Bulwark Takes - AP is BANNED from Oval Office Event Over 'Gulf of America'

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

Sam Stein is surprised after the AP is banned from an Oval Office event after it refused to use The Gulf of America. Trump and Musk also had an awkward press conference where Trump said he will make sure there is no conflict of interest with Elon Musk and DOGE.

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Before we do, as always, subscribe to the feed. We appreciate it. So this is what happened. The back story is Trump this afternoon is in the Oval Office and Elon Musk is with him at the Oval Office. They just did a briefing on Doge and Elon took questions. He was with his son. The whole thing was a little bit awkward. Trump was sitting there. Elon was standing. Yeah, the vibe was weird and we can get to that later. But as this was happening, I guess, so it happened. And then as the video of it was being made public, the AP put out a statement from its executive editor, Julie Pace,

who is great. I know Julie, and she's a fantastic journalist and has been a formidable executive editor at the Associated Press. This is what she said in her statement, quote, today we were informed by the White House that if AP did not align its editorial standards with President Donald Trump's executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, AP would be barred from accessing an event in the Oval Office. This afternoon, AP's reporter was blocked from attending an executive order signing. Just pause for a second. Because this is, you might be thinking to yourself, who cares? It's just an event, whatever, big deal. But the Trump White House has barred the biggest wire service, a global news organization, from covering a event in the Oval Office because that wire service has exercised a totally legitimate editorial decision

not to apply a fake, made-up name that Donald Trump came up with a couple weeks ago for the Gulf of Mexico. No one says that the AP has to do this. It's an executive order, but it doesn't seem like it should have to be abided by by news organizations. They make their own standards. It's ridiculous. And it's outrageous that you would basically tell a news organization they can't cover news events because they're not, you know, wrapping themselves around your executive orders and changing their editorial discretion around your wins. And that's like dictatorship stuff. It really is. And yeah, so whatever, one event, who cares? Well, I care. And you should care too, because when you chip away at the independence of journalists and the people who are covering the administration,

you lose a lot. That's not something that is a bedrock of our democracy. Hate to be all pro-clutchy about it, but it's true. And we should be opposed to a White House or president demanding that news organizations do things a certain way that he likes or they get their access cut off. And in fact, the Trump people should be resistant to this. It's important that they have journalists, a press corps that keeps them in check. Every president begrudgingly acknowledges this. It's true. It's important. But let's just get to sort of the larger matter, which is this administration has claimed that it is a fundamental supporter and defender of First Amendment rights. And clearly that's bullshit. I mean, let's just be honest. It's bullshit. This is just bullshit. And all those tech titans that came into the Oval Office or Mar-a-Lago trying to get in good

favor with Trump, they all couched it by saying, well, you know, this guy, this guy at least respects First Amendment rights. And Mark Zuckerberg, who specifically said that he was turned off by the Biden administration because the Biden administration did not like how Facebook was elevating anti-vax viewpoints during the height of COVID and asked him to take down some stuff. He thought that was an atrocious, atrocious overstep by the government. He was offended by it, so much so that he rushed to Trump's arms in the first days after the election. Well, how is this any different? Arguably, this is much worse. The government demanding that the biggest wire service domestically has to refer to certain things or else its access is cut off. Objectively, that is much worse.

It just is. So here we're at. And I will just say this, you know, this whole notion of transparency, of honesty, of respect for the First Amendment, I think we have enough at this point to conclude that obviously the Trump administration is not operating with any of that. It's not just browbeating the Associated Press. They are not at all transparent about what's going on. At this meeting at the White House, Elon Musk was talking about Doge and he says, well, you know, we are being transparent and overboard with everything we've done. Everything is fully public. That's just not the case. It's just not the case. We have no insight into Elon's finances, so we can't make proper determinations about whether there is a conflict of interest in what

he's doing. But obviously there is. He's a government contractor. He's the richest man in the world. We should know these things. And Trump and the White House have said, well, we'll allow him to police his own conflicts of interest. I mean, take a look at this. And we thought that we would not let him do that segment or look in that area if we thought there was a lack of transparency or a conflict of interest. And we watched that also. He's a big businessman. He's a successful guy.

That's why we want him doing this. We don't want an unsuccessful guy doing this. I mean, so there you have it. He gets to just determine if there is a conflict of interest and we have to trust Trump if that's the case or Elon to excuse himself, which is ridiculous. And so, you know, I also think there's an irony here in that they're doing this stuff and they're talking about transparency. The same day, this headline from Fox News, although I think the Washington Post was the first report. Yeah, it was the post that first reported. We're just going to show you the Fox News headline. White House will not release visitor logs during Trump's second term.

We don't know who's coming in and out. They didn't do it during the first term either. But Obama did release visitor logs. Biden released them. They were kind of useless because we couldn't really tell, you know, who these people worked for if there were false positives, but at least they released the names. Trump, not happening. And so we're stuck in this situation where we're basically being told by the richest guy in the world, trust me, I won't have conflicts of interest. And we're told by the president, trust me, he won't have conflicts of interest. And we don't know who's coming in. We don't know

who's coming out. When you report on who's working for Doge, you are threatened by Elon Musk, who says it's against the law. And then when you dare to show editorial independence like the AP did by saying, no, we're not going to refer to it as the Gulf of America, you get your axis cut off. And that's some dark shit. And people should be upset about it. And we should be real that this free speech utopia that Mark Zuckerberg promised us, which was always a joke, clearly is being exposed as a joke. All right. Needed to just unload a little bit. Got a little steamed about that, but I think it was righteous anger and hopefully you agree. As always, subscribe to the feed. Thank you for tuning in. Please share and we'll see you later.