Please don’t quote me NYT White House correspondent Peter Baker on how Trump’s attacks on the media echo the early Putin years
On February 25, the Trump administration announced it would begin selecting the journalists allowed to cover the U.S. president’s daily activities, taking control of the White House press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association. Reporters and press freedom groups widely condemned the move, though it was hardly Trump’s first effort to undermine independent journalism. Trump has vilified reporters throughout his political career, suing media outlets over coverage of his presidency and repeatedly calling the press “enemies of the people.” Days before the press pool takeover, the White House began barring Associated Press journalists from events after the agency refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
For Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, these attacks on the press feel familiar. From January 2001 to November 2004, Baker and his wife, journalist Susan Glasser, reported from Moscow, where they covered the rise of Vladimir Putin and his early efforts to clamp down on independent media. On February 26, Baker published an article titled “In Trump’s Washington, a Moscow-Like Chill Takes Hold,” drawing parallels between Putin’s early efforts to curb press freedom and Trump’s escalating pressure on journalists. Meduza spoke with Baker about the limits of this comparison, the spread of Russian disinformation into American politics, and the relationship between Trump’s domestic media strategy and his Russia-friendly foreign policy.
This interview has been lightly edited and abridged for length and clarity.
— You acknowledge in your piece that comparing the Trump administration’s treatment of the media to Putin’s in the 2000s risks going too far. What made you decide to write about it anyways?
— Russia and the United States are not the same — we should be clear about that. And any comparison does risk going too far.
But my wife, Susan [Glasser], and I spent four years in Moscow at the beginning of Putin’s tenure. And for the last few weeks, we’ve been waking up and feeling real flashbacks to that time. And we thought it was important to explore that. She wrote a piece in The New Yorker saying something similar. And I think that, without going too far, there are some interesting and important parallels that are worth exploring, both in terms of the specific actions being taken by the new government here, and the sense of fear and the chill that we’re seeing on the part of the city [Washington, D.C.].
For me, one of the most evocative sensations is trying to get people to be quoted in stories about Trump — [people] who used to speak very openly, candidly, often blisteringly about Trump, who no longer want to be quoted. “Please don't quote me, I can't afford to be on their list.” “Please don't quote me, I have a kid who works in the government.” “Please don't quote me, I’m just afraid.” And that was exactly what we experienced in Russia.
We arrived in March of 2000 for the [presidential] election, and we came back at the end of the year to live permanently for four years. When we first got there, everybody was pretty open with us. We got a lot of access; people were very open about their politics and their opinions, and they didn’t always agree, and they certainly weren’t always pro-government. By the time we left, people who talked to us quite openly and freely at the beginning were no longer talking to us. They were afraid. They just didn’t think that that was a good idea. And that was something I didn't expect to ever see in Washington.
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— In 2017, on the eve of Trump’s first inauguration, the U.S. press corps published an open letter to the incoming president, basically saying, “We’re not going to bend the knee.” There was no such letter before his second inauguration, and there seem to be much fewer of these kinds of initiatives now. Why is that? Is it that people just don’t know what the consequences could be and are afraid?
— There’s no question that people are afraid. And intentionally or not, it seems to be a strategy at this point — to make people think twice before speaking out.
I have covered every American president since 1996. I started at the White House, and except for those four years in Moscow, I’ve pretty much been on the White House [beat] ever since. Every president gets mad at the press corps. Every president doesn’t like their coverage. Every president often feels that the press is unfair, biased, all these things. I’ve never had one who attacked the very idea of a free press — until Trump.
Trump doesn’t just say, “I’m mad at the New York Times and I think their stories are terrible.” What Trump says is, “The fake news media is all fake” — in other words, they’re “enemies of people.” And of course, as somebody who focuses on Russia, you know the history of that phrase. He might not have known it when he first used it, but it was pointed out to him again and again.
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I was in the Oval Office with him once with my own publisher, and I pointed out the fraught nature of that kind of language, and he used it anyway. So it’s not, at that point, an accident. It’s not unintentional. “Enemies of the people” means that you discredit the very idea of an independent press.
