There is a striking development buried inside the administration’s escalating confrontation with the press that’s turned a familiar Donald Trump-versus-the-media fight into a potentially consequential rupture inside the right-wing media ecosystem. By banning CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO, the president tried to extract a cost for challenging coverage. The move backfired. Instead, it united competitors behind a press-freedom principle, prompting Fox News — the biggest booster of Trump’s political ascent — to participate in an unprecedented pool-coverage stoppage. 

Fox’s own Washington bureau chief, Bryan Boughton, who happened to be chairing the pool this week, sent the note announcing the shutdown. Now Peter Navarro, one of the president’s most loyal foot soldiers, is on a crusade against “the back-stabbing Fox News Corporation” and pushing the White House toward a punitive boycott of the outlet. 

Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, is actively orchestrating a campaign to persuade the White House to formally cut ties with Fox News and isolate the network, thereby dismantling its status as the supreme arbiter of conservative media. Calling it “CNN with better lighting, a fake slogan and a flag graphic,” he has accused the network of “helping the other side undermine the president.” In recent days Navarro has argued that Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and senior officials should stop appearing on Fox News and Fox Business. Not only has he attacked network executives, but he has also celebrated Real America’s Voice as a potential replacement for MAGA’s loyalties. 

The proximate cause of Navarro’s rage is Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business and Fox News anchor whose sudden firing earlier this month is key to understanding everyone’s motives in this fight. The longtime business host had been preparing to interview Navarro following Trump’s July 16 primetime speech in which the president made unsubstantiated claims about foreign interference in the 2020, 2022 and 2024 elections. After a Fox executive subsequently instructed her not to cover Trump’s claims, Bartiromo canceled Navarro’s appearance and shared the executive’s message with him. He then passed the communication up the White House chain of command. Fox treated the disclosure as a fireable offense, cutting Bartiromo loose after over 12 years, isolating her from her own staff in her final weeks and firing her executive producer alongside her. Trump himself seemed blindsided, posting that he “can’t believe” Bartiromo no longer has her shows. 

Navarro has treated Bartiromo’s exit as proof of a wider “muzzling” of MAGA. He has spent the following weeks constructing an increasingly elaborate theory of Fox as captured territory, run by executives who he claims are secretly sabotaging the president. Writing in the Washington Times and The Daily Caller, he has laid out a rap sheet: Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott is, by his account, “the same executive responsible for the decapitation of three of the network’s most intelligent talk heads”: Lou Dobbs in 2021, Tucker Carlson in 2023 and now Bartiromo, all pro-Trump voices who were pushed out while “useful RINO idiots like Karl Rove” enjoy free rein to criticize Trump’s tariffs. Navarro accused Fox of joining the entire White House television pool — which consists of ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox — to form a “Five Network Cartel” exercising illegitimate “veto power” over what Americans see of their own president. In Navarro’s view, the only acceptable resolution would be a primetime apology from the network to Trump and its viewership.

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Before he ran for office, Trump built his national political relevance through cable television, especially with Fox appearances during his birther campaign against President Barack Obama. Fox has been the top-rated network in total day and primetime cable news viewership every year since January 2002, a 24-year winning streak built precisely on the grievance-driven conservative audience that provided Trump with his political foundation. He, in turn, drove up the ratings even more. 

Fox did not build Trump alone, and Trump did not cultivate Fox’s audience alone. But their feedback loop mattered enormously: Each gave the other cultural authority with conservative voters. Members of the president’s Cabinet — from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former “Fox & Friends Weekend” host, to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — were recruited directly from the network’s anchor desks. 

Yet as Trump’s second administration reaches a critical turning point, that historic alliance has devolved into open, bitter warfare. The president’s own personal frustration with Fox predates even Navarro’s critique, though it often manifests in petty grievances and public score-settling. On Truth Social, the president has repeatedly vented his annoyance with the network, publicly berating anchor Shannon Bream — and misspelling the insult as “Milktoast” — for using outdated visual graphics of White House ballroom construction and for challenging Attorney General Todd Blanche on legal impartiality. Trump has similarly attacked Bret Baier and the network’s polling unit for displaying “Fake Polls” that reflect his declining national approval ratings.

Trump’s anger at Fox highlights a fundamental vulnerability for both himself and the network. Fox finds itself caught in an unsustainable commercial position; the network’s historically dominant ratings are showing signs of erosion as Trump’s poll numbers decline. When Fox hosts attempt to reflect the changing mood of the public or question controversial policies, they face immediate backlash from both the White House and their core audience.

This friction has become acutely visible in recent months as prominent Fox personalities have openly broken with the administration on his war of choice in Iran. Anchors who are generally supportive of the president, including Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters, have repeatedly questioned Trump’s handling of the ongoing war. The conflict has drawn strong disapproval from a large segment of Trump’s populist base, who are feeling economic pain at the fuel pumps and growing skeptical of the president’s repeated claims that the military engagement is drawing to a close. Former Fox stars like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have amplified this backlash from the outside, creating an unprecedented wave of right-wing dissent against the administration’s foreign policy.

