Martin Schram: Fanning the flames while covering the fires

Martin Schram, Tribune News Service on Jun 12, 2025

Published in Op Eds

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

President Donald Trump always seemed to get it.

Way back when he was just a born-rich whippersnapper from the Queens chasing The Big Spotlight so he could make Manhattan know who the hell he was, The Donald always seemed to know he could manipulate some in the news media who were eager to cover him as if he was news.

So he began calling New York City’s tabloids, introducing himself as Donald Trump’s press agent, saying their photographer could get a picture of him arriving at Sardis at 8:30 with a sexy blonde starlet. And lo, Manhattan got to know the rich kid who would be America’s 45th and 47th president.

Now, let’s fast-forward into April and May of this year to understand how we got into this mess with U.S. troops being deployed to Los Angeles and maybe elsewhere. It started with Trump in his White House, staring at his news screens and fuming not at what he was seeing, but what he was not seeing.

He saw that we were seeing news about Elon Musk’s DOGE chainsaw demolition of Trump’s government. His tariff spree had panicked world economies. Those prices he promised he’d cut were rising. He saw we were seeing he couldn’t deliver his promised peace deal with Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Putin had been playing him.

But what really enraged Trump was news he wasn’t seeing – about the issue he always counted on to put him ahead of Joe Biden and the Democrats: his always get-tough crackdown on illegal immigration. Trump wasn’t seeing anything about his guaranteed Greatest Trump News because his Team Trump was failing to do the easy media manipulation thing he knew made Trump what he is today!

And then, at the very end of April and then a few days later in May, some immigration news appeared on America’s news screens.

On April 29, The Wall Street Journal, which has done outstanding Washington immigration policy coverage, headlined this news about the immigration results of the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency: “ICE Data Shows High Arrests, Lagging Deportation Effort.”

It reported ICE arrested roughly 66,500 migrants who were living illegally in the United States and deported nearly 66,000. But it said that was “a much higher pace of arrests but slightly slower pace for deportations…than the final year of the Biden administration.” In fiscal 2024, Biden officials reported they deported 271,000 people – “an average of roughly 742 migrants a day,” compared to the Trump administration daily average of about 660. A few days later, a graphic bar chart made the difference clear at a glance.

We don’t know for sure whether Trump saw those numbers or the stunning graphic. But we do know what followed, thanks to the detailed report on June 9 by the Journal’s Elizabeth Findell, Ruth Simon, Michelle Hackman and Tarini Parti.

Trump and his senior adviser, Stephen Miller, the conservative mastermind of his immigration program, revised their strategy to make sure America saw Trump’s get-tough enforcement for all it really was. And that required revising their policy execution to make sure it included plenty of media and message manipulation that had always been Trump’s core.

Way back in the 1980s, I had written in the Washington Post that my colleagues in television news and print often end up fanning the flames as they cover the fires. And it has long been clear to me that Trump always understood that about journalists. He knew how to appeal to our worst instincts – and manipulate competitive media coverage.

So Miller went to ICE headquarters. The Journal news team reported that Miller told ICE agents Trump wanted them to not just go after “the worst of the worst,” but go to Home Depots, where laborers gather looking for work, or 7/11s, and arrest all who they somehow concluded were illegal aliens. This is, of course, racial profiling. He challenged the agents if they could go with him right away and arrest 30 people: “Who here thinks they can do it?”

Trump also decided to do all sorts of photo op things that would make their tough enforcement look tough at a video glance – like having a bunch of fatigue wearing troops – national guard and U.S. marines – on the scene in Los Angeles. Whether they were needed or not seemed not to be the imperative.

Meanwhile, Trump had help. Demonstrating activists helped Trump visually communicate the need for his getting tough by setting driverless cars on fire. My TV colleagues wallpapered their news by repeating the same visuals – fanning the flames – as Trump mouthpieces repeated claims that Los Angeles was aflame.

Soon social media was gushing orange glowing visuals as all the world could see with their own eyes the crisis in LA. Even if the crisis never existed until the fanning began. Real video and fake video dazzled and deceived our minds’ eyes. One site on X posted a photo of bricks said to be gathered for use by Democrat militants against ICE agents. But it turned out the photo came from a construction company in Malaysia. It was viewed more than 800,000 times, The Washington Post reported.

America lost touch with its own reality.

_____