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The best thing that happened to Donald Trump all week is that BuzzFeed published the raw Russia dossier about him.

It cant be pleasant for anyone to see his name associated with prostitutes and a bizarre sex act in print the principle that all publicity is good publicity can be taken too far even for Donald Trump. But in the medias ongoing fight with Trump, BuzzFeeds incredible act of journalistic irresponsibility represented the press leading with its chin.

Trump thrives off media hostility, and the more hostile and the less defensible the better. It allows him to portray himself as the victim of a stilted establishment. It fires up his supporters. It keeps the debate on terrain that is familiar and favorable to him whether or not he is being treated fairly and allows him to adopt his preferred posture as a counterpuncher.

There are legitimate questions raised about how determined Trump has been to ignore evidence of Russias hacking operations prior to the election. BuzzFeed unintentionally did more to obscure and delegitimize these questions than Trump Tower could ever hope to. By publishing the uncorroborated dossier, BuzzFeed has associated the Russia issue with fantastical rumors and hearsay.

Its decision to post the document has to be considered another chapter in the ongoing saga of the media and Democrats losing their collective minds. If the election had gone the other way, it is hard to see BuzzFeed publishing a 35-page document containing unverified, lurid allegations about President-elect Hillary Clinton that it didnt consider credible. This was an anti-Trump decision, pure and simple.

It created a media firestorm, even though everyone should realize by now that media firestorms are Trumps thing. They have been literally since the day he got into the presidential race. They suck the oxygen away from everything except the transfixing melodrama surrounding Donald Trump. The question is always, How can he possibly escape this? And at the center of attention, vindicating his own honor and that of his supporters by proxy, he always does.

The paradox of the Trump phenomenon is that he may be ripping up sundry political norms, yet he benefits when his opponents and adversaries do the same. When Marco Rubio descended to Trumps level in the primaries and mocked the size of his hands, it hurt Rubio most. The Democrats have done themselves no favors by implicitly refusing to accept the election results after browbeating Trump for months to accept the results in advance. And if the press is going to lower its standards in response to Trump, it will diminish and discredit itself more than the president-elect.

For all that Trump complains about negative press coverage, he wants to be locked in a relationship of mutual antagonism with the media. It behooves those journalists who arent partisans and reflexive Trump haters to avoid getting caught up in this dynamic. If they genuinely want to be public-spirited checks on Trump, they shouldnt be more bitterly adversarial, but more responsible and fair.

None of this is a particularly tall order. Yet its unlikely to happen, even if it was encouraging that so many reporters opposed BuzzFeeds decision. The press and Trump will continue to be at war, although only one party to the hostilities truly knows what he is doing, and it shows.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review. He can be reached via e-mail: [emailprotected]. 2017 King Features Syndicate

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