Domestic economic policy has produced similar ideological fractures on air. Host Will Cain expressed visible frustration over Trump’s recent outreach to New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Pointing to lip-reading analysis of off-mic exchanges where Trump invited Mamdani to the White House and offered to look after his interests, Cain warned that MAGA and democratic socialism were beginning to blur, citing data showing that over half of young conservatives support government-run grocery stores and more than 40% would welcome a Democratic socialist presidency.

A week after his Oval Office temper tantrum, Trump’s press crackdown has succeeded only in exposing deep ideological fractures within the conservative movement and uniting historically fierce media competitors against his overreach. (On Thursday, a Trump-appointed judge issued a temporary order restoring access of the outlets to the White House for 14 days, while the legal challenge is ongoing.)

The president’s crackdown assumed Fox would play the compliant beneficiary, scooping up airtime and access that CNN and MS NOW no longer had. Instead Fox recognized, correctly, that a press pool that can be selectively gutted by presidential fiat today is also one that offers no institutional protection to others tomorrow, including Fox itself. In fact, after pool coverage resumed on Friday, the White House barred CNN from traveling with Trump on Air Force One. 

Instead of establishing Trump’s control over the media, the White House’s attempt at press suppression showed the limits of that control and, in the process, placed Fox News in the crosshairs of the very movement it helped build.

The post Fox News could suffer the most under Trump’s press crackdown appeared first on Salon.com.

Early morning chaos reigned at the White House on Thursday.

In the pre-dawn hours, federal District Court Judge Timothy Kelly granted CNN, Politico and MS NOW a temporary restraining order allowing them to regain access to the White House after Donald Trump had unceremoniously yanked their press passes last Friday.

But the Secret Service and White House officials initially refused access to those reporters as the work day began, even as Trump allowed entry to Chinese state media, telling them they were friendlier than the independent Washington press corps.

Sitting In evident defiance of a court order, (he never stands for anything, unless it’s to bow to an authoritarian leader) Trump appeared ready to risk an acute constitutional crisis.

By noon he had backed down. 

So by my count that leaves First Amendment attorney Ted Boutrous, who represented the news organizations, 5–0 when pitching against Donald Trump. That’s one hell of a legacy.

If I leave a legacy, I hope it’s for something as well done. 

I imagine Donald Trump wishes the same thing. But I don’t think the president and I agree on the meaning of “well done.” That’s just the way he likes his burgers.

Trump is mired in the muck of his own making — enraged that he can’t get his way, so scared of the midterm elections that he had his supporters take an oath to “cheat like hell” and so ignorant of history that he seems condemned to repeat all its worst parts.

A source of mine from the George W. Bush administration, reflecting on Trump, told me this week, “People? They ain’t no damn good. You can’t trust ’em and can’t love ’em. No good deed goes unpunished.”

“Quoting Mellencamp?” I replied. “Lighten up, brother.” 

I understand the epic frustration Trump causes and inflicts. Some of us have been documenting his dictatorial, disruptive, divisive, dangerous and delusional escapades for more than a decade. This past week, I was forced to relive an experience covering Trump to which, until now, only one other person on the planet could relate. 

On Wednesday, Judge Kelly held a half-hour hearing on CNN, Politico and MS NOW’s request for a temporary restraining order against Trump’s snatch-and-grab of their press passes. To me, this was a case of déjà-vu all over again. Or as my longtime White House colleague Jim Acosta told me on his show Wednesday afternoon, “It ain’t over til it’s over.” Jim and I had a particular reason to trade Yogi Berra quips; we empathize with the reporters’ plight. We’re the only two reporters who’ve been through this before.

Of course, this time there was a new Trumpian twist on the narrative. On Friday, Trump simply said he didn’t like those media companies and resented their negative coverage, and then shooed the reporters away with a wave of his hand. By Monday, after Boutrous filed suit, Trump’s lawyers were making the ridiculous claim that the aforementioned media outlets were compromising national security. 

He’s used that all-purpose catchphrase before to try to get his way with the big, beautiful ballroom and his proposed massive arch. Excuse me? Why would we need snipers on the George Washington Memorial Parkway? Or drones? Or a massive arsenal of weapons and ammunition? OK, Dr. Strangelove, what’s next?

Trump based his national security claim on the actions of a handful of reporters who don’t even hold White House passes, along with one who does. He claimed that a few routine stories — some of them five months old — had somehow compromised national security. The funny thing is that until he made that claim in court, he’d never even cleared his throat on those stories. And the one reporter who holds White House credentials? She recently got them renewed after the stories were published.

Geez, is it possible that Trump was just making stuff up? Judge Kelly’s hearing was a particularly acute memory for Acosta, since Kelly was the judge in his case too.  For me it was unnerving to hear the judge, the plaintiff and the defense attorney mention “Karem v. Trump” about three dozen times in their arguments. My ears were burning, but I tried to remember that in this particular case, having my name mentioned in court was a good thing. Nobody was standing by with handcuffs. Kelly ended the hearing by promising a decision as soon as possible, and issued a 14-day restraining order in a matter of hours.

