Donald Trump has long operated under a strategy of normalisation – every new lie, each fresh outrage serves to overwrite what has gone before. The line between acceptable and unacceptable isn’t where it was last year, or even last month. Under these conditions, it is hard to stay scandalised. By autumn, something will happen that will cause us to shake our heads and say: “Caging children – remember when that was a big deal?”
Unfortunately for Trump, this tactic may not prove successful in retrospect: if you live long enough for history to judge you, the enormity of your crimes will only fall into sharper relief. Reporting Trump’s First Year: The Fourth Estate (BBC Two) is a first inkling of how it will feel to look back some years hence and think: wait, what happened there?
Beginning on the day of Trump’s inauguration, the New York Times opened its doors to cameras as two reporting teams – one in New York, one in Washington – scrambled to figure out how to cover a White House like no other. “We have a president who is very comfortable not telling the truth,” said the executive editor, Dean Baquet. You are free to treat this as a monstrous understatement, but remember: this was all of 18 months ago.
The White House correspondent, Maggie Haberman, is the closest thing the Times has to a Trump expert: she used to work on tabloids covering city hall and has dealt with him for decades. Briefing her colleagues about the world inside Trump’s head, she offered them a telling warning. “He’s fascinated slash obsessed with the Times,” she said. Trump likes to think of himself as a scrappy arriviste. Although he refers to it almost exclusively as “the failing New York Times”, the president craves the respectability the paper’s coverage affords.
This first instalment, covering the administration’s chaotic first 100 days – opened with the paper licking its wounds after the election. “During the campaign, we tried to cover Donald Trump using the rules of the past,” said Baquet. “We didn’t have our finger on the pulse of the country, and that was wrong.” Meanwhile, the Washington bureau reporter, Mark Mazzetti, has set up a Trump-Russia team to look into links between the campaign and the Russian government.
Trump has long asserted that the Times makes up phoney sources to justify its fake news, but here is proof the sources exist: reporters’ phones ring constantly; they answer, they listen and their eyes pop open. If the sources are phoney, these reporters are very good actors.
It can be difficult to wrestle political drama from a lot of footage of people talking on phones, but The Fourth Estate has more intrigue than most fictional newsrooms. The Times has money worries; it is locked in competition with its rival, the Washington Post; and it is constantly under attack from the White House. At times, it can be downright chilling: you feel what it is like to be a reporter in the room when Donald Trump denounces the press as “the enemy of the people” to a cheering crowd. Remember when that was a big deal?
The Fourth Estate also has some dramatic advantages that, say, All the President’s Men didn’t have. First, reporters these days often type standing up, in groups, while talking. Second, they multitask: they type and tweet and text and go into makeup for TV news appearances all at the same time – it’s amazing they don’t fall down more stairs. Third, and most importantly, the Trump administration is a runaway train of a story, so much so that reporters have to keep reminding themselves they are on to something. “That’s a huge fucking deal,” says Mazzetti of then national security adviser Mike Flynn’s undisclosed phone conversations with the Russian ambassador, a breach another reporter has chosen to characterise as “incredibly untoward”.
A documentary revealing the quiet, thankless heroism of reporters is a necessary corrective in these dark days, but it is also clear the Times team is having a whale of a time. Trump is the best story they will ever have, and they are seizing it with both hands. Above all, you get a sense of how exhausting it must be. We often speak of the 24-hour news cycle, but most of us don’t have to live in it. There are no cliched shots here of a papers rolling off presses. Nowadays, you push a button that says “publish”, and instantly someone on TV starts talking about it. It never ends.
