Donald Trump and the Theater of Access
The press may not yet know how to cover the president, but the president knows exactly what to do with the press: Humiliate them.
Reporters had been following Trump all year. Early rallies had been covered as curiosities; later ones as political mass spectacles. But on the eve of the election, it was clear that a perilous dynamic had been ignored. “He never once failed to invite his crowds to heckle us,” he wrote. “He was placing us on display like captured animals. And it worked.”