Too bad I didn’t draw Kelly in my case. Not that I didn’t like its outcome, since U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras and later a federal appeals court ruled that the loss of my press credentials violated due process, setting that as the precedent for all future cases in the D.C. Circuit. It’s just that I was without my press pass for nearly three weeks. Kelly worked more quickly.

Trump of course isn’t fond of Kelly. When he found out who was handling the current case, the president weighed in on Truth Social, calling Kelly “totally disloyal” and “not a particularly fair judge.”

Naturally it was Trump who appointed Kelly to the bench.

I ran afoul of Trump on July 11, 2019, during a meeting in Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden, before Trump turned it into a tawdry Miami Beach patio reminiscent of cheap hotels from the 1960s. Trump hosted an event for his favorite media influencers. They sat in seats in the Rose Garden. The rest of us stood, as usual, behind a rope line. 

Trump made a few perfunctory statements and turned to leave. I was about 10 feet away and asked him if he would stay and take a few questions. Someone who was sitting down turned and literally hissed at me: “He’s already talked to the real press.”

I chuckled and said, in my best Rodney Dangerfield voice, “Ooh, here’s a group eager for demonic possession.” That got a few laughs, but when I reviewed the tape later I was disappointed with myself. I usually do a much better Rodney impression. Ask anyone.  

Sebastian Gorka, a Trump underling who speaks like one of those beings who don’t rise until after sunset, approached me from the far side of the Rose Garden after that. He was wearing an ill-fitting suit and resembled the kid who peaked in eighth grade because he was big for his age and could grow a beard. Gorka went on to later infamy selling fish oil in commercials. He’s now back working for Trump, who hires only the best people.

He came at me stomping and yelling: I wasn’t a reporter, Gorka said, I was a punk. I replied that we could either talk here in the Rose Garden or go outside and talk all day. Nothing happened. When the ruckus, of which we were only a part, died down, we found ourselves standing nearly shoulder to shoulder as we left and went our separate ways. Without the cameras on, everything was different.

More than a month passed, and nothing more happened. Then, on Aug.16, 2019, Trump gathered at the rope line for a “chopper talk” session before leaving the White House on Marine One. He answered two of my questions, calling me “Playboy” (my previous longtime employer) as often as he called me “fake news.” I left that afternoon and two hours later, while at dinner with my wife, I got a call from my editor. My credentials had been suspended because I had been rude, crude, unruly and socially unacceptable in my earlier encounter with Gorka. Trump apparently wasn’t upset that on that particular day I had asked him if he was delusional. 

When we got to court, the Trump attorneys said that if they couldn’t throw me out of the White House for what I’d done, then how could they keep reporters from mooning the first lady. They didn’t mention mooning other reporters. Would that compromise national security? No? I guess directly mooning the president might qualify.

Judge Contreras said in his judgment, “This event was also one where jocular insults had been flying from all directions.There is no indication in the record that other offenders were reprimanded or even told to stop.”

As Kelly said from the beginning of the Wednesday hearing, the decision in Karem v. Trump affirmed and fleshed out due process, and he had to apply it as precedent, meaning the government was screwed from the outset. The reasons for pulling my pass were ridiculous, but the importance of the decision cannot be forgotten. 

While it is a privilege to get a White House press pass, that’s not the point. It cannot be confiscated without a well-defined cause. “No official can deprive Plaintiffs of those interests on a whim — with no notice, no process, and no warning — as the President did here,” Boutrous argued. Accordingly, the loss of those credentials and the “White House access” that accompanies them without due process is unconstitutional. 

I’d like to personally thank Donald Trump for his actions. By going after media organizations this time around instead of individual reporters, as you did with me and Acosta, you finally got the press to work together again — though I’m quite sure that wasn’t your intention. Still, it warms the cockles of my heart to see pool reporters finally refusing to cover the president until and unless he stops acting like an ass.

Had the press worked together so diligently when Acosta and I had our passes confiscated, or when Trump took over assigning reporters to the press pool, or when the AP ran afoul of the president over the “Gulf of America,” or when he kicked reporters out of the upper press area, then we might have avoided the latest dust-up. The only way to stand up to a bully is to push back and defend our rights. I applaud everyone who is now in the fight. As Bruce Willis put it in “Die Hard,” “Welcome to the party, pal.” I’m just pointing out that the party was sparsely populated before you got here. 

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Maybe Karem v. Trump is all the legacy I will ever get. Beating Trump three times in court? I will claim it. I leave it to history to judge its importance to the First Amendment. 

I’d prefer my legacy to be my family. That, plus a five-minute black-and-white short film of a man and a woman meeting, dancing to Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” and then walking away from each other. But you can’t have everything. I’m not picky. I’m just listening to jazz.

Ted Boutrous’ legacy will be his historic defense of free speech and due process by defeating the hackish clowns from Trump’s Justice Department who tried to peddle lies a fool could pry apart. He’s beaten Trump three times representing me, once more defending Acosta and now he’s won again.Trump will leave an unparalleled legacy of the attempted destruction of the U.S. Constitution. He too will be long remembered – though not for anything good. 

