From the beginning of his first run for the White House, President Donald Trump has had an antagonistic relationship with the mainstream news media. While he didn’t coin the phrase “fake news,” Trump certainly made it a staple of his criticism arsenal against the press, often referencing reporters as such directly to their face.

Few politicians on either side of the aisle have so obviously relished going toe to toe with the MSM. At the same time, Trump mastered the art of beating the press by going around them and directly appealing to the American public via social media, as no other president has.

Both of his presidential wins, especially his second, came in large part thanks to his ability to beat the media at their own narrative-framing game. Trump’s rhetorical bomb dropping is already legendary, as few have done so with such targeted effect — to the anger of his opponents, the delight of his supporters, and the consternation of the prim and proper political establishment.

During his first term, Trump’s aggression toward the Leftmedia was primarily rhetorical. He blasted the media, and they blasted back in their coverage of him and his presidency. Yet as those first-term years went by, it became arguable that Trump’s often bombastic criticism of the MSM was having more of an impact than their overwhelming negative coverage of his presidency.

As a result of this battle, Americans have grown overwhelmingly distrustful of the MSM. The long-established, self-important, and self-aggrandizing fourth estate was finding its popularity turned to infamy over its blatantly biased anti-Trump reporting. Many more people began seeing the MSM as dishonest “fake news” as Trump had repeatedly labeled them. However, as we have long noted in our humble shop, this negative view of the MSM is fully deserved, as the lion’s share of media coverage simply furthers the Democrats’ messaging.

Now in his second term, Trump’s aggression against the press has gone well beyond public criticism; indeed, he has increasingly gone at them with legal force.

The examples began before he reentered office, as he sued ABC News for defamation related to George Stephanopoulos’s false claims that Trump had been found guilty of rape stemming from the E. Jean Carroll case. ABC settled for $15 million. He sued CBS News for its deceptive editing of Kamala Harris’s interview. CBS settled for $16 million. He sued CNN for promulgating the “big lie” regarding his Charlottesville comments. He’s gone after The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the BBC.

What all these have in common is blatantly false negative reporting against Trump, and he has found some success in suing.

His administration has likewise faced numerous challenges from the MSM, such as the White House changing press pass rules and the Pentagon restricting reporters’ access.

Now, with the U.S. military’s ongoing action against Iran, Trump has become increasingly frustrated with a number of Defense Department leaks to the media. In light of this, Trump has pressed Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to go after media leakers. As Blanche recently explained, “In all circumstances, the Department of Justice follows the facts and applies the law to identify those committing crimes against the United States.”

To root out and crack down on these media leakers, the DOJ has been sending subpoenas to media outlets demanding sources, a practice that the president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Bruce Brown, observed was historically “a last resort and only after exhausting investigative efforts targeted at non-media sources.”

Of course, the DOJ going hard after leakers has the press asserting First Amendment violations, but legally, such claims are ridiculous. Speaking of actual free speech violations, where was the media when it came to the Biden administration and its proven efforts to suppress Americans’ speech on social media?

What’s clear this term is that Trump is not content to sit back and allow the kind of media-deep state collusion malfeasance that plagued his first term. He’s doing what Trump does — fight back.