He was asked about this once by [CBS journalist] Leslie Stahl. Leslie Stahl asked him — unfortunately, off-camera — why do you always attack the media? And he said to her, pretty openly, “Look, I do it to discredit you, so that when you write something I don’t like, people won’t believe you.” And I think that sums it up. So that’s a very different thing than the traditional American president, at least in our lifetime.
— Your article focuses on the Trump administration’s decision to handpick which journalists are in the White House press pool. But there’s another parallel to Putin’s approach: billionaires acquiring media properties like The Washington Post and Twitter, as well as Facebook’s apparent pivot towards Trump, call to mind the way Gazprom and pro-Kremlin oligarchs took over Russia’s independent outlets [in the early 2000s]. Is this a fair comparison?
— Yeah, I think there’s a comparison there. Again, nothing is exact, nothing is precise. But when Putin comes in, one of the first things he does is he sits down with the oligarchs and says — I’m paraphrasing, obviously — “Okay guys, we’re going to have a deal here. And the deal is, you get to keep your money, your companies, your ill-gotten gains, in many cases, if you keep loyal to me, don’t challenge me, [and] don’t use that power to try to shape the government and its decisions.”
And it was a bargain, in effect — or a diktat — that most of them lived with, and they adjusted accordingly. And those who didn’t saw the consequences. The very first big story when we arrived there in the beginning of 2001 was the takeover of NTV. It was very clear what was going on. The state used its power through the courts and through the financial arrangements that had been made with Gazprom to take over what was, at that point, the only real independent major network. And [NTV founder Vladimir] Gusinsky was driven out of the country, in effect, just as [former Public Russian Television owner Boris] Berezovsky had been. And all the other oligarchs, all the other media owners, all the other editors and publishers and producers got the message. And those who didn’t, time and time again, faced the consequences.
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So in this case, [in the U.S.], we’ve got a president who sued ABC, who sued CBS, who threatened suits against The New York Times just before the election. And his FCC is now reviewing CBS and PBS. I think that even before the press pool [takeover], that was all pretty clear. And there is a parallel there. He’s not taking over the networks in the same way that Putin did. But Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in the last few years — there is some parallel there in the sense that it’s an ally of the president controlling a pretty important venue for public discourse.
Again, it’s not the same, because there’s still a lot of criticism of the president on X. It’s not like that has become a completely one-sided state-oriented forum. But it clearly has changed. There’s Zuckerberg’s decision to bend to Trump’s wishes on fact-checking, these different examples that you cited, and now, of course, the press pool. So again, you don’t want to take it too far. And obviously, Russia got a whole lot worse after we left. That’s not where Washington is, but there is some similarity there.
— Week after week, we’ve seen the Trump team appear to embrace Putin’s Russia and distance itself from Ukraine, culminating in Friday’s Oval Office meeting. What’s the relationship between this and Trump’s moves against the press? Is this approach to media coverage just something that comes naturally to autocratic-minded leaders, or is someone at the Trump administration studying Putin’s Russia?
— I wouldn’t say that he probably knows that much about what Moscow was like in the early Putin era, but there are instincts, as you rightly say, about people who have autocratic tendencies. And we have reported plenty of times that Trump’s autocratic instincts govern how he approaches being president. I don’t think it’s intentional that it’s the same or similar to Putin, but the timing of that certainly focuses more attention on it and more attention on the consequences of it.
[Trump] said just last night on social media, “Stop worrying so much about Russia — we should be worrying about our borders,” or whatever. And the comments and actions of the last two weeks have been so strikingly different than any [previous] president ever took when it came to Russia — with the exception of the late eighties and nineties, when Gorbachev and Yeltsin were at least attempting reform, and America was supportive of those efforts. But broadly speaking, we’ve never seen an American president — just to give the example — being at the UN and voting with Russia, North Korea, and Belarus against England, France, Germany, and the rest of Europe. I can’t think of a precedent.
— In the past five years or so, I’ve noticed so many Russian propaganda narratives starting to creep into the American political conversation. For instance, early in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I was shocked when someone close to me who has no connection to Russia told me they’d heard that Zelensky was a drug addict. I don’t want to overstate the impact of Russian disinformation on American politics, but have you been as struck by this as I have?
— I think you’re right that that sort of Russian disinformation has injected itself into the bloodstream. And how orchestrated it is versus how organic it becomes.