Wednesday’s decision by Judge Kelly shows that the power in the White House remains with “We the people.” Trump is just a hired hand, a temp employee whose stewardship of the republic has failed miserably. 

We’d better not forget that, because remembering and acting on it should be everyone’s shared legacy.

 

The post Years before his CNN and Politico ban, Trump yanked my press pass appeared first on Salon.com.

We’ve been afflicted with the Donald Trump show for far too long. For more than a decade, American public life has been suffocated by a relentless, 24/7 reality television nightmare centered on his insatiable ego. The entire political existence of the self-described “king of ratings” has depended on a toxic, symbiotic relationship with the press that consists of bombastic press conferences and constant visual dominance designed to suck all the air out of the room. But when a clown’s only trick is shouting into a live microphone, the absolute worst thing that can happen is for the cameras to simply turn off. It’s clear by this week’s spectacle that Trump cannot survive the possibility that America has finally changed the channel.

On Friday, in a fit of authoritarian pique, Trump banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House press pool. It was a classic bully move. Yet, in a rare and long-overdue display of institutional solidarity, the rest of the press corps refused to play along. Major networks including NBC, ABC, CBS and even Fox News suspended their pool coverage of the president. Photographers from major wire services and news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post stopped publishing new images of the octogenarian chief executive.

The immediate result was an unadulterated farce. Stripped of his apparatus, Trump stepped onto the White House lawn to host a ribbon-cutting ceremony for his prized new helipad. He preened, grabbed his oversized scissors and opened his mouth to boast, but no one could hear a single word over the deafening roar of Marine One’s idling engines. The White House’s own official feed lacked the audio equipment that network pool crews typically provide. Viewers were left watching a silent movie of a shrinking figure gesticulating wildly into the wind. Even anchors on right-wing channels like Newsmax were forced to admit on air that the media ban was backfiring.

Trump got the closest thing to a full media blackout that modern television has ever handed a sitting president and his answer, apparently workshopped over a single weekend, was to build his own tiny replacement network out of recycled clips and call it a triumph. On Monday, the White House rolled out “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” a 24-hour YouTube livestream on the official White House channel. The promotional hype promised an unedited, nonstop look at the administration’s “greatest hits” to circumvent the supposed censorship of the mainstream media. What they delivered instead was a glorified, automated graveyard of old clips. Viewers who tuned in expecting cutting-edge propaganda were greeted by a two-month-old Trump speech from Mount Rushmore, followed hours later by a rerun of a months-old address regarding creative uses for artificial intelligence and, eventually, a year-old broadcast of a dinner with Britain’s King Charles III. On Tuesday morning, while Trump was actually delivering a live address to the United Nations General Assembly, his own channel was airing his remarks from a prayer breakfast held at the White House in February. 

The numbers tell the story. “Trump TV: The Essentials Station” went live on the White House YouTube channel Monday at 7 p.m. Roughly 8,000 people tuned in for the premiere. Ninety minutes later that number had been reduced by half. By the next morning, as the cable news shows Trump was supposedly trying to render obsolete came on the air, his own channel had cratered to a little over 1,000 viewers, out of more than three million subscribers to the White House’s YouTube account. The viewership figures were a brutal reality check for a man whose self-worth is entirely tied to Nielsen points.

Trump has spent a lifetime mistaking attention for affection and ratings for legitimacy. Reporting and testimony from Trumpworld have long suggested that his 2016 campaign began at least partly as a vehicle for attention, leverage and perhaps a Trump-branded media enterprise. He was reportedly shocked by his victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But once he discovered that the presidency provided a permanent camera crew, a global stage and an endless supply of people forced to listen, he developed an addiction that makes the rest of his behavior easier to understand. Stripped of the drama generated by actual journalists asking tough questions, however, Trump’s unfiltered echo chamber is excruciatingly boring. 

Trump TV’s desperate launch fits a decades-long pattern of grandiose vanity projects that inevitably collapse under the weight of their own cheapness. Before he became president, he was a brand in search of a platform. The list of failed enterprises bearing his family moniker is as long as it is embarrassing. There were the frozen steaks, the fraudulent university, the ill-fated airline shuttle, the bankrupt Atlantic City casinos and a short-lived dating show spun off from “The Apprentice” that was canceled after two seasons. There was the failed search engine, the closed charity, the cheap furniture line and the mortgage company launched right before the housing bubble burst. Trump TV is merely the latest entry in a long line of hollow grifts. 

Unable to command the airwaves from the Oval Office this week, Trump was forced to decamp to New York City to find a camera. In an ironic twist, the self-proclaimed media titan had to rely on a joint appearance with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — that reportedly angered some Republicans — to get his face back on television screen feeds. Standing at Gracie Mansion in the heart of liberal America, the president squeaked to reporters about how he had somehow beaten the boycott, boasting about the crowd of journalists while visibly shrinking in stature. Mamdani gracefully reminded the audience of the critical importance of a free press, while Trump predictably rambled about himself.

