In the move that will finally, conclusively stop people from saying bad things about him—like that he’s a thin-skinned, petulant attention addict obsessed with what people he claims to hate say about him—Donald Trump issued a statement today that he’s banning CNN, MSNOW, and Politico from the White House. At last: The Problem With Journalists, solved.
Trump made these statements, obviously, on his own Truth Social social media platform, your go-to online stop for official pronouncements that the United States is, like, annexing Greenland, mixed with ads for your preferred brands of horse dewormer. Promising “other fake news media outlets to follow,” Trump claimed to have banned the three named organizations from the White House, although he didn’t go into further details about what the practicalities of the ban, an upending of years of press pool precedence, would look like.
This isn’t the first time Trump has moved to cut access to outlets he’s decided to make an example of, most notably banning The Associated Press from the Oval Office and other more select press opportunities last year over its refusal to bend the knee and start calling the Gulf Of Mexico the Gulf Of America. (The AP sued, and a judge issued an initial order letting them back into those room, but a Trump-friendly appeals judge put a stay on that order until the court case is resolved.) This latest pronouncement/tantrum is quite a bit more sweeping, though, hitting multiple outlets at once for their vaguely outlined crimes against the administration. (In a press conference later on Friday, Trump also highlighted The New York Times and The Washington Post as outlets he might consider “throwing out,” which we have to assume hurt poor Jeff Bezos’ “But I Complied In Advance!” feelings.)
CNN’s own reporting on the “ban” makes it clear that it hasn’t heard from Trump and his team about how they intend to actually enforce what is, at the moment, really just a social media post on a social media network that feels like it’s one bad pop-up ad from giving our antivirus software an aneurysm; the network put out a statement today asserting that “CNN stands fully behind our White House team and their fair and accurate reporting. We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government. Should the ban which President Trump threatened go ahead, it would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right.”
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