I interviewed Jonathan Karl about his new book for one reason. It turned into something much bigger.

There has been a lot of debate over the president's coronavirus briefings at the White House. Some say TV networks shouldn't air them because of all the misinformation and confusing things the president says. Then Trump indicated he might pull back from them. So far he hasn't.

Anyway, I realized that someone who sits in the front row of the White House briefing room almost every day just published a book about covering the Trump White House. And I’ve known him for years. 

Jonathan Karl is chief Washington and White House correspondent for ABC News. His new book is “Front Row at the Trump Show.” 

“Too often in the Trump era, the press has looked like an opposition party,” Karl told me on the podcast. You can listen to the entire interview here. And I wrote about his book and our interview at Yahoo News here.

My main takeaway from the book is this line from the introduction: “There’s nothing more fake in the Trump era than Donald Trump’s attacks on ‘fake news.’”

Now, that line is a bit of an exaggeration. It’s not to suggest that Trump isn’t sometimes truly angry, enraged even, at criticism of him in the press. 

And it’s not to minimize the danger of Trump’s rhetoric and of where it might head. 

Jonathan has a long passage where he catalogues the ways that that phrase has been used to justify killing political opponents and scapegoats throughout history: by Robiesperre during the Reign of Terror, by Hitler during the Holocaust, and by Stalin during the great purge. And he has personally warned Trump in a private meeting that his attacks on the press and his use of that phrase specifically could result in violence.

But what Karl is getting at is this: it’s a central part of Trump’s strategy to portray the press as his opposition because it helps him sow distrust in what they say. The biggest check on the power of the president is a free press. If that is undermined, or curtailed, that gives the executive much more power to run roughshod over the actual institutions of government. 

And so his point that Trump’s attack on “fake news” are “fake” is that Trump actually loves the press, because it is both a vehicle and a villain for him. It gives him a stage on which to act, to play out the Trump show that he views his presidency as — more a performance than anything else. That’s why he is obsessed with ratings for his coronavirus press conferences and why he instructs tv crews on how to light his speeches. And as he plays out this soap opera, Karl’s point is that he wants the press to go too far in its criticism, to move from holding power accountable to seeking to get him. He wants the press to overstep. 

And in Karl’s view, often they have. We talk about that here. It connects to the theme of institutions. 

One part of media imbalance is the issue of constant frothing about Trump on cable TV, and that's more an issue of media company ownership putting profits ahead of the public welfare: all Trump outrage (or cheerleading if it’s Fox) all the time brings in the ratings and jacks the ad rates. 

But at the level of individual reporters, Karl criticizes the instinct to become entangled in a highly visible showdown with the president in a press conference, even though he sympathizes with it. He has been attacked by the president in personal terms, as recently as April 6 when Trump called him a “third rate reporter” during a White House briefing. (That was a week after this book came out by the way, and Karl has some very harsh criticism for the president throughout.) Karl did not respond in that moment, even though even more recently he has jousted with the president when Trump said that he would have been criticized even if the government had done well on producing enough tests for coronavirus. Karl interjected a few times at that point to tell the president, “that’s not true. That’s not true.”

But Karl told me this about Trump’s personal attacks on him: "when he insults me, that doesn't matter. What does matter is if he's doing that in a way as a tactic to avoid addressing a question or to distract. Then I want to pivot and get back to the facts. That's what matters. Not what he says about me. Who cares?"

Karl uses his long-running relationship with Trump to illustrate how fake the president’s behavior and attacks on the press often are. Karl has known Trump since the mid-90’s, almost 30 years. He first interviewed him in 1994, when Jonathan was a print reporter at the New York Post. 

Since then, Karl said, he has lost count of how many times he has interviewed Trump. “It’s probably a couple dozen times and might even be more,” Karl told me. Karl effectively uses this background in his book to illustrate the way that Trump, as president, has conducted a “Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde routine … with the news media since the early days of his presidential campaign.”

Trump has gone from smiling and praising Jonathan backstage after an interview to jeering at the press pen holding Jonathan and other journalists, moments later in the middle of a rally. And conversely, in December 2015, Trump was enraged by Karl’s questions during an interview moments before he took the stage in Iowa. Once he was out of view of any TV cameras, he began to scream and curse at Karl backstage. Moments later on stage, he joked with the crowd about how Russian President Vladimir Putin has reporters killed. “I would never kill [journalists]. But I do hate them,” Trump told his supporters. “And some of them are lying, disgusting people.”

And then, backstage again, Trump took more questions from Karl and acted as if nothing had happened, even arguing that they should take a photo together. The artifice of it all, Karl argues, demonstrates that it is part of Trump’s intentional strategy. “He wants to define the media as the opposition party,” Karl writes in his book.

Karl writes this about media coverage of Trump: it is “relentlessly and exhaustively negative. His accomplishments — and there are accomplishments — are either ignored or overshadowed by the drumbeat of outrage fueled by his own outrageous behavior.”

But he also says this: “The president is waging a war on truth, helping to convince millions of Americans that real news is fake, that journalists are partisans who are out to get him.”

You could obviously write an entire book or series of books about the ways that President Trump has lied about things ranging from the mundane to the consequential. Karl catalogues a few choice examples. Perhaps the most jarring is the series of lies that Trump told about a pay raise for the military in 2018. Karl tracks how Trump at first told the truth in March 2018: an appropriations bill increased military pay by 2.4 percent, the largest pay raise for the military in 8 years.

Then he slightly exaggerated, saying it was the largest raise in over a decade. Then in May 2018, he said it was the first pay raise for the military in 10 years. But the military has had a pay raise every year for the last 30 years. By December, when he visited troops in Iraq, he told them it was “one of the biggest pay raises you’ve ever received.”

"You haven’t gotten one in more than 10 years — more than 10 years.  And we got you a big one.  I got you a big one.  I got you a big one,” Trump said. "They said, 'You know, we could make it smaller.  We could make it 3 percent.  We could make it 2 percent.  We could make it 4 percent.'  I said, “No.  Make it 10 percent.  Make it more than 10 percent.'  Because it’s been a long time.  It’s been more than 10 years.  It’s been more than 10 years.”

Again, the pay raised was 2.4 percent, and Trump suggested it was 10 percent. And it wasn’t even close to one of the largest pay raises ever. During two of Obama’s 8 years in office, the military got a bigger raise. And during 6 of Bush’s 8 years in office, the military got a bigger raise. In 2002, the raise was 6.9 percent. 

I still remember the first time it became clear to me how blatantly Donald Trump was willing to lie, when I was in New Hampshire a day or two ahead of the Republican primary in  February 2016 and read Trump’s comments on the morning shows blatantly denying that he’d ever said John McCain wasn’t a war hero. There is video of him saying that very thing. This isn’t about a typical politician lying occasionally or shading the truth. This is a habit that amounts to what Karl calls “an assault on truth itself."

“Donald Trump is aggrieved,” Jonathan writes. "And arguably he has reasons to be aggrieved. But his response is to wage a war on truth that I fear may do as much or more lasting damage to America than any of the mistakes made by the presidents who went before him.”

“Our democracy is built on trust,” he writes. "Without some collective understanding and agreement about what is true — what is real news and what is fake — the trust that holds us together is imperiled … What is at stake is the survival of our nation as a place where differing views are tolerated and debated, where election results are trusted and accepted, where people in power are held accountable, and where the truth is accepted, even when it challenges our beliefs and our biases … If we can’t agree on reality and have no interest in seeking truth no matter where it leads, we have no hope of overcoming our divisions.”