Later, at the United Nations, the president threw a visible tantrum when he spotted CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins in the briefing room, whining that she should not be allowed to cover him because of the network’s stance. Collins calmly noted that her credentials were issued by the U.N., not the West Wing, and proceeded to press him on national security concerns surrounding his unsanctioned military maneuvers in Iran. 

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It’s becoming clearer every day that the country is already moving past the Trump show. Beyond the broadcast networks, the wider media ecosystem is tuning him out. An analysis of nearly 70,000 hours of political podcasts conducted by The Wall Street Journal revealed that mentions of Trump’s name on conservative platforms have plummeted by nearly 70% from their 2024 pre-election peaks. His audience is exhausted. 

None of this is merely embarrassing. It is also very possibly illegal — and not in some abstract, symbolic sense. 

For 75 years Congress has barred federal agencies from spending appropriated money on publicity or propaganda that lawmakers haven’t explicitly authorized, a restriction currently codified as Section 718 of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act. Any government resource used to produce partisan content that glorifies an official or an administration runs straight into that wall, and there is no minimum dollar threshold that makes a violation too small to count. Under the Antideficiency Act, federal employees who knowingly commit the government to spending beyond its appropriations for such content face fines up to $5,000, up to two years in prison or both, with a five-year statute of limitations that will still be running long after this administration leaves office. Slapping the Trump name on the Kennedy Center, hanging his portrait on federal buildings and, now, producing a taxpayer-funded YouTube channel that exists to replay his own speeches with no disclosed staff and no editorial standard — all of it likely clears that bar. Nobody expects this Justice Department, led by Trump’s former personal attorney Todd Blanche, to prosecute itself. But somebody is eventually going to have to answer for how the funds behind Trump TV were spent and justified.

The legal fight over the press ban itself is proceeding on a parallel and even more consequential track. CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW sued the administration Monday, arguing that stripping their credentials without notice or a chance to respond violates due process and the First Amendment. Their case leans on Sherrill v. Knight, the 1977 D.C. Circuit ruling that grew out of a reporter’s fight over a revoked White House press pass and established that access, once granted to bona fide journalists, cannot be pulled arbitrarily or because officials dislike what someone writes. The judge assigned to the case is Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee who, in an earlier chapter of this same fight, ordered the White House to restore then-CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s credentials back in 2018, citing that very precedent. 

In its response this week, the Justice Department didn’t just defend the specific ban. It asked the courts to overturn Sherrill entirely, arguing that access to the White House is a privilege rather than a right, and that the president should have the same discretion over the whole complex that he has over more sensitive spaces like the Oval Office. The filing is not a defense of one bad decision. It is a request for permission to make the president’s media ban permanent, to convert selective access into a standing tool for punishing unfriendly coverage every single day this administration remains in office, regardless of how this particular ban is ultimately resolved.

The cruelest, most effective thing the press could do right now is exactly what it is already doing: nothing. Keep the boycott going. Let the Trump TV feed play to a couch of true believers and stray insomniacs. Trump has spent his entire adult life treating attention as oxygen, and for the first time in a decade, the room has actually gone quiet around him.

The post Trump TV is the end of an era for the “king of ratings” appeared first on Salon.com.

Blame Natalie Harp. On Friday, seemingly out of nowhere, Donald Trump banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House after whining for the umpteenth time about “Fake News,” his decade-long catchphrase to demonize accurate but unflattering press coverage. (It remains unclear if the president, whose paternal grandfather was from Germany, knows the term is an English translation of the infamous Nazi term “lügenpresse.”) Trump has been complaining about the media’s insufficient reverence for him throughout his entire political career, but there seems to be no precipitating cause for this particular tantrum. To the contrary, POLITICO reported that “senior staff were surprised by the directive, which happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town.”

“You get sick of it,” was all Trump would offer in the way of explanation for his media ban. 

Soon, though, reports showed that it was likely a response to provocations from Trump’s aide, Natalie Harp. “Aide” is probably too generous a word for Harp’s job, which is reportedly to follow the president around and attempt to soothe him with an endless barrage of flattery from herself and with print-outs of his followers saying nice things about him online. Even though she recently wrote “I never want to bring you anything but joy” to the man she she calls her “Guardian and Protector,” it appears Harp is actually quite comfortable showing Trump materials guaranteed to hurt his notoriously fragile ego.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Harp “showed him clips of anchors on the cable network MS NOW criticizing his administration” on Friday, which sent the agitated president into “a fever pitch.” CNN followed up with a report that she also provided him with clips from CNN and POLITICO, resulting in a rage from Trump that led to an impulsive ban of the three outlets. 

Harp became famous earlier this summer, when Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., mentioned in a campaign speech that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” on the new Air Force One than do his job as president. The White House responded with a five-alarm overreaction, a move that only served to draw more attention to his relationship with a woman that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has described as Trump’s “human binky.” At first, the relationship was mostly the source of mockery that someone of the his stature apparently needs a full-time ego masseuse who often totes around enormous bags, which have generated speculation about their contents. (Some have connected them, with no concrete evidence, to the strange shape of the president’s prominent posterior.) 

