When Trump fans assault journalists, should the press reassess its abusive relationship with the president?

Trump would stop holding rallies if there was no media coverage. He thrives off the exposure

The press pays attention to powerful people. Donald Trump began to capitalise on this in the 1980s, and arguably would never have become president if he wasn’t already a media personality. Now he likes to bites the hand that fed him, and his supporters have got the message too.

Major political figures have always had a symbiotic relationship with the press. After a Trump fan in El Paso attacked a BBC cameraman last night, we have the confirmation that the president has become an abusive partner

US presidents need the press to promote initiatives, raise their profile, and connect with the public. The press acquiesces because they know or assume their audiences care about the US president. Many in the news industry would also say they want to hold powerful people to account.

There have been failures, like journalists not sufficiently challenging George W. Bush and Tony Blair in the lead up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, but overall, the relationship between the president and the press functions with a mutual, but strained, respect.

Trump has blown that convention apart. He consistently hurls insults about “fake news” media and has labelled some “the enemy of the people”, but he remains reliant on the press in the same way previous US presidents have been.

Trump would stop holding rallies if there was no media coverage. He thrives off the exposure. When he takes to the stage, he consistently points out the attention he’s getting. As he said in El Paso, “Wow, look at all the press…can you believe that?” To which the audience booed.

To his supporters, the press, despite having a range of political ideologies, have become the physical reminder of liberalness, and an opportunity to act out aggression. That might be expressed by constant booing, or the urge to yell out expletives in front of the camera, and can lead to actual physical attacks like one in El Paso. Literally and figuratively, the press has become a punch bag for a lot of angry people in MAGA hats.

Rallies in general can drift into partisan aggression by their very nature. But ordinarily the person in charge is not egging on the tension. Barrack Obama once told an audience that was jeering Republicans, “don’t boo, vote”. When John McCain ran for president, he even took the microphone back from one supporter who referred to Obama as an untrustworthy Arab, in order to defend his rival.

The contrast with Trump rallies is stark. It is perhaps a function of Trump’s decision to effectively keep his 2016 campaign running through his presidency that he has fostered a cornucopia of aggression, which has led to violence in some cases. Trump and his surrogates constantly tell supporters the world is against them.

In El Paso, Trump Jr. said liberals hate businesses. This is a message which has been cultivated by conservative sources like Fox News for years (for them, there is even a war on Christmas, of course). Trump directs conservatives' generalised mistrust towards the press. They are an easy scapegoat, and unlike his political opponents, they are present, and exposed.

That abusive relationship continues. The news media keep that cycle going by reporting and publicising the aggression and the insults, and head back to each rally in search of more. Trump, and his supporters, give good copy, make good footage, bring in revenues and it’s hard to see how this will change. News media is as cut-throat a business as politics.

There is no easy solution for undoing the damage that Trump and conservatives before him have caused by positioning the press as the adversary. This latest incident, in many ways, just tells us what we already knew: that the Trump political era has built a faction driven by disdain and fear of liberal institutions and of the idea of liberalness itself.

Dr Lindsey Blumell is a lecturer in journalism at City, University of London