Over the weekend, Donald Trump barred three news orgs from the White House for the “crime” of covering him accurately. What happens in the coming weeks will determine whether he stops at just three.
On Friday the president announced on Truth Social that CNN, MSNOW, and Politico were banned over their “constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS,” and he promised other outlets would follow. By Saturday morning, Secret Service officers were confiscating hard passes from working reporters at the gates. By Sunday night, the White House had yanked CNN from the travel pool for the UN General Assembly.
This morning, all three outlets are suing, and they stand a good chance of winning. A Trump-appointed judge already ruled in a similar case involving the Associated Press that if the government opens its doors to some journalists, it cannot shut those doors to others because of their viewpoints. (However, an appeals court has been sitting on that case for months, which is why the press can’t wait on the judiciary to fix this.)
I watched this movie from the inside during the first Trump administration, and I can assure you that a courtroom victory won’t cut it. When the White House pulled Jim Acosta’s hard pass in 2018, I was at the White House and watched the depravity unfold. Chief of Staff John Kelly was deflated that he could no longer stop Trump from such petty moves, from banning reporters he didn’t like; meanwhile, mega MAGA aides in the West Wing gloated and went out to dinner to celebrate Acosta’s ban from the premises. CNN sued, the courts sided with Acosta, and even Fox News backed its rival’s case. Acosta’s badge had to be handed back.
But Donald Trump evidently took no lessons from that episode. Seven years later, he’s engaged in the most full-frontal assault on the free press of any president in modern history (arresting journalists, raiding their homes, suing news orgs, threatening to take outlets off the air, siccing the FBI on them, ejecting reporters from government buildings, and so much more). On Friday, Trump basically said he doesn’t care if he wins or loses on his White House reporter ban, in his words, “whether it survives or doesn’t.” Why? Because he’ll find other ways to retaliate.
The man whose whole career has been built on leverage thinks he has all of it and that the news outlets have none. That must change. The question for the rest of the press corps is whether they want to sit on their hands like cowards, or fight back. Do they want to issue “strongly worded” statements, or do they want to actually reverse the executive attacks on the First Amendment?
Here are five things that other news outlets covering the White House could do to take a stand in solidarity with their banned colleagues, from “mild to wild.”
1. Ask Trump about this at every public event, press availability, and interview. They should push Trump’s buttons. Hard. He should be asked about this at every briefing where he wants to boast about something else and every sit-down interview where he hopes to peddle his lies about the “greatest” economy and the war we’re “winning” in Iran. In fact, it should go beyond the president. At every single event where an administration official appears, they should be asked by the free press about the censorship of the free press. If they really want to get serious, they each make their first question about the ban… and it stays the first question until the badges are restored.
2. Refuse to fill the empty chairs of the banned outlets and make it visible. In 2009, when the Obama Treasury Department tried to exclude Fox News from a round of pool interviews, the other network bureau chiefs refused to participate unless Fox was included. The administration folded the same day. That kind of solidarity needs to be put on steroids. For instance, CNN was supposed to fill the television pool slot today (the smaller group of press outlets that take turns covering the president on travel, rotating and sharing coverage); no outlet should take CNN’s spot. Leave Trump without a camera to talk to. No reporters should fill the seats of CNN, MSNOW, and Politico in the White House press briefing room. Everyone should open their questions with the names of the journalists who are barred from asking their own.
3. Get all the outlets on the lawsuit together. The fastest way to destroy Trump’s “fake news” framing is a united legal front that includes his friendliest outlets, which is less far-fetched than it sounds. As noted above, Fox filed an amicus brief for CNN in 2018, declaring that press passes “should never be weaponized,” and the current president of the White House Correspondents’ Association is a Fox News correspondent. If the filings in this case carry Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the wire services alongside all the other usual names, this stops being Trump-versus-critics and is more clearly presidency-versus-press. If they don’t — if any of these outlets decide to keep their heads down — they will regret it. Because they’re next.
4. Boycott the White House briefing room and keep Trump’s goons off the airwaves. The White House press briefing room is basically just a television set that produces content for the administration, and reporters are under no obligation to keep the cameras rolling while their colleagues are barred from coming into the building. They should refuse to show up. At the next briefing, they should let White House officials perform for a handful of far-right bloggers in an otherwise empty room. But they should go further than that. Networks should decline to book Trump officials and administration surrogates in primetime until the badges are restored. Trump’s whole operation depends on flooding the zone with noise, and the outlets themselves control the microphone. They have more leverage than a judge does — that is, if they have the courage to use it.
5. Make the president physically remove them from the building. On Friday’s program (below) I argued the banned outlets should have staged a sit-in and forced the Secret Service to carry them out. They left before their badges expired, but the reporters still inside now hold that card. If Donald Trump wants to purge the press corps the way his Pentagon did, then officers should have to remove credentialed journalists from the People’s House one by one. On camera. The Pentagon fight taught us that walking out quietly just means the seats get backfilled with propagandists. So this time nobody should walk anywhere. I get that this is the more radical approach for journalists, but don’t you see? What is happening is radical. Countries lose their speech rights if they don’t speak loudly enough to defend them.
None of these options requires an actual verdict from a judge. The press already holds the power to make this ban painful for the Trump administration. If they act, they can make sure it backfires.
In the end, we hold the cards. A Pew Research survey conducted before the ban found that 44 percent of Americans think the press has gotten “less free” since Trump’s second term began (only 12 percent say it’s gotten “more free”). Seventy-three percent of respondents, across party lines, say press freedom is extremely or very important to society. If they really believe that, then people should subscribe to the banned outlets, share their reporting, and speak out loudly about this. Regardless of party affiliation.
Donald Trump wants this fight to be about the three outlets he kicked out for exposing his corruption. In reality, it’s about all of us. And we should act like it.
Your friend, in defiance,
DEFIANCE DAILY
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