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3 weeks ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
Donald Trump billed his “reciprocal tariffs” as a tit-for-tat measure: You tariff our products at 20 percent, we’ll tariff your products at 20 percent back. He said it again in his Rose Garden announcement: “Reciprocal — that means they do it us and we do it to them. Very simple. Can’t get any simpler than that.”It’s not good policy, but it made a certain amount of sense.
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1 month ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
Conventional wisdom within the Washington press corps has it that there are several – maybe even many – Republicans in Congress who, in their heart of hearts, are not on board with MAGA. The theory is that there are still moderate Republicans out there, that they are offended by the profoundly non-conservative Trump/Musk agenda – think tariffs, siding with Putin, defunding medical research — and that they march in lockstep with the Trump regime out of fear, not out of principle.
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1 month ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
One CNBC analyst has spoken the truth. Will other journalists follow?
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1 month ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
The White House press corps is justifiably outraged by Donald Trump’s decision to start picking which reporters are allowed to follow him around and ask him questions. In a free country, presidents should not get to choose who covers them. But if members of the traditional, independent White House press corps want the public to share their outrage, they need to do a much better job of proving their value.
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2 months ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
Ever since the White House began banning the Associated Press from Oval Office press availabilities on Tuesday, there have been calls on social media and elsewhere for the White House press corps to start some kind of boycott. The ban – in response to the AP’s decision to continue to call the Gulf of Mexico by its true name, rather than the one Trump made up — is outrageous. As AP executive editor Julie Pace has said, “it plainly violates the First Amendment.” The AP should sue.
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2 months ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
There will come a time, maybe even in the next few days, when at least some of our top newsroom leaders will acknowledge the growing mountain of evidence before them and reach the obvious conclusion that Donald Trump’s actions have precipitated a full-fledged constitutional crisis. They will recognize that through his unconstitutional executive orders, his rampant law-breaking, and (new!) his defiance of court orders, he is acting as if he alone is the government.
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2 months ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
Donald Trump has repeatedly and flagrantly broken the law since reassuming the presidency. But the national media – whose mission is ostensibly to hold the powerful accountable – is treating it like the new normal. I’m not saying our top journalists are ignoring the story – we know about it, after all, thanks to their reporting. They are dutifully and diligently giving us daily updates on the law-breaking, with the occasional news analysis reminding us that a lot of law-breaking is taking place.
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2 months ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
Even as bodies were still being fished out of the Potomac River, Donald Trump went on a racist, partisan, and dishonest rant on Thursday, blaming diversity hires and Democrats for Wednesday’s calamitous nighttime collision between a passenger jet and a military aircraft outside Washington’s Reagan National Airport. Then the traditional media covered up for his racism. They even made excuses for him.
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2 months ago | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
I have been struggling for a week now to put my finger on why and how the mainstream media’s coverage of Donald Trump’s second term has been so disastrously feeble and insufficient. What is it missing? And I finally came to this conclusion:You simply cannot cover Trump’s second term accurately and responsibly if you are not willing to situate his acts as part of a terrifying descent into authoritarianism, racism, and cruelty.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
presswatchers.org | Dan Froomkin
Traditional media coverage of Donald Trump‘s second inauguration was so obsequious and so normalizing that the average news consumer could easily have missed the essential fact that almost everything he said was a lie. His inaugural address was full of lies, from beginning to end, based on the false premise that the country is in a shambles and needs to be rescued.