“Free Speech” President Admits He’s “Banning The Free Press” From The White House

from the get-in-losers,-we’re-banning-the-free-press dept

Apparently autumn is when President Donald Trump feels free to admit to his anti-free speech, anti-free press ways. For a guy who constantly lied about being in support of free speech, despite regularly suing people and news organizations for their speech, he’s been remarkably willing to admit to wanting to abuse power to suppress speech lately. A year ago, he admitted that he “took the freedom of speech away” when he tried to remove the First Amendment protections (something he cannot actually do) regarding flag burning. And last week, when asked about it in the oval office, he admitted that he was “banning the free press”:

Specifically, he’s banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. (MS NOW, for anyone who missed the rebrand, is the network formerly known as MSNBC.) If you didn’t see it, he (naturally) announced the ban with no due process on his personal propaganda and grift site, Truth Social:

That’s him posting:

I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Yes, you’re very proud to announce yet another attack on free speech and the free press. Also, the whole “$8 million dollar subscription” thing is a bullshit misreading of subscriptions taken out by many different individuals and agencies across the federal government to Politico’s subscription offering.

Of course, all this is unconstitutional. We know this because we’ve been through this before. In his first term he banned a couple of reporters from the White House for asking questions he didn’t like, and he lost in court.

In this case, the White House has already denied access to reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico:

Reporters for CNN, MS NOW and Politico said they were denied access to the White House grounds Saturday, a day after President Donald Trump said the three news organizations were banned from the location.

The fact that this is such an extreme and obvious attack on speech doesn’t much matter to Trump or his MAGA supporters, who are already making up all sorts of excuses about how this is perfectly normal and fine.

They’re lying.

And we know they’re lying. We know it from Trump’s own first term, and we know it from Obama’s first term, when many of these same people lost their minds over something far less egregious: avoiding having administration officials appear on Fox News, claiming the network was “a wing of the Republican Party.” After widespread complaints about this, including from other White House reporters, the White House backed down and made officials available to Fox News again.

Years later, Tom Fitton’s Judicial Watch FOIA’d the White House emails about all this and spun them into another round of stories about Obama officials making jokes at Fox News’ expense.

“The Obama administration seems to have lied about its attempt to exclude Fox News Channel from access to an interview with the ‘pay czar,’” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.

Fitton told Fox News the White House treatment was “something Hugo Chavez might do but it really has no place in modern-day America.”

Rather than condemning Trump’s action, Fitton went on X and posted a link about the Obama story, leaving out every detail that makes the two situations different. So, to be clear: Trump has fully banned three top news orgs from the White House. In 2009, the Obama administration thought about excluding Fox News from a pool of reporters to interview a mid-level administration official, and then backed down almost immediately when the rest of the media industry complained. To Tom Fitton, these are apparently the same thing:

As always, with MAGA folks, the hypocrisy is the policy. Trump and his supporters love showing off about how they get away with breaking the rules that they would never allow a Democrat to break. To them it’s a form of “owning the libs.”

Also, what a weird group of news orgs to exclude. CNN has spent years bending over backwards to try to sanewash nearly everything that Trump has done. They regularly platform liars like Scott Jennings to spew Trump’s false talking points. Meanwhile, Politico is owned by Axel Springer, whose CEO, Mathias Döpfner, has spent years platforming far-right political figures from Viktor Orban to Elon Musk, and has repeatedly supported Donald Trump. He even wrote an ass-kissing piece in Politico (now banned from the White House) as a kind of open letter to the EU, that they should give Trump what he wants: “Trump wants a strong Europe — and Europe should listen.”

And his reward: having his journalists banned from the White House.

Why, it’s almost as if sucking up to the petty, thin-skinned authoritarian in the White House is no guarantee that he won’t turn around and punish you for saying something he dislikes.

Unsurprisingly, CNN, Politico, and MSNOW sued earlier this morning.

This ban could not be a more direct assault on the First Amendment nor a more blatant violation of our most fundamental constitutional principles. Presidents from the earliest days of the Republic have disagreed with and complained about the tenor and content of press coverage of their administrations. But as the Supreme Court has recognized, the First Amendment, including its guarantee of a free press, reflects “a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, 376 U.S. 254, 270 (1964). And the Constitution protects the liberty and property interests that news organizations and White House reporters have in their press credentials and the access those credentials afford them to cover the White House for the benefit of the public. No official can deprive Plaintiffs of those interests on a whim—with no notice, no process, and no warning—as the President did here.

As Trump’s health and political power begin to wane, we’re starting to see major media companies display what can only be described as the faint outline of a backbone. We’ve seen it with ABC’s lawsuit against the FCC for its bogus censorship efforts. And we’re also seeing it here, as numerous major media outlets say they’re cutting off all coverage of presidential events due to the ban:

Perhaps realizing that his own statements on “banning the free press” are likely to look bad in court, Trump went back to Truth Social this morning as well to insist that when he said he was “banning the free press” he didn’t actually mean a ban on the free press:

That’s him saying:

The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP

Which… is not how any of this works. The whole point of the First Amendment is that no government official, let alone the president, gets to decide what is good reporting and what is “fake news.” Because the second a government officials gets to make that determination is the second the First Amendment is nothing but a dead letter.

As Trump gets more afraid of his own embarrassing political and existential collapse, he’ll only lash out further. But the threats will increasingly carry less weight; particularly if the midterms deliver a lame duck president. And again, while intended to portray strength, they’ll only demonstrate growing fear and weakness by a dim authoritarian narcissist clearly approaching the end of the line.

At this point no one serious still believes that Trump is “the free speech president,” but calling out each of his increasingly erratic censorial attacks on free speech is still important in reminding everyone that this is not normal, not constitutional, and absolutely not in support of free speech.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, censorship, donald trump, due process, free press, free speech, journalism, mathias dopfner, media, white house, white house briefing, white house correspondents association

Companies: axel springer, cnn, msnow, politico