On Monday, President-elect Trump held a meeting at Trump Tower with top members of the media.

The New York Post reported, quote, Donald Trump scolded media big shots during an off-the-record Trump Tower sit down on Monday, sources told the post. It was like an effing firing squad, one source said of the encounter. Trump started with CNN Chief Jeff Zucker and said, I hate your network. Everyone in CNN is a liar and you should be ashamed, the source said. The meeting was a total disaster. The TV execs and anchors went in there thinking they'd be discussing the access they'd get to the Trump administration, but instead they got a Trump style dressing down, the source added. According to the post, attendees included NBC's Lester Holt and Chuck Todd, ABC's George Stephanopoulos, David Muir and Martha Radd, Fox News, is Bill Shine, MSNBC's Phil Griffin, and CNN's Jeff Zucker and Aaron Burnett, among others.

Here, in no particular order are a few random thoughts. First of all, the media totally deserved this. The media destroyed Mitt Romney in 2012 by turning him from an honorable family man, an excellent business person, into the scourge of the earth, searching far and wide for gay kids so he could practice his hair-cutting skills, hunting down dogs to strap them to his car. The media then decided to treat Barack Obama with kid gloves for eight years, soft-pedaling his lies on everything from Obamacare to Benghazi. Then finally, the media built up Donald Trump in the primaries and then attempted to tear him down in the general. They've earned every bit of scorn Trump can level it done. Second, Trump's going to start every single firefight he can. The media didn't leak this story to the Post gang. Trump's people certainly did. The Post was one of the friendliest publications in the country to Trump. And this bolsters Trump's favorite case, that he's a powerful God King, willing to face down the scurrilous media and hammer them into the ground. Trump relishes this sort of fisticuffs. It's why he singled out reporters during his campaign. It's why he went to war with Hamilton and Saturday Night Live over the weekend. Trump gets that most of his voters are sick of watching the media monopoly, and they're more than willing to countenance a president blasting away at the media if it means destroying that monopoly.

Third, the media will seek revenge by turning up the volume.

The media just don't know how to handle a Republican who doesn't seem to care about their adoration.

Their solution thus far is turning up the volume to 11.

That's not working.

They're treating every Trump tweet as apocalyptic.

Every Trump outrage is plumbing new depths of Dante's Inferno. That only succeeds in making Trump look justified in slapping them with both hands,

then poking them in the eyes like a member of the Three Suges. The only way the media could cover

Trump properly would be to understate their case rather than trotting out Howard Dean to label

Trump cabinet appointees Nazis or covering Richard Spencer's alt-right hate

fest as an extension of Trump world. Finally, this is not actually great news for Americans.

Despite the delicious schuydenfreude, this is not good news. Americans are best served when the press

of every stripe have access to information about the executive branch. Closing off access for

political gain was bad when Obama did

and it isn't good when Trump does it. Many conservatives can't see past their own shortling

over the media shamefacedly shuffling from Trump Tower tails between their legs, which is

understandable, but the presidency is still a government office. It requires more daylight, not less.

So here's the bottom line. The lesson,

you ought to be worried about a president who's not granting access to the press, even if you're

happy that he's slapping them. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro show.

...