Minutes after Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House Friday afternoon, Jake Tapper correctly called it a distraction. He added that it wasn’t clear there was any strategy behind it to his credit, and he’s right on both counts.
I’ll take it a step further. The ban is unconstitutional, authoritarian, and the press alarm is well deserved. It is also the best thing that’s happened to this White House in a week that, until roughly 3 p.m. Friday, had been an unmitigated shit show of a disaster. A news cycle that’s suddenly focused on whether the Trump administration is acting in an autocratic manner that flouts the Constitution is an impossibly better narrative for the White House than almost everything else in the political media.
Consider the week Trump was having before he changed the subject:
The national average for diesel went over $6 a gallon this month, which has never happened, ever. Regular is $4.48, and it was $3.19 a year ago.
The Congressional Budget Office put a $38 billion price tag on the Iran war Tuesday and said it’s running another two to three billion a month.
A New York Times/Siena poll found six in ten likely voters think going to war was the wrong call, a tough number for a president who keeps insisting it isn’t a war.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was in Strasbourg Wednesday being offered a seat for Canada at Europe’s table, a few weeks after Trump blew up the trade talks and slapped 50% tariffs on our neighbor.
Speaker Mike Johnson had to go on three Sunday shows and explain that the $5,000 checks Trump promised in Dallas (which, as I argued in this space last week, just blew up the GOP’s entire socialism attack) would need Congress to pass a trillion-dollar bill he couldn’t promise, and 63% of the country, including four in ten Republicans, said no thanks anyway.
Reuters/Ipsos had Trump at 35%, and the same poll found Republicans have lost the edge they’ve held forever as the party voters trust on the economy.
And a Fox News poll had him at 39%, which is tied for the low of his second term in that survey. 63% blamed his administration for a worse economy, which included a quarter of Republicans.
That is the very definition of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week.
Then came Friday’s press ban, which led to dozens of cable news rundowns being immediately ripped up. Asked in the Oval Office why now, Trump said “no reason.” He said he’d lift it if the three outlets “straighten themselves out,” and threatened the New York Times and the Washington Post with the same fate. The media reaction was about what you’d expect. Even Fox News contributors called it a terrible precedent, though not really on air, and Fox News White House reporter Jacqui Heinrich, who is currently serving as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, demanded the passes back. By dinner, it seemed like every First Amendment lawyer in Washington had a cable news hit booked.
But here’s what's largely missing in the cable news coverage and analysis of this fight: Trump loves it. He has been insulting and fighting the press for over a kayfabtastic decade. His base has been brainwashed into believing CNN has it coming, while most everyone else just assumed this was an inevitability. Lawsuits will come and will likely go the way Jim Acosta’s did, and the AP’s did for a while. But none of it moves a single voter, because on the increasingly tired subject of Trump v. The Media™, there are no undecideds left to move.
This is the same point I made a couple of weeks ago in my Maria Bartiromo column: Trump can lose CNN, ABC, the Times, the Post and every editorial board in the country and it will effectively cost him nothing. The fact that many of the loudest voices calling Trump an authoritarian charge this weekend are employed by the three banned outlets gives the White House a frame to label the whole thing as the media defending the media. Which it did, in a simultaneously responsible and gleeful way. There are, after all, few topics that the press love reporting on more than the press.
Watch what Mike Waltz did on State of the Union. Dana Bash asked the UN ambassador, a 27-year Green Beret, whether he was comfortable with a president banning news organizations over their coverage. Waltz said Trump was “spot on,” citing a 1965 Supreme Court case about a guy who wanted a passport to Cuba, and within about a minute was on to blasting the press over anonymous sources, napalm and leaked munitions stockpiles, a bonkers reply to which Bash admitted she was “kind of at a loss for words.” An unconstitutional press ban had suddenly turned into an argument about CNN’s sourcing. That’s the argument the White House would much rather have any Sunday of the year.
Try to find anyone representing the White House that’s eager to go on cable news and defend gas at $4.48 a gallon. No one wants to sit across from Dana Bash and defend $6 diesel. The war is so unpopular that even Republicans running in November have stopped saying the word Iran. An unregulated AI industry that Trump has championed is suddenly a threat to human extinction. Marquette has Trump at 19% approval on inflation and the cost of living, the issue voters rank first by a mile. Democrats are up seven points on the generic ballot with the election 44 days out.
Again, a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week. Which puts the reasoning and timing of the press ban in perfect perspective.
So put yourself in the White House Communications Director’s chair. You can spend the weekend on a press freedom fight that’s become a well-worn heuristic for both press and Trump surrogates since 2016, and you know your base is with you. OR you can spend it trying to explain $6 diesel. Whether Trump actually thought it through is unknowable and almost irrelevant. He’s equally capable of both a tantrum and a craven strategy, and from the outside they look exactly the same. His own press shop claims they didn’t know the ban was coming, but they got the same result either way.
Tapper made another astute point Friday when he noted that the ban won’t work because CNN and the other censored outlets will keep reporting, and he’s right about that too. Nobody at CNN, MS NOW, or Politico stopped doing their job for a minute after Trump posted on Truth Social. Whether the reporting continues is a different question from what actually changed: the news stories everyone is talking about. With an election six weeks away, the lead story was understandably Trump’s banning of the press. At least on news outlets not dedicated to defending the president and/or ignoring stories unfavorable to him.
The press is largely handling this story with great nuance and care. Bash came closest to sounding the alarm in her Waltz interview, but later in SotU, she went to a panel of three former WHCA presidents. Each was correct in everything they said, but also disquietingly calm about it all.
They covered the AP getting kicked out of the press pool, and the Pentagon and Treasury both freezing reporters out of a finance ministers’ meeting and other past examples by the Trump administration. What was missing was anyone saying that a president stripping badges from reporters because he doesn’t like their stories is flat-out fucking nuts. And everyone watching should be freaked out. But we’ve all become too numb to it all, which is also by design.
Fox News, whose contributors were the loudest critics online, gave it a short report on Special Report Friday and a quick read from Guy Benson on The Big Weekend Show, then Peter Doocy gave it a brief mention and aired a clip of Jonathan Turley saying presidents should be careful about this sort of thing, but otherwise left it alone. Trump got the change of subject without even having to sit through the outrage.
The press had good reason to cover it this way. A president punishing newsrooms for their journalism is a real story, maybe the most resonant story of an administration's clear drift to autocracy but that can still very much be a trap. Whats stranger is that the authoritarian story is almost old hat while the war, gas and inflation stories are still hot. Trump handed the press the easier one and they ran with it at a time they should be focused on he abject failure of his past two years