US President Donald Trump's mind-boggling press conference last Thursday was closely watched around the world. In it, he particularly targeted the mainstream American media, stating that it “is out of control” and criticising a political establishment in Washington that he said praised “political correctness” and liberal causes. Listen carefully to American politics these days and you immediately notice the growing gulf between the traditional liberal and conservative media. Trump reiterated on Friday in a tweet his view that many mainstream news organisations, including the US network NBC, were “the enemy of the American people.” Such shifts are disturbing, even if American politics, institutionally liberal, is conservative at heart. According to Trump supporters, the US “deep state” is working to discredit the president in the corridors of power in Washington. The deep state is made up of state bodies such as the armed forces or parts of the civilian authorities, and refers to a situation in which intelligence agencies, the police, administrative agencies and branches of the government bureaucracy do not respond to the civilian political leadership. However, in the US this situation does not appear to apply. At a succession of altercations over recent months, Trump and his liberal nemesis the establishment media have fought it out on metropolitan battlefields: Trump in New York and the liberal establishment and media in Washington and Los Angeles. Trump's team is by no means a united front either. “The UK was so smart in getting out,” Trump has said of the UK's decision to leave the European Union, but Vice-President Mike Pence has been more conciliatory towards America's European allies. In a recent speech, despite Trump's pro-Brexit stance Pence emphasised shared values and heritage. “Whatever our differences, our two continents share the same heritage, the same values and above all the same purpose: To promote peace and prosperity through freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and to those objectives we will remain committed,” he said. Pence's remarks pleased EU Foreign Policy Chief Federica Mogherini and head of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker. According to CNN, US Defence Secretary James Mattis has also stressed that he has “no issues” with the media, despite Trump's view that the “fake news media” is “the enemy of the American people”. Indeed, Mattis jested at a news conference in the United Arab Emirates that at times democracy was “quite sporting.” The fracas has all too readily metamorphosed into farce. Trump's rival Republican Party candidate in the presidential elections, Marco Rubio, has mocked the president's hands, for example. The press then debated whether Trump's hands were “too small,” as Rubio alleged, or “too large,” as some of the president's critics claim. “I have to say this: He hit my hands. Nobody has ever hit my hands. I have never heard of this one,” Trump said. This curious exchange was televised on the US network Fox News. “Look at those hands, are they small?” Trump's tweet that “the FAKE NEWS media is not my enemy. It is the enemy of the American people. SICK!” made the news last Friday. “Look what's happening last night in Sweden,” Trump trumpeted on Saturday in Florida, apparently unaware that nothing had happened in Sweden and that there had been no attacks in the Scandinavian country. On 11 December 2010, two bombs exploded in the Swedish capital Stockholm, killing the bomber, an Iraqi-born Swedish citizen named Taymour Abdel-Wahab Al-Abdali. Perhaps it was this that Trump had in mind. Unsurprisingly, the media in the US and Europe is in fractious mood. The Swedes for their part denied that there had been any attack in their country, and Trump may have been alluding in Florida to past attacks while critiquing Europe's refugee policies. “The media is trying to attack our administration because they know we are following through on pledges that we made and they're not happy about it for whatever reason,” Trump said. “It's absolutely crazy,” Shepard Smith of Fox News said in reply. “He keeps repeating ridiculous throwaway lines that are not true at all and sort of avoiding the issue of Russia as if we're some kind of fools for asking the question.” Trump can be crass. “I am only worried he might give me a kiss,” he trumpeted to his followers in Florida concerning one of his young supporters. That would in any other country be in poor taste. To cut a long story short, Trump's promises about “making America great again” are now sounding hollow, and they will be hard to keep. The clash between the media and the US president is unprecedented. “We cannot understand the perils that Trump poses without recognising how prior presidents used similar ploys. Unfortunately, much of the media is dismally failing at this task. Many Washington reporters and pundits write as if they were not born until 20 January 2017,” US commentator James Bovard has said. Trump's media obsession is often dismissed as a sign of his combative temperament. Yet, the US president appears to attract media workers like bees round a honeypot. According to the US newspaper USA Today, “Trump received $817.6 million in earned media coverage in January, nearly five times more than president Obama received at the start of his second term.” The outlines of the Trump administration's policies that have generated so much coverage in America and abroad have been well described. Speaking to the US network NBC, US senator John McCain slammed Trump's attacks on the media, stating that dictators “get started by suppressing a free press.” Trump's views concerning Russia have also generated consternation in Washington and European capitals. “And I can tell you one thing about a briefing that we're allowed to say, because anybody that ever read the most basic book can say it, a nuclear holocaust would be like no other. They're [Russia] a very powerful nuclear country, and so are we. If we have a good relationship with Russia, believe me, that's a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump has stated. In order to achieve his goal of “making America great again,” Trump will need to open the country up to trade and foreign professionals. Even the Kremlin is becoming circumspect about whether he will be able to do so, and there have been reports that Russian state television has been instructed to scale back its coverage of the US president. The Kremlin has dismissed these reports as “rumours,” but the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta recently warned against what it called “excessive Trumpophilia.” Liberalism is a hard habit to break. Shadows from the past haunt Trump, and he ought to be wary rather than audacious. Past grievances among a large segment of Americans have now come home to roost, and the election of Trump is the proof. The hazy future of the US, politically and economically, is disquieting. But Trump is blaming the media for these failings as the bearer of bad news. “But let's not forget an inconvenient truth. Pre-Trump, the watchdogs of democracy were mostly lapdogs, gently licking the blood-soaked hands of those who fed them: America's political and corporate elites,” said US commentator Ted Rall. “US editors and producers are guilty of many sins. For my money, however, the biggest and lying-est are the big lies of omission that leave important facts unknown to the public for years and even decades, result in many deaths, and let the perpetrators off the hook both legally and historically.” “The high body counts of war spotlight the staggering moral failures of a press that, day after day, fails to remind readers of fundamental truths that usually get suppressed from the outset,” Rall said. “The US foreign policy establishment is gradually shifting its focus from the Middle East to the Far East, but the unexpected election of Donald Trump has thrown a wrench in plans to pivot to Asia. Trump wants to fundamentally change Washington's approach to policy; that is, he wants to abandon the destabilising wars and regime-change operations that have characterised US policy in the past and work collaboratively with countries like Russia that have a mutual interest in establishing regional security and fighting terrorism,” Mike Whitney, a Washington-based commentator has claimed. “The question is whether the deep state powerbrokers – who have already launched a number of attacks on Trump in the media – will throw in the towel and allow Trump to develop his own independent foreign policy or take steps to have him removed from office,” Whitney said. The Muslim and Mexican immigrants that Trump hopes to ban from entrance to the US are backed by the liberal establishment in Washington and by much of the US media. In general, Trump's tactics of making pulses race have so far proven to be a fiasco.