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This new wrinkle in the Harp story, though, suggests that she’s not just a human Band-Aid for Trump’s insecurities — she is actively dangerous. It’s unclear why she apparently showed the president clips that were guaranteed to anger him, but the result is that he launched the most serious assault in his ongoing war on the free press and the First Amendment. The episode shows that Harp isn’t just there to flatter and soothe Trump; she is also willing to get him worked up so that his terrible decision-making skills deteriorate even further. 

This move works out very nicely for Harp; it will almost certainly make Trump more dependent on her. She’s setting up a contrast for the praise-hungry Trump, between the “nasty” media that says stuff that offends his ego and what she has on offer as a lithe blonde exalting his magnificence. Plus, having had his feelings hurt by the press coverage, he’ll be even more eager for her services as a professional ego-fluffer. 

The situation is potentially dangerous for the country. As his press ban shows, Trump’s sense of entitlement and demands for adulation are getting worse, making him more prone to lash out at those he feels show insufficient deference. He also seems to feel less constrained by the law in exerting his power to punish those who aren’t sufficiently compliant, an attitude that goes beyond his outrage at the media. For months, Trump has been illegally withholding federal funds to states that didn’t vote for him. 

The president’s addiction to flattery has always made him vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors. But this appears to have increased during his second term. Nowhere is this more obvious than with his war in Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hawkish Republicans, led by the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, spent years trying to lure the U.S. into a war with the Islamic Republic. They were unsuccessful, never quite able to persuade past presidents, including Trump in  his first term, to ignore the military experts warning against taking action. But in February, Graham finally managed to get Trump over the line, appealing to his vanity by shamelessly comparing him to Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

This time, Trump’s demand for nothing but fawning coverage backfired. The major networks that comprise the White House press pool, including Fox News, responded to the media ban with a boycott. “Mr. Trump, for whom television is better than any narcotic, finds himself for the first time at least partially deprived of the major networks that have covered nearly every movement and utterance he has made for more than a decade,” wrote Peter Baker of the New York Times.

Deprived of his attention fix, the president visited New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion on Monday, crowing, “They never boycott me” and “Look at all that press,” ignoring the fact that they were there at the invitation of the popular Mamdani and not himself. In reality, the boycott has already resulted in one major humiliation for Trump. The president’s comments were inaudible during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for his vaunted South Lawn helipad because his streaming team couldn’t get the sound working in the absence of CNN. 

Now the White House is attempting to salve the president’s wounded ego by launching “Trump TV,” which appears to be nothing more than a hasty rebranding of the existing in-house video team that livestreams events on social media. This is unlikely to quell Trump’s angst over losing the media coverage he himself banned, especially since the White House livestreams have already given his team headaches in the person of Aaron Rupar, the independent journalist who seizes opportunities to grab unflattering shots of the presidential backside.

Trump very obviously craves the validation that can only come from getting attention from major media outlets. While he may have a professional enabler in Harp, nothing can beat the narcissistic fix of national cable news coverage. Even she probably can’t keep him from soon rescinding the ban and recovering his access to those sweet, sweet cameras. 

The post Natalie Harp isn’t a joke — she is Trump’s dangerous enabler appeared first on Salon.com.

The president is going after the press again.

The post When presidents ban journalists, the First Amendment is not the only constitutional right at stake appeared first on Salon.com.

Trump Manages to Silence Himself

The news outlets that make up the TV pool that covers the White House and the president’s schedule joined together on Monday to announce that they would not be “designated as pool coverage of the president” until further notice after President Trump banned CNN from the White House.

“This is to advise that, effective today, the TV pool will not be covering events designated as pool coverage of the President,” Fox News Washington bureau chief Bryan Boughton, who is also the chair of the TV pool, wrote in a memo to journalists in the White House press corps. The memo was obtained by the Washington Post and others on Monday.

“There will be no replacement pool put in place. All other pool coverage will continue as normal, including Congress, VIPs, and selected events in Washington and around the country,” it said.

The news comes after President Trump announced last week that CNN, MS NOW and Politico were banned from the White House — and journalists from those outlets were turned away from the White House grounds. Lawyers for the banned news outlets and individual journalists filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington, D.C. on Monday, alleging violations of the news organizations’ First Amendment rights.

“This morning, we notified the government that we are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes,” the three news organizations said in a statement on Monday, per CNN.

“Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting,” they said. “Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”

The members of the TV pool news organizations announced their boycott on Monday morning as well.

“The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting,” ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Media and NBC News, the five cable networks that make up the rotating White House TV pool, wrote in a statement on X Monday.

The pool is a system that news outlets have been using for decades to help split the cost of having cameras follow the president’s moves on a daily basis. Per WaPo:

The assigned network records and distributes a live feed that other news outlets can use. Without a TV pooler, there will be scant video coverage of Trump unless news outlets take their own video or use feeds provided by the White House.

The Washington Post also announced it would not publish any photos of any presidential events on Monday until midnight ET.

