Last week Trump banned CNN, MSNow, and Politico from the White House in a long rant accusing them of publishing “FAKE NEWS” – and warning that other news organizations could be next.
In response, the entire White House press pool announced Monday that they wouldn’t be covering Trump until the ban was lifted, saying that “no administration should restrict a news organization because it objects to its reporting.”
Rather than uphold the First Amendment’s protections of free speech and a free press, Trump launched “Trump TV” – a state-run, taxpayer-funded media channel playing 24/7 Trump propaganda.
This isn’t about whether you like how news organizations cover Trump, or whether you like the questions they ask and issues they raise.
This is about whether the president gets to decide which journalists are allowed to question him in the first place, and whether the American people’s unfettered access to unobstructed media can be curtailed on the whims of America’s Hitler (JD Vance’s words, not ours).
In banning the media, Trump thought it was a show of force, but in reality all it’s done is expose the fact that Trump is an emperor with no clothes. It’s exposed how weak, unpopular, and out-of-touch he is with the rest of the country in a way nothing else could.
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins is a seasoned veteran of the White House press corps. She has covered the White House since 2017 and consistently been the one asking the tough questions, raising the hot-button issues, and refusing to take no for an answer.
It makes sense why Trump hates her.
For two years now, Collins has been one of the few willing to consistently look Donald Trump in the eye, ask the question he doesn’t want to answer, and then ask it again when he inevitably refuses to answer or tries to change the subject.
Collins has embodied what the press is meant to do – and what our First Amendment was literally designed to protect. Given that Trump has already violated the Constitution in more ways than we can count, it’s no surprise that he could care less about your freedom of speech, either.
What he didn’t expect was that the rest of the media would voluntarily cut their own coverage of him in protest, and by extension deny him the very thing he craves most: the spotlight.
This was made abundantly clear during a press event Monday on the South Lawn of the White House. Usually, Trump uses these occasions to ramble and rave about whatever his latest grievance is (like how there still isn’t enough gold around the White House, or his ballroom isn’t being built fast enough, or basically anything other than your soaring costs, his failed war, or the Epstein Files).
Without the press pool, though, not a single person could hear him. Cameras rolled and showed Trump doing his usual bluster, but in a gift many of us have been wishing for since 2015, we couldn’t hear him.
As much as Trump professes to hate the press for uncovering his grifts, corruption, and erosion of basic American rights, the hard truth he must confront is that he’s nothing without the media.
Without the press, all of Trump’s bluster falls away. Without the press, there’s nobody to cover his ramblings, ravings, lying, and psychopathic egotism. Put simply, without the press, Trump is nothing more than a guy 20 years too old and countless pounds too heavy desperately trying to cling on to relevance.
In uniting against him, the press has made clear that Trump can’t restrict one of them without going after all of them.
We applaud their resistance, but we also can’t help but see how, for some, it may just be too little, too late.
For years, Fox News has aided and abetted Trump’s corruption, anti-American power grabs, xenophobic agenda, and really anything else he’s wanted.
At the same time, other media organizations have cow-towed to Trump and forfeited their independence in the name of “honest reporting.”
None has done so more than CBS, who installed a pro-Trump puppet in Bari Weiss at the top of the organization. Since taking over, she’s fired nearly all of their veteran journalists, spiked stories that would damage Trump, and turned one of America’s pre-eminent news organizations into a place for pro-Trump propaganda.
What each of these organizations have now learned is the age-old lesson that you can’t help create a tyrant without losing your own freedom in the process.
Make no mistake, if Trump has his way, this is only the beginning. If he has his way, every single right that makes us Americans is up for debate and dependent on the whims of one man’s fragile ego hidden under a head of fake hair.
It was John Lewis who famously said: “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.” At the end of the day, our rights are words written on a piece of paper, and they are only as strong as is our willingness to fight for them, defend them, and expand them – no matter who the president is or what his MAGA goons may want.
Trump’s move is but the latest warning that his America is where freedom goes to die, and if we sit idly by, we’ll watch the death of America at the hands of a man who’s never known a life other than one of wealth, privilege, and entitlement.
When Trump publicly named Headquarters as a “media offender” and enemy of the people, we said that we wouldn’t give up and wouldn’t stop pursuing the truth, wherever it may lead.
We also said that while we were among the first new media outlets he went after, we wouldn’t be the last. We said that Trump’s assault on influencers and online creators was but the newest front in his war on free speech in any form. We hoped we were wrong, but his latest moves have confirmed our worst fears. While legacy media is seemingly just now grappling with the threat Trump poses to all of our rights, we’ve been sounding the alarm for months.
Make no mistake, Trump will keep pushing, attacking, and silencing all those who stand against his MAGA agenda until we stand up and stop him once and for all.