Transcript: Trump Plane Swap Suddenly Gets Darker as Damning Leaks Hit

Sullivan: I think two things. One is that they’re very afraid of losing access to the White House. I mean, it’s their job not to, you know, sort of dig up dirt about the White House, or, like, really sort of get under the surface. It’s mostly their job to, you know, for example, be in the briefing room and ask a question, and then the evening news with David Muir, or whoever it may be will take that as a soundbite and show, Look, we’re, we’re doing our jobs here. So much of it is optics.

So some of it is losing access, not being able to, you know, do that, and some of it is just this strange normalization that has gone on for years now, in which the reporters seem to be saying to themselves, Well, he’s the president, and no one can argue with the fact that what the president does creates news. So we’re going to simply treat it as news. And if we need to do a little fact-checking or pushback, we’ll do that, but nothing that’s very radical. Whereas he’s radical, and so I think something much more powerful needs to be done in reaction to that. But don’t hold your breath.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think there’s a bigger calculation as well on the part of the news media, and maybe you could shed a little light on this. They really think that the election of Trump represented some sort of seismic cultural event that repudiated them. I think that’s how they think about it on some level, a lot of reporters. He called them fake news for years. They just kind of let it roll off their backs, and then Trump was reelected, so maybe the American people agree that we’re fake news, right?