The national media are nothing if not a predictable lot.

They complained for over a year that the White House wasn’t holding “traditional” daily press briefings, but now that the briefings are on again, they don’t like White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s no-nonsense approach to their gotcha-games foolishness.

They also droned on incessantly about how President Trump would allegedly look for ways to avoid being questioned by the press corps. But not long after he began doing the daily White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefings in mid-March, they whined that the briefings were improving Trump’s ratings went on for too long, and then stopped carrying them in full in protest.

Some in the media, including those who had previously ripped the administration over alleged lack of access to the president, even suggested Trump stop participating in the briefings altogether.

The latest example of this type of media yoyo-ing comes from liberally biased New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, a frequent adversary of Trump’s and who was caught a few weeks ago shamelessly altering a Trump quote into something it wasn’t.

Haberman, who along with many other distinguished members of the mainstream media has complained in the past about access issues with the president, took to the Twitter machine earlier today to express concern over the fact that Trump was… doing so many interviews. She laughably characterized it as an attempt at a “hostile takeover of the media cycle”:

Am struck by the spate of interviews the president is doing lately – aides seem to be trying to recreate the atmospherics around the 2016 campaign, when candidate Trump could do a hostile takeover of the media cycle and he had a constant stream of attention paid.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 7, 2020

Later, after a tweet from the New York Post’s Joe Tacopino stating that this “doesn’t work in a national crisis”, Haberman provided this puzzling response:

We are going to find out, but it certainly isn’t breaking through the way he’s used to. He’s been trying to will public opinion to favor reopening over concerns about public health by encouraging these protests, and it has not succeeded.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 7, 2020

That was a really odd comment to make, considering two recent polls show that Trump’s approval ratings are on the rise – in fact, Gallup had him at his highest approval rating ever with their polling service, up 6 points in a span of two weeks. That was thanks to independent voters, who are a crucial voting bloc in close elections.

I guess Maggie doesn’t read reports like that because she’s too busy inventing imaginary scenarios about Trump that don’t actually exist.

In any event, Haberman’s fretting just goes to show why Trump is danged if he does and danged if he doesn’t with the media. Which is why he shouldn’t bother trying to please them.