Donald Trump has come to office having reviled and degraded two institutions in the United States that claim to be pillars of the country’s democratic system: the news media, and the intelligence services.
The irony embedded within this deliberate denigration of fact is that journalists and spies have for decades viewed each other with suspicion, even enmity. The wariness has been especially intense in recent years amid the disclosures via WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden and the enthusiasm of much of the media to publish them. Yet now hacks and spooks find themselves unwitting bedfellows as they face the contempt of the incoming president.
Throughout his campaign for the presidency, Trump called reporters “dishonest”, “disgusting” and “scum”. Then there was that press conference last week when he refused to take a question from CNN’s senior White House correspondent, Jim Acosta, shouting him down — apparently enraged that CNN had been the first to report that former President Obama had been briefed on lurid allegations about him in an intelligence dossier. To adopt the style of his tweets, which often end with a shocked expression and an exclamation mark — “Unprecedented!”