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A U.S. Court Of Appeals has ruled that the Trump White House can, in fact, exclude journalists from the Oval Office and Air Force One on the basis of political beliefs, with two of three judges in the case (both Trump appointees) ruling to grant the administration a stay on a previous judicial ruling. This is, of course, about Trump’s efforts to bar the Associated Press from as many official presidential press channels as it can, because the massive global news organization merely acknowledges, but does not fully adopt, Trump’s fiat declaration back in January that the Gulf Of Mexico is now the Gulf Of America. Which is, in turn, pretty blatantly about bullying the media, as a whole, to pay at least deferential lip service to any other delusions that might issue forth from his office. You know this. You are awake and alive in 2025; the gnarliness of it all is presumably not, at this point, a surprise.
Anyway, the AP, which sued over this issue, had previously gotten a ruling from a lower court judge back in April saying that, if the White House opens up spaces like the Oval for press access, it has to do it for everybody, regardless of their belief in things like maps. The D.C. Circuit Court Of Appeals did not agree, ruling that “Restricted presidential spaces are not First Amendment fora opened for private speech and discussion,” so the White House can choose who gets access to them in any way that it wants. (The dissenting judge on the opinion, an Obama appointee, noted that, “my colleagues assert a novel and unsupported exception to the First Amendment’s prohibition of viewpoint-based restrictions of private speech—one that not even the government itself advanced.”)
In the interest of technical correctness, it’s worth noting that none of these rulings are official full verdicts on the AP’s actual case, which targets as its defendants White House chief of staff Susan Wiles, deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt. The initial ruling was a preliminary injunction determining how the White House had to behave while the case is being litigated, with this latest order a stay on that injunction. The practical upshot is the same, though: The AP’s been officially denied access to huge parts of the White House’s press apparatus again, and Trump and his minions have been crowing about it on social media.
[via Variety]