There are legitimate concerns about the vacuum created by the news outlets’ absence — and what this White House might do to fill the void. A year ago, Trump’s White House blocked the White House Correspondents’ Association from choosing members of the White House press pool, effectively taking control over which news outlets could send reporters to cover White House events.

But for today, at least, Trump managed to silence himself. His attempt to unveil his new White House helipad was not televised live on the usual cable news channels Monday. Here’s footage from Newsmax of the event. You can’t hear him.

LMFAO — Trump is holding an event at the White House right now but there's no audio because the press pool isn't there. The Newsmax host notes that this is an example of Trump's attacks on the press "backfiring just a little bit"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-09-21T17:51:50.189Z

Last week, Fox News seemed to be trying to give Donald Trump what he wanted. Network personalities went on air and recited, with all the enthusiasm of a sixth grader reading a book report he skimmed on the bus, the rosiest possible version of Trump’s economy. Will Cain stood in front of a big board and tried to force-feed viewers praise for an economy that much of the public sees as failing them and their families. Greg Gutfeld, in the familiar performance of a man discovering empathy only when the numbers flatter his side, acted surprised to care about falling poverty statistics. It all had the feel of a network reading from the same set of talking points, dispatched from somewhere on the C-suite level, hurrying to convince viewers that Trump’s economy is thriving.

But that synchronized propaganda blitz flopped. 

Whatever the assignment was supposed to accomplish, it did not appease the man it was designed to flatter. By the end of the week, the president who had just been handed hours of favorable spin by the most watched cable network in the nation let out a tantrum so large it swallowed three unrelated newsrooms. Facing a failing presidency, crashing poll numbers, the prospect of a Democratic wave in November’s midterms and zero sense of a second-term agenda, Trump just up and banned CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House for seemingly no reason. On Monday, they announced they were suing to reinstate their access.

“On Friday the press shop was blindsided,” Politico reported, as the directive happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town. Still, the latest retaliatory purge was as pathetic as it was predictable. Trump did not identify a specific false report or allege a security breach to justify his radical action. Instead, his stated offense was simply that these outlets had produced too many negative stories over too much time. By Saturday morning, reporters from all three outlets were turned away at the White House gates. 

Fox News barely let out a peep. And the rest of the White House press corps — the reporters who share vans and pool feeds and holiday parties with the people just banished — did what they have done for a decade now. Mostly nothing.

That appears to have changed Monday morning. Late Sunday night, the administration announced it was banning CNN from serving in its previously scheduled slot as the television pool representative for the White House press corps — a marked escalation of the situation. In response, major networks including ABC, CBS, NBC and, notably, Fox News — agreed to suspend their pool coverage of Trump in solidarity with CNN. In a joint statement, the four networks, along with CNN, said, “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information about its government. No administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”

New York Times reporter Peter Baker pointed out the historic nature of this event: “For the first time in my 30 years of covering the White House, the president will not have a network TV camera covering his everyday official actions and travels.”

At least until this point, Trump knew the press corps’ dirty little secret: It was far too late for symbolic outrage to substitute for collective action. The press has spent years teaching Trump that it is possible to divide journalists from one another. He recognized that much of the Washington press corps will deplore his conduct in a statement, and then show up for the next photo-op, fight for the next pool slot and keep treating access to an increasingly authoritarian White House as a professional prize. He believed, with good reason, that outlets like Fox News will even frame the exclusion of their peers as a partisan squabble in an effort to appear balanced. 

But Fox News has been here before.

In 2009, when Barack Obama’s White House tried to marginalize Fox News by excluding the network from an interview with Treasury official Kenneth Feinberg, the other television networks pushed back. The attempt was temporary — exclusion from one specific interview, not an announced and potentially expanding ban on multiple major outlets from White House grounds because their reporting offended the president. But the other four major television networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN — refused to participate if Fox was excluded.

The Washington bureau chiefs delivered a clear ultimatum that either Fox News is allowed in the room, or nobody goes in. Jake Tapper, then at ABC, confronted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs in the briefing room and asked him directly why it was appropriate for the government to declare a news organization illegitimate. (Fox lawyers later argued in court that hosts like Tucker Carlson cannot reasonably be considered legitimate sources of news.) Facing a unified front from a press corps that put constitutional principles ahead of commercial rivalries, the Obama administration backed down immediately. 

That moment demonstrated the power of absolute press solidarity. The networks did not defend Fox News because they agreed with its right-wing bias, but because they understood the precedent that would be set if a president were permitted to ban a critic from the room. Once the government establishes press facilities and admits credentialed journalists to gather news, it cannot hand access out according to ideological loyalty. 

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But that solidarity fractured in the years that followed. With Trump’s rise and his infamously leaky first term, White House reporters have seemingly surrendered to access journalism. When he descended his golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015, major television networks traded journalistic rigor for spectacle. They broadcast his rallies uninterrupted, handing him billions of dollars in free airtime to normalize his attacks on democratic norms. In 2018, the administration pulled CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s press credentials after he refused to hand back a microphone during a heated exchange. CNN sued, other outlets filed friend of the court briefs, and the administration eventually folded and restored his pass. Although imperfect, this response demonstrated that the old model still worked.

