The Tweeter-in-chief

In the week after he was elected president of the United States, Donald Trump sent 22 tweets, six of which were attacks on The New York Times over stories that he found insufficiently complimentary. He said things like, "The failing @nytimes story is so totally wrong on transition. It is going so smoothly," and "The @nytimes states today that DJT believes 'more countries should acquire nuclear weapons.' How dishonest are they. I never said this!" (Guess what, he did.)

You need not fear for the Times itself; the most influential news outlet in the world is doing fine, and Trump won't be able to hurt it. But what on Earth is Trump thinking? And is this any way for a president to act?

Every president believes that the coverage they get in the media is overly critical and fails to present the full picture of their well-intentioned efforts to improve the lives of all Americans. But Trump may be the first president to arrive in office having spent over 30 years obsessing over his image in the press. Even before he ran for president, his office walls were lined with magazine covers on which he has appeared, and every day an aide would bring him a stack of news clippings where he was mentioned for him to pore over. He often marked them up with comments about things he didn't like, then had them mailed to the offending reporters.

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And there has never been a president who was so openly hostile toward the press. Richard Nixon may have hated reporters with more fervor, but he didn't come out in public and say things like "You're a sleaze" to those who had asked him impertinent questions, or call out individual reporters at his fervid rallies so his supporters could yell and jeer at them.

Whenever Trump criticizes a media outlet, he usually claims that it's "failing," losing audience, or will soon go out of business — always either falsely or without any evidence. Needless to say, there's something rather problematic about the president saying that kind of thing about a publicly traded company; if people believed him, its stock could tank. Fortunately we've learned by now that what comes out of Trump's mouth (or his Twitter feed) has no particular relationship to the truth, so the market risks may be minimal.

But while people keep saying Trump will become more serious once he grasps the weight of the office he's about to assume, there's no reason to think that will actually happen. Twice since the election he has left behind the "protective pool," the small rotating group of reporters who travel everywhere with the president in case some momentous event occurs, and provide their colleagues with updates on his activities. Most voters wouldn't care, but to the press it's a clear signal: I don't like you, I don't care how things have always been done, and I'll treat you with all the contempt I can muster.

The contempt itself isn't a problem per se — he can feel however he wants. But it becomes a problem when he starts singling out individual journalists and outlets for abuse, shuts the press out of things the public needs to see, and acts as though access is something he can grant or withhold depending on how friendly coverage has been to him.

Reporters covering the current White House have had plenty of complaints about the Obama administration being insufficiently forthcoming with information and doing end runs around them to speak directly to local media and entertainment shows. But we may never have had a president so plainly hostile to the very mission of the press, who says he wants to "open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money."

All of Trump's attacks on reporters didn't succeed in intimidating them out of doing their jobs, but they did succeed in further undermining the idea that there is any such thing as objective truth outside of what makes you feel good. I don't think it's an accident that when the Republican candidate was saying on a daily basis that any news story that didn't praise him was false and defamatory, his supporters became more and more drawn to fake stories on Facebook telling them things they wanted to hear.

It's hard to know yet how much damage Trump's hostility to the press will do to the public and their right to know. But it will almost certainly hurt whatever small ability he might otherwise have had to govern effectively. If you're spending all your time plotting how to use Twitter get back at those jerks who said something mean about you, you aren't going to be paying enough attention to your actual job. As Trump would say: Sad!