The press is abuzz with the aftermath of Trump’s decision on Friday to ban CNN, MS-Now, and Politico from the White House, a buzz largely focused on the lawsuit the three outlets will file today.
It is a big deal.
But rather than focusing on Trump’s three tweets about the attack on the press — the initial announcement, a meme suggesting someone took them out of the White House as trash, and a follow-up invoking national security behind the ban (just as, over the weekend, he invented a national security purpose for his Nazi arch, both likely attempts to give legal cover for an assault on the country) — I want to focus on the mechanics of it.
In a story reviewing how weepy Trump is that his bullying is not having the effect it used to at the beginning of this term, WSJ described that he made the decision after Natalie Harp showed him bad news.
The president has objected in public and private to media coverage of his presidency for months. But his frustrations reached a fever pitch on Friday, when one of his closest aides, Natalie Harp, showed him clips of anchors on the cable network MS NOW criticizing his administration, according to people familiar with the matter. Hours later, Trump banned the network and two other news organizations from the White House.
[snip]
The president has been briefed on the headwinds facing Republicans in the midterms, and advisers have told him that the Iran war is a drag on his conservative base’s enthusiasm ahead of the election, though his team maintains they are cautiously optimistic about November.
The president’s frustrations mounted in the past week as two key advisers were away: White House chief of staff Susie Wiles was in Florida, where on Wednesday she announced that she is cancer-free, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently left the White House.
Trump’s decision to ban MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House caught many White House officials by surprise, according to people familiar with the matter. But the president’s aides moved quickly to implement their boss’s directive, barring the outlets’ reporters from entering the White House on Saturday. A White House official said senior staff were with the president when he made the decision to ban the outlets.
One senior administration official reacted with exasperation to the decision, arguing that the move would do little to achieve the president’s goal of improving press coverage. The president has discussed banning news outlets from the White House before, according to people close to the White House. But aides have persuaded him to take less aggressive measures, such as blocking reporters from the Oval Office or limiting their participation in the pool of reporters that covers the president when he conducts events in spaces that are too small for the entire press corps.
It focuses on MS-Now, which has been focused on how badly Trump is doing in the polls, including a Katy Tur piece focused on shitty Latino polling in Texas in the hour before the ban. CNN was telling the same story, with a typically animated Harry Enten showing a up to 60-point swing in Latino support.
Both of these took place in the wake of María Salazar’s ad calling out Trump’s immigration policies.
CNN’s version of this story describes that Harp showed Trump some graphic Politico had posted.
[A] graphic from Politico was among the material that is believed to have infuriated the president and helped inform his decision to bar the three outlets from the White House grounds. The president also viewed clips from television, a second source said.
Whatever the content of these clips, consider the import of them.
Natalie Harp showed Trump bad news.
That’s not her job. Her job is to show him good news, to always feed his narcissism.
But last week, she showed him bad news, and partly because Karoline Leavitt has moved on and Susie Wiles was out of the office, Trump responded by banning three outlets, and no one thought to simply stall (as Trump’s staffers have done in the past, especially in the first term). Over the weekend, one after another credentialed journalist from the three outlets showed up at the White House, only to have Secret Service agents that know them well pull their hard pass.
Of note: Kaitlan Collins — who for better or worse has become the grande dame of the White House Press Corps in recent years, even as she suffers through harassment if she doesn’t smile at Trump — did not attempt to enter the White House in this period.
The effect of this, though, is that CNN was kicked out of the press corps days before its turn on as the TV pooler, and per Weijia Jang (former WHCA President), Brian Stelter, and even News Nation’s Kellie Meyer, there will be no TV pool today, even as Trump travels to NY for the UN General Assembly meeting. Some of his meetings — like that with Zohran Mamdani and Emmanuel Macron — are listed as closed press. But the UNGA is the kind of event where Trump has been known to exchange loaded comments in passing and he is expected to have one such meeting with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The rest of the week includes potentially momentous meetings as well, with Xi Jinping’s visit starting Wednesday. And in the background, Trump is equivocating about whether to fulfill US promises of security to Saudi Arabia.
To be clear, the pool is one of the few areas where you can get solidarity (not least because the pool outlets pick up the costs of the coverage and then provide it free to anyone who participates in the pool). But all this is happening in a week where, with no exaggeration, the direction of the world could change dramatically.
Several news outlets were, truthfully, making the case that Trump is a loser. Unusually, Natalie Harp showed Trump that proof he’s a loser. And as a result the press will be partly blinded during a potentially momentous week.
Update: CNBC confirms the other poolers will halt coverage.
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