In 2025, Trump tried it again, this time against the Associated Press, after the wire service declined to rename the Gulf of Mexico on his say so. The AP sued. Fox News, NBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post all filed amicus briefs on the AP’s behalf, and a Trump appointed district court judge, Trevor McFadden, ordered the ban lifted from the broader White House grounds, even as an appeals court let Trump keep the AP out of the Oval Office, Air Force One and Mar-a-Lago while the case proceeds. All the while, the president held press avails in which he continued to attack the press. 

Trump understands how to exploit every weakness the media has cultivated, like its addiction to spectacle. He insults a reporter, and the clip runs all day. He threatens a network, and the network gets a bump in attention. He calls the press “the enemy of the people,” then calls individual reporters when he wants to plant a story or manipulate a news cycle. He denounces the New York Times as “fake news,” then sits for lengthy interviews with its reporters when they are writing books he hopes will immortalize his preferred version of events. At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump turned CNN’s Kaitlan Collins into a target of misogynistic ridicule while the assembled press corps remained seated. 

This breakdown of solidarity among the press corps has allowed Republicans to build a false narrative around media access. After Trump announced his ban on CNN, Politico and MS NOW, the conservative political machine rallied to defend the blatantly unconstitutional act with a familiar bait and switch. Trump allies like Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., absurdly claimed no president has been more open to the press than Trump and mocked the idea that press access requires actual access. Scalise repeatedly parroted the debunked claim that Joe Biden revoked the credentials of 400 reporters, a distortion fact-checked by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who noted that only one reporter was ever denied a credential under Biden. The rest simply hadn’t reapplied and were let in anyway. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz told CNN’s own Dana Bash that he backs banning her network. Fox News contributor Joey Jones, whose colleague Jacqui Heinrich is the current White House Correspondents’ Association president, casually remarked that he would not “shed a tear” over the banned journalists. Heinrich, Fox’s White House correspondent, rightly condemned the ban as an unequivocal violation of the First Amendment.

Fox’s opinion side has spent a decade building an audience that treats CNN’s misfortune as content. In that time, Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit after internal communications revealed how Trump’s false election claims were knowingly aired and promoted.

But Monday morning’s news that at least some of the past solidarity has returned is heartening — and it stands as a rebuke to an out-of-control president and administration that thinks they can bulldoze the media into submission. Still, the damage has been done. While a legal victory for CNN, Politico and MS NOW is probable, it will in all likelihood come months from now, after the outlets have been shut out of covering the president during the most consequential midterm season in a generation. That is not the same as winning. 

Executive power cannot be checked by the courts alone; it must be checked by real-time resistance from reporters. Monday’s collective action is a meaningful first step. Now there should be another: while the lawyers argue the case in federal court, the rest of the White House press corps should make sure the chairs in the briefing room are empty.

UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect Monday morning’s news that ABC, CBS, Fox News and NBC are suspending pool coverage in solidarity with CNN, and that CNN, Politico and MS NOW are filing suit to regain access to the White House.

The post Trump didn’t break the press. They did that to themselves appeared first on Salon.com.

The White House began enforcing President Donald Trump‘s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico Saturday, denying reporters from all three news organizations access to the White House grounds and confiscating or disabling their credentials.

CNN senior White House reporter Betsy Klein, MS NOW correspondent Akayla Gardner and Politico White House reporter Cheyenne Haslett were each turned away Saturday morning.

Gardner said she passed through two security gates before discovering that her White House badge had been disabled. An officer then asked her to surrender the credential, telling her the decision came from “above him.” Klein similarly reported that her credential had been deactivated, while Politico said Haslett’s badge was confiscated.

The restrictions extend beyond access to the White House briefing room or limited presidential events. Without access to the grounds, affected journalists also lose their regular workspace and access to areas such as Reporters’ Lane, where television correspondents frequently deliver live reports from the White House complex.

Trump announced the ban Friday on Truth Social, accusing the three organizations of “reporting FAKE NEWS” and warning that “Other Fake News Media Outlets” could follow.

The president did not identify a specific report that prompted the decision. Asked about the timing Friday, Trump said it was “really just cumulative stories over the past few years.”

“They purposely write negative news,” Trump said, accusing the outlets of trying to diminish Republicans and his administration.

Trump later described the order as a “very simple ban,” adding, “I would say the ban would go as far as you can.”

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CNN called the move an “illegal assault” on its constitutionally protected rights. Politico said it would “vigorously defend” its First Amendment rights, while MS NOW said Saturday it would take “any and all steps necessary” to defend its journalists.

CNN Statement on White House access: https://t.co/X0rMWFfueA

— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) September 18, 2026

The administration previously restricted Associated Press journalists from some presidential events after the organization continued using “Gulf of Mexico” in its coverage following Trump’s order renaming the body of water the “Gulf of America.” The AP sued the administration, and that litigation remains ongoing.

Trump has suggested the current restrictions may expand beyond the three outlets.

The post Trump escalates media fight with new White House press ban appeared first on Salon.com.