It certainly starts off with the idea of an effort by Moscow to sow doubts, to create divisions, to drive a wedge between the United States and Ukraine. But what’s striking is that here, the president of the United States, and the White House, say things that you know the Russians have been talking about. [For example,] the idea that Zelensky is somehow a “dictator without elections,” or the idea that all these Ukrainian cities have been destroyed. Even Zelensky said to [Trump’s] face: “No, Mr. President, our cities are still alive. They have been hurt, but maybe you’re just listening too much to Putin.” It was an extraordinary exchange.
But you can see the Russian talking points being parroted in the United States, consciously or not. Maybe people don’t know where they come from originally, but the Russians have succeeded in shaping part of the discourse, at least to some degree. And it’s still the case that most Americans don’t like Putin, believe he’s a dictator, and are on Ukraine’s side versus Russia’s side, if they have to pick. But there is a part of the American public right now, in the political space, that has some sympathy for Putin. There’s a pro-Putin part — one that’s small but important. And I think it’s because they see him as this anti-woke champion, this person who positions himself as a defender of “traditional Christian values,” and he’s critical of trans rights and all these other things.
So there’s some serendipity between the far right of the American political spectrum right now and what they perceive of Putin’s Russia. It’s a little like how the far left used to be more sympathetic, in the Soviet era, to the communists and Stalin, willing to suspend disbelief or see the best in him, because they believed there was an ideological convergence there. And that’s driven in part by our politics rather than Russia’s, but I think it’s having an influence. And I think that Trump is not only playing to it, he’s sort of stimulating it a little bit.
— There’s been speculation that Trump planned this public fallout with Zelensky in the Oval Office on Friday. After all, the minerals agreement could have been signed behind closed doors, but the meeting was televised instead. Do you think it’s plausible that this was some kind of setup?
— Is it possible? Yes. Do I think that’s what happened? I don't have any reporting to say that. I think it’s likelier that they didn't intend it, but that, you know — Vance, at least, seemed to come primed for a fight if it came.
Let me put it this way: neither Trump nor Vance seems to like Zelensky. They both seem to personally dislike him. Neither one of them particularly seems to like Ukraine. Both of them go back years on that. But whether it was planned or not, I don’t know. I think the first 40 minutes of the meeting were more or less normal, more or less fine, and then it kind of goes off the rails. And Trump wanted this rare minerals deal, which then ended up not getting signed. So that makes me wonder whether he really planned it. But I think that they were on edge and ready for it, in the sense that they were more willing to engage in it than they would have been with somebody else. If Putin had been there and said some things that were similar, they wouldn’t have taken it the way they took what Zelensky said.
I think that it’s worth observing that foreign leaders, when they come to Trump, have learned, or decided, that flattery and stroking his ego are the way to go. You saw that twice in the few days before Zelensky got there with Macron and Starmer. “Oh, dear Donald,” says Macron. “Oh, King Charles wants you to come for a state visit,” says Starmer. They’re really playing his ego and flattering him and so forth. And I think that Trump has gotten used to that as being the only way he wants a foreign leader to engage with him.
Zelensky doesn’t do that. He doesn’t have that gene. He doesn’t have the deference and flattery gene. When he has something to say, he says it. And what he said was defending his country’s interests, as he saw it. “We need security guarantees,” he said. “Don’t trust Putin,” he says. And that’s not disrespectful as far as I can tell, but to Trump and Vance it is. What Vance says to him is, “It’s disrespectful to litigate this in front of the news media.” Okay, so what he’s saying is that it’s disrespectful to make the case for your own country.
Why was in front of the cameras? That was Trump’s decision. Trump is the one who likes to have the cameras there. With most presidents, when they have a foreign leader in, the press comes in for two minutes, they shake hands, maybe they answer a question or two, and then they shuffle the reporters out and have their real meeting. Trump likes keeping the cameras there. And so the cameras are there for a full hour, which no other president would have done with a foreign leader. It was not Zelensky’s decision to “litigate” in front of the news cameras. Even at the end, he says, “Hey, that’s good television.” For Trump, the theater of it is part of the whole game.
Interview by Sam Breazeale
Portrait by: William B. Plowman / NBC / Getty Images