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Members of the White House press pool and White House TV watch as President Donald Trump walks to board Air Force One, Monday, 21 Sept.
ColumnStars and Swipes
Trump’s war with the press has finally met some resistance
The Trump Show has always needed the press, but on Donald’s terms. This time around, the press is finally saying no.
BY THE TIME you read this column, it is entirely possible that CNN, MS Now and Politico, the three news outlets that were banned by Trump last Friday, will be back at their White House media perches, lobbing questions and being ignored or excoriated as fake news/dumb/corrupt/lousy journalists who are (in the case of female journalists only) ‘ugly on the inside and out’.
It’s also possible that Trump will have pulled the plug on the entire White House TV pool, casting out Fox News, NBC, CBS and ABC for having the temerity to stand up for their CNN colleagues by refusing to provide camera and sound crews for Trump’s events on Monday.
After almost a decade of belittling its members and whittling away its First Amendment rights, the White House press corps has finally grown the semblance of a spine with its first unified defiance of the White House authoritarian creep that has long since progressed to a gallop.
The TV pool’s refusal to step into the breach caused by Trump’s banning of CNN, the fifth member of the White House TV pool, was followed by a refusal by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Associated Press and other outlets to publish photographs of Trump’s scheduled appearances on Monday. His meeting with New York Mayor Zohran Mandami, his visit to the UN General Assembly and his meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron were subjected to a visual blackout, although smaller entities picked up the slack.
Surreal
A moment of unintentional comedic gold transpired when the White House comms team attempted to plug the gap by providing their own footage of Trump cutting the ribbon around his brand-new White House helicopter pad. But someone forgot to wire him for sound; as a result, the footage is accompanied by incoherent emissions from the US President.
The cynic in me says the White House press corps’ united stance stems from the near-certain knowledge that this battle over access will be brief and relatively bloodless. Media coverage is oxygen for the reality TV President, and with Xi Jinping dropping by for a cup of tea later this week, it’s unthinkable that Trump would allow the Chinese leader to witness his television pool’s revolution.
The court will likely ride to his rescue before XI’s plane touches down, neutralising the consequences of his temper tantrum. CNN, MS Now and Politico promptly sued Trump, and an initial hearing is scheduled to take place tomorrow (Wednesday) afternoon before District Judge Tim Kelly, who gave short shrift to Trump’s 2018 attempt to strip CNN reporter Jim Acosta of his White House hard pass.
Back then Kelly felt no need to broach weighty First Amendment issues. Instead, he issued a narrow ruling that found that Acosta’s Fifth Amendment rights to due process had been trampled. He stipulated that should a future President feel the urge to cast out any – or indeed all – of the 495 reporters who currently hold hard passes, he must first provide advance written notice of his reason for doing so and provide the target of his ire with an opportunity to formally challenge the decision.
Neither of those happened before Trump’s decided to ban more than 100 reporters, editors, producers and camera crew from CNN, MS Now and Politico from White House last Friday.
Following the law
Hard passes can only be revoked if the journalist is deemed to represent a verified security threat to the President or his family, or if they fail to meet normal behavioural standards. A fistfight in the Oval Office, for example, or ingesting drugs in the Press Room would be considered reasonable grounds for ejecting a reporter. Asking tough questions or publishing a critical analysis of a policy decision would not. So even if Trump had followed the procedural steps laid out by Kelly last weekend, there is no substantive reason behind his decision.
That the White House press corps has finally joined together in defence of their colleagues is laudable. That it has taken them more than a decade to do so is utterly shameful. Their representative body, the White House Press Correspondents Association (WHCA) – and I say this as a former member – is amongst the most spineless of any Washington DC-based organisation.
The WHCA hasn’t just stood by in silence as Trump insulted, humiliated and berated its members for having the temerity to do their jobs. It has abdicated even its most basic duties – allowing former Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to annex its right to select White House pool members and even remove its right to allocate the 49 seats in the White House press room to journalists according to seniority and outlet reach, allowing Trump to stack the press room with right-wing influencers and pass over veteran journalists in favour of MAGA know-nothings who can be relied upon to offer praise and platitudes instead of questions.
Last year AP, a global news agency whose coverage reaches an estimated four billion people worldwide, was dropped from the White House pool and banned from the Oval Office and Air Force One because it declined to parrot Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. As an international news organisation, its decision was entirely correct. AP has also sued the White House. That case focuses on the narrower question of whether a major media outlet can be excluded from a White House pool of about 20 members.
Trump’s latest overreach is unsurprising, given how much ground the White House media has already ceded. Since 2015, it has placated, flattered, justified, equivocated and, under the pretext of ‘even-handedness’, bestowed a false equivalence between Trump and his Democratic rivals. This has resulted in contorted efforts to fashion the morally asymmetric into the symmetric, comparing Hillary Clinton’s misuse of a private email server with Trump’s mendacity, sexual misconduct, lack of political experience and dubious business practices. Or the 2024 equation of his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election with Kamala Harris’s failure to disavow Joe Biden’s economic policies.
The Trump Show
Lest the prospect of a break in the daily fire hose of Trump-adulation masquerading as media coverage induce a premature case of delirium tremens, never fear. Trump TV: The Essentials Station was launched on Monday night at 7 pm Washington DC time.
The promise to Make Television Great Again is underscored by a 24-hour streaming platform of all things Trump, which will operate 7 days a week. How precisely it will use its own airwaves is not yet clear. Even Trump, for all his uncanny ability to insert himself front and centre of every American and international news story, may have a hard time generating new controversies around the clock.
The answer may be in the title – Trump; Essentials sounds like one of those greatest hits-adjacent ‘filler’ albums put out by 1980s artists that are short on hits and long on B-sides. Which means we’ll get to revisit what Trump regards as his greatest political triumphs on a loop – untroubled by reality, much less fact-checkers.
And so we’ll likely be treated to reprises of Trump being feted with swords in Saudi Arabia, Trump striding across global stages shoving minions out of his path, Trump yukking it up with Kim Jung Un, Putin and Xi Jinping.
And expect plenty of Trump ‘fight fight fight’ reruns from Butler, Pennsylvania, along with the rapturous welcomes he’s received at the 2016, 2020 and 2024 RNC conventions – interspersed with the Fifa accolade for the eight wars he ended – in his own head at least. The war he started is unlikely to feature prominently.
White House Press Corps or not, the Trump show will continue.
Marion McKeone is an award-winning journalist, writer and documentary maker.
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