MICHAEL WOLFF: Why the Media Keeps Losing to Donald Trump.

It is the Trump view that the media has been so wrong in its predictions, and made to look in the eyes of the public so woeful and ludicrous, that it must now double down in an effort to prove its thesis about the president and restore its honor. (The Trump White House now hammers a persistent theme: Why was nobody fired in the mainstream media for such dunderheaded election coverage?)

The media strategy is to show Trump to be an inept and craven sociopath. The Trump strategy is to show that media people are hopeless prigs out of touch with the nation (e.g., CNN’s media correspondent, Brian Stelter, who turns to the camera every Sunday morning and delivers a pious sermon about Trump’s perfidiousness) and nursing personal grudges.

Accordingly, “alternative facts.” It’s curious to pick a battle whose outcome won’t change anything—like over the actual size of the inaugural crowd. But both sides grabbed it. Hence, the argument becomes about relative reaction. Who is perceived as overreacting more? Whose apoplexy is greater?

Trump’s genius is for making his opponents seem crazier than he is — and I’m using “crazy” as a pejorative in the former example, but not in the latter.