It was just a small news item about a seemingly mundane bureaucratic decision. But some White House reporters perceived deeper import in it last week. As CBS News reported, president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming press secretary will start work without one of the traditional trappings of the job: the spacious, high-ceilinged office in the West Wing located steps from the Oval Office. The real estate will instead go to a deputy chief of staff, bumping press secretary Karoline Leavitt to more humble quarters in the upper-press space nearby. Reporters were quick to read it as a sign: The president’s chief emissary to the news media was being symbolically downgraded before she even officially started.
The reaction suggests it doesn’t take much to trigger the people who cover the president. After Trump’s chaotic first term, and a bruising campaign this past year in which he declared he was out for “retribution” against his perceived adversaries, journalists are sensitive to even small tremors. On the eve of Trump’s second term, they’re bracing not just for his usual rhetorical lashings but for much worse.
Will Trump throw disfavored reporters out of the White House briefing room? Suspend daily press briefings? Ditch the presidential press pool, or close the White House grounds to the news media altogether? Will he continue to sue news organizations? Will he try to “zero out” funding for public broadcasters such as NPR and PBS, or monkey with commercial broadcasters’ TV licenses?
None of these are theoretical considerations, given that Trump has either done all of these things or threatened to do them previously. To be sure, Trump’s attacks against the media have grown more surly and intimidating since he lost power in 2020. He has sued Washington Post legend Bob Woodward, Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and her employers, The Des Moines Register and Gannett, CNN, and ABC News (winning a $16 million settlement from the latter in December). Trump demanded CBS surrender its broadcasting license as punishment for its editing and promotion of a Kamala Harris clip from a 60 Minutes interview. Ditto ABC when its moderators fact-checked him during his debate with Harris. (A spokesperson for The Des Moines Register has said the lawsuit is without merit, and attorneys for Selzer have released a statement asserting that it violates long-standing Constitutional principles.)
The prospect of a second Trump term seems especially alarming to some White House reporters because the terms are different this time around. Trump will be a lame duck from day one, and thus won’t have to moderate his worst tendencies to position himself for reelection. “I don’t think he intends to pack reporters off to Guantánamo, but who the hell knows,” a veteran cable news journalist told me this week. “My guess is that he’ll be in attack mode from day one. Why would we think otherwise?”
The journalist (who spoke on background because he wasn’t authorized by his employer to speak on the record) noted that Trump has some powerful new allies in his war on the news media. Elon Musk—the world’s richest man and the proprietor of X—routinely spread pro-Trump misinformation to his 212 million followers during the campaign (Musk will be cochair of Trump’s ad hoc budget-cutting commission, the Department of Government Efficiency). A second tech multibillionaire, Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, banned Trump from his platforms after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, but has lately been Trump-friendly too. After meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Zuckerberg announced last week that Facebook and Instagram would dispense with independent fact-checking, opening wider the sluices for Trump’s distortions and outright lies.
A second broadcast journalist, a former White House bureau chief during Trump’s first term, said Trump could do “serious damage” through his control of federal agencies. Trump’s nominee for Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has proposed banning pharmaceutical ads on TV, potentially undermining a major financial supporter of network and cable news programs. Meanwhile, a politicized Justice Department could scuttle proposed media mergers, as Trump’s Justice Department attempted to do in 2018 when CNN’s parent Time Warner sought to merge with AT&T.
Even relatively obscure agencies can get in on this act. The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Trump appointee Brendan Carr, “can cause misery” for broadcast companies like Disney and Comcast by holding up license renewals, the second broadcast journalist said. During his first term, Trump tried to manipulate the work of federally funded Voice of America; his pick of MAGA-friendly conspiracy theorist Kari Lake as VOA director suggests he’ll try again.
The most dangerous figure of all may be Kash Patel, Trump’s nominee to head the FBI. Patel, a Trump loyalist and holdover from his first administration, told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on a podcast in 2023, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” Placing Patel atop the FBI would give him full control of the government’s investigative machinery, potentially turning his rhetoric into reality.