Every week, the Trump administration seems to shift from issue to issue or scandal to scandal. There was DACA, then leaks, then tariffs, then leaks, then North Korea, then leaks. Vacillating like this is unhealthy for the nation and it is not to President Trump’s advantage.

Watching it all, some conclude that the president is an amateur. Perhaps, but his issue shifting seems to be partly by design — a response to the atmosphere in the public square created by a press that despises him. 

The Obama administration did not need to shift from issue to issue weekly. The major press outlets were moderate toward him — not restrained so much by an understanding of their own duties to the public as by prejudicial favor for President Obama. The Obama administration was thus freed to devote its focus to thinking through and implementing its policy goals. Indeed, it even received help from the press who sold its policies to the public. This was a courtesy owed a duly elected president, much of the press then thought.

Today, however, large parts of the press have reversed their tone, suddenly viewing themselves as a relentless attack dog against President Trump. The press’s hatred comes out in myriad examples, though rather humorously in the Washington Post’s insistence that President Trump must not congratulate Russian President Putin on being re-elected because then-National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster advised against it. The Post stretches to imply that The National Security Advisor — an official not even confirmed by the Senate — should outrank the president in authority.

Hatred also guides the press into imposing invented standards onto the president. Today their theory is that the purpose of a cabinet official or presidential advisor is to restrain — rather than assist — the president. Never was such a notion proposed about President Obama, but it is stated today as though it were established constitutional theory. No matter the issue, a justification to contradict or malign the president always seems to be found, as if malice and playing the public’s protector express themselves identically.

Today, the public and the press live in different worlds, with 90 percent of NBC, CBS and ABC coverage of the president skewing negative, as the Media Research Center has found, and public opinion supporting the president at 46 percent, according to the latest poll by Rasmussen. 

As originally conceived by America’s Founders, a free press, in order to promote scientific progress and political freedom, would by rationally oppose various anti-republican doctrines and sentiments, while also sniffing out and exposing public corruption. Nevertheless, many in the founding generation, seeing that a free press would have no check upon it, feared that it would be given to “whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare,” as Thomas Jefferson said. 

By maligning and attempting to cultivate hatred for the president, today’s press hopes to exhaust, corner him into error, and thereby regain its rule over public opinion. Having grown accustomed to ruling public opinion for the past decade, so confident were many of the main press outlets that they even believed they could determine the outcome of the 2016 election.

This is the atmosphere President Trump confronts. In response to it, he seems to have decided that since the press will attack relentlessly, without compromise, better to change the images they chase — to the extent that he can — every few minutes so they can’t sink in their teeth.

By chasing the president from issue to issue, the press looks frantic and fanatical — at once begging the public to listen to it, while contemptuously instructing them about how and what to think. And their behavior adds clout to the president’s long-time accusation that the press represents a class unto itself, claiming to watch out for the people, while primarily interested in gaining rule over public opinion.

For Trump, the alternative to issue shifting is worse. If he responds to the press directly, accusation by accusation, he lends them the respectability due only to equals. The Bush administration erroneously attempted to do this with Guantanamo Bay and its detainee programs. Trump knows that the press wants to turn the public square into a court room where it lobs accusations, then plays judge, jury and executioner.

Shifting from issue to issue, week after week is of course is no way to govern. Nor does this approach favor President Trump in the long run, for there must be stability and continuity for the implementation of policies and for public confidence in government.

The question of who will ultimately win the meta-narrative — the president or the press — is difficult to see at this point. But the American public will decide, after either three or seven more years, whether they will again turn over the rule of public opinion to the press and the class it represents. After seeing its motives, tactics and its treatment of a duly elected president, you have to wonder if they’ll rule against the press.