Front Row at the Trump Show
By Jonathan Karl
Dutton, 2020

“The advent of the Trump era brought about a transformation of the White House press corps,” writes ABC’s chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl in his inevitable Trump-book, Front Row at the Trump Show. At the moment he makes the comment, he’s referring specifically to the personnel showing up in the White House briefing room, but his book can’t help but reflect the truth of the comment in broader terms. 

American reporters learned two things about Donald Trump in late 2015: he hated them, and he helped them. Trump has never hidden his desire to replace free press with a kind of extended Trump, Inc. PR office. He refers to all reporting critical of him as fake news; he refers to the free press guaranteed in the Constitution as “the enemy of the people;” he routinely inflames his Klan rally mobs to the edge of physical violence against individual reporters. He is, in other words, an existential threat to the press. But he’s also a virtually guaranteed source of ratings, the much-ballyhooed “Trump bump” that has lured virtually every single news outlet in America into becoming flunkies to one man’s mania. Trump’s time in the Oval Office has been the single most disgraceful Presidential term in US history, but it’s been accompanied every step of the way by the most avaricious, shallow, duplicitous, and sanctimonious US press corps in US history. 

And this has been reflected in almost every Trump book that’s appeared in the last four years. Almost all of them have been marred in their DNA by the same tone of beatifically wounded piety that you’d expect of a nun who’s just been slapped by an orphan she was trying to help. The authors of these books hate Donald Trump. This is understandable, since he’s an idiotic fascist manqué. But the authors of these books likewise ape him, because they know what will sell books and what won’t. This, too, is understandable - and thoroughly contemptible. 

Karl is a chief priest in this religion of self-regard. He sounds a very clear note about the duties of his profession:

If the president declares real stories fake, the record must be corrected. If a president attempts to block reporters from covering the work of his administration, we need to fight back. If a president attempts to use the tools of law enforcement to target reporters for doing their jobs (something Trump talks about and the Obama administration actually did), reporters and news organizations need to fight back.

“A free press is not the opposition party,” he goes on. “Our role is to inform the public, seek the truth, ask tough questions, and attempt to hold those in power accountable by shining a spotlight on what they are doing.” All of which sounds good, but neither Karl nor his network can be relied upon to do any of it. If Trump takes the podium in the White House briefing room and delivers a rambling, muttering completely incoherent slew of resentment, innuendo, and spite, Karl and his network behave like clockwork: they seize on a couple of semi-coherent half-sentences, they stitch together various semi-points often separated by 30 minutes of garbled nonsense, and they tediously rebut “factual inaccuracies” they know perfectly well are fully conscious lies. In other words, they normalize Trump, again and again, and they do it for a very simple reason: because they know if they don’t, if they simply report, “The President rambled in slurred tones for an hour. None of it made any sense. The man is clearly very sick,” they’ll be denied access to the briefing room. That is not informing the public. That is not asking tough questions. That is certainly not holding those in power accountable. 

Front Row at the Trump Show is not in-the-moment reporting, of course, although it’s a reporter’s book. In these pages Karl is free to add more flesh to the bones, to spin some of his anecdotes into the kinds of stories that can be excerpted on cable news shows. He provides pacing; he provides color. At one point he notices Trump’s first Press Secretary: “Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, scurried by as I walked down the hallway outside his new office.” Did Spicer really scurry? Or is that the opposition party talking? “In that Oval Office meeting [between president-elect Trump and Barack Obama], I saw a side of Trump I had never seen before,” Karl writes in the caption to one of his own photos in the book. “He seemed humbled and a little dazed - as if he was struck by the enormity of what was about to happen.” In the photo, Trump looks bored and petulant - normal, in other words, neither dazed nor the utterly absurd “humbled.” Do you believe Karl, or your lying eyes? 

And so on, throughout the book. The principal events of Trump’s first three years in office are presented through Karl’s perspective. That perspective is often valuable - Karl has known Trump for decades - and Front Row at the Trump Show is often entertaining reading. And if it becomes a bestseller, well, that’s how deals are made, right?

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.