The American press is "not equipped" to cover a true authoritarian strongman presidency like President Donald Trump is creating, warned Huffington Post senior White House correspondent S.V. Dáte in a dire analysis Wednesday.
"The Washington, D.C., press corps, used to playing small ball for small exclusives, has been suddenly thrust into a presidential administration that appears hell-bent on transforming our constitutional republic into something entirely different," wrote Dáte. "For decades, the coin of the realm in political journalism was access. Who you knew determined what you knew, and especially what 'inside' information the people you knew were willing to give you."
That kind of reporting can often lead to big scoops in a political environment where politicians play by the rules and care about norms and democracy. But it's wholly inadequate for the beast the free press, and the American people at large, now face, he wrote.
"In the before days, if a reporter had the opportunity to get a new tax proposal from Mitt Romney’s campaign a day before he announced it, OK, whatever. If President Barack Obama’s campaign had some research they wanted to plant about Romney’s businesses, sure," he wrote. "In the end, the source relationships that led to that genre of stories were harmless. Whether Obama won or Romney, the future of the republic was secure. That is no longer the case. Before our very eyes, Donald Trump and his administration, with what so far has been an extraordinarily pliant Republican Congress, are taking those exact steps that autocrats who were initially democratically elected take to consolidate power."
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The problem, he wrote, is that the old strategy requires reporters to schmooze with Trump loyalists who are working to undermine both constitutional rights and the free press itself, and that's simply unsustainable. This is evidenced by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's increasingly ruthless crackdown on any press criticism of Trump, from barring the Associated Press from using the name "Gulf of Mexico," to decreeing the White House itself chooses who sits in the press pool — and kicking out the Huffington Post for asking Trump about Jan. 6 pardons.
White House reporters can no longer just fiddle while Rome burns, Dáte warned — they have to stop playing the old games and be straight with their readers about what is happening.
"Trump made clear what he thought of democracy when he tried to end it four years ago by trying to overturn an election he had lost. Far too many of us accepted the bargain to leave out that context in our coverage for the sake of access to Trump’s campaign and the chance for an interview," he wrote. "That was then, when the idea of a nation careening toward autocracy might have seemed just a wildly remote possibility. It seems neither wild nor remote now."