you will pay little or no price for it. The media will not be able to punish the president by complaining that he's hostile to the First Amendment or anything like that, because what Trump has shown is that the public knows the difference between attacking free speech and attacking people who are doing their jobs poorly, or reporting unfairly.

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• This one especially applies to Republican presidents, but Trump has shown it is not necessary to moderate your policy positions in an attempt to avoid media criticism. This has been a tendency of Republican nominees and presidents alike - the belief that if they don't water down their proposals and take the conservative edge off them, the media will pounce and defeat is inevitable. Trump has challenged that thinking and won - in the primaries, in the general election campaign and now as president. By "won," I don't mean he has necessarily maintained strong popularity numbers or avoided criticism. Obviously he has done neither. But Trump is able to govern in spite of all the hysterics, and that's all he cares about. Future presidents will understand, because Trump proved it, that you can govern even while everyone around you is losing their minds.
• Trump has exposed the fact that the American people don't care about the things the media talk amongst themselves about. They don't care about candidates' tax returns, for example. Now, polls will say they do, but anyone will say they care about something like that if they're prompted with a question. If you ask the same people how much time they spent thinking about it prior to being asked, most would have to admit they didn't think about it at all. That means you really don't care. Trump understands that. People don't care about the "gaffes" and gotcha statements. They don't care about the wording of statements on the Holocaust, and they don't care that when Trump paid tribue to Frederick Douglass, he sounded like he didn't even really know who the guy was. They don't think it's a bad thing that he tweets all the time. This is the sort of thing the media will go into overdrive talking about. And the public doesn't care. They care about jobs, taxes, health care, energy, the economy and being safe from threats. Trump doesn't waste his time groveling about things that are unimportant to the public, no matter how much the media want to yammer on about them. Future presidents won't either.
• Finally, Trump's electoral victory demonstrated that the media really don't influence anyone. They reinforce the biases of those who already have certain biases. But the media's obsessive attempt to shove Hillary Clinton down the throats of independent voters was a gigantic failure. No matter how dire the warnings that Trump would be a disaster as president, undecided voters broke for him in massive numbers on Election Day. Likewise, the media's hyperventilating over the immigration order is ginning up mass hysteria among liberals, but it's having almost no effect on anyone else. Past presidents have tended to worry about that bad press would cause the public to turn against them on issues. Future presidents will understand the press appears more influential than it really is.

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The press made a gigantic tactical mistake by declaring all-out war against Trump in the campaign

The press made a gigantic tactical mistake by declaring all-out war against Trump in the campaign. They thought that by doing this, they would ensure his defeat. Instead, by failing, they exposed their own weakness and irrelevance. By defying them and winning, Trump showed that future candidate and future presidents can do the same thing. They may not do it with this same aplomb as Trump, but some may do it more skillfully in other ways. Either way, Scarborough is wrong. Not only can you win a fight with the press, but Trump has already done so because they are stuck in the ways of the past - trying to revive old rules of engagement that are dead and gone forever. Trump has moved on, and the nation has moved on with him. Future candidates and future presidents will do the same. The press will never be relevant, influential or trusted again until they decided to start reporting facts fairly without making it about their bias and their agenda. But right now they are trying very hard to double down on what they've always done. Meanwhile, the president they hate is doing all the things they feared he would do, and they're helpless to stop him. Dan's new novel, BACKSTOP, is a story of spiritual warfare and baseball. Download it from Amazon here

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