He couldn’t help himself. At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday night, Donald Trump patted himself on the back several times, like a child proving he’s not having a tantrum. “By the way, do you see how nice I’m behaving tonight?” he asked the crowd. “Have you ever seen this?”
And yet even in the midst of a crude attempt at possible mass murder of leading Democrats, when the moment called for humility, peace and unification, the US president could not resist taking a swipe at his oldest foe of all.
The media has “a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative and oftentimes false attacks and stories”, Trump blasted.
And on Thursday there was more to come. He tweeted: “A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News. It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!”
John Berman, an anchor on CNN, responded: “Let me tell you what the mainstream media has been doing this morning: We’ve been reporting on a bomb ... sent to either kill, threaten, or scare.”
After all, like all autocrats, Trump loves scapegoats and summoning the threat of “the other”. On the day he launched his presidential campaign in June 2015, he demonised Mexicans crossing the border as “criminals” and “rapists”, adding as an afterthought: “And some, I assume, are good people.”
But having spent much of his career in the fierce culture of New York tabloids, Trump has a unique love-hate relationship with the media. The love part is about narcissism and an attention-seeking ego.
He is the master of throwing the proverbial dead cat on the table, knowing that it would grab all the attention. Hence during the election, TV cameras were trained on his empty podium.
The hate part is manifest when he calls the media “fake news”, “absolute scum”, “disgusting” and “very dishonest”. Last week he praised a member of Congress who had criminally assaulted the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs.
The dangerous implications became vividly clear when the phrase “fake news” spread like a meme around the world. Trump had handed dictators a convenient stick with which to beat their own journalists. Most infamously, the president has called the press “the enemy of the people”. At an event hosted by the Axios website in Washington on Thursday, the former House speaker Newt Gringrich opined that the media had “earned it”.
The argument goes that it is the mainstream media, not the White House, that is responsible for creating the toxic political climate which motivates someone to send parcel bombs to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other targets of rightwing criticism.
The reality is that the mainstream media’s primary role has been holding the president to account for his lies. They have, if anything, been escalating in recent days as the midterm elections draw near.
There was his claim that a caravan of immigrants moving through Mexico contains “unknown Middle Easterners”; Trump himself acknowledged on Tuesday “there’s no proof of anything”. He concocted a new tax cut proposal that members of Congress knew nothing about. He hyped allegations of illegal voting, even as the Republican party seeks to actively suppress African American voters.
Bizarrely, even after the US this year imposed tariffs on steel, aluminium, washing machines and solar panels, he insisted: “Where do we have tariffs? We don’t have tariffs anywhere.”
Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star tweeted on Monday: “I’ve fact-checked every word Trump has uttered for two full years. This is one of his most dishonest weeks in political life. He’s lying about so many different things at once, and in big ways – not exaggerating or stretching, completely making stuff up.”
But the media, of course, is no monolith. Trump has never given an interview to CNN but speaks often to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, which arguably did more than Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine to ensure his election.
Fox News has been whipping up hysteria about the immigrant caravan for days. And Fox Business Network host Lou Dobbs pushed a conspiracy theory about the mail bombs on Thursday. “Fake bombs,” Dobbs tweeted. “Who could possibly benefit by so much fakery?” Dobbs deleted the tweet after widespread condemnation.
It is worth remembering that Dobbs has the president’s ear. There have been reports that Trump sometimes puts Dobbs on speakerphone during Oval Office meetings. He similarly echoes talking points from Sean Hannity and other Fox presenters.
Yet the paradox is that the Trump circus is great for ratings and readership. His attempt at re-election in 2020 will be the greatest show on earth. And he knows it.