Bulwark Takes - Trump Says He’s Banning the ‘Free Press’ From His White House

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

Donald Trump has banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, and this time, he followed through. Will Saletan and Will Sommer discuss Trump’s escalating attack on the press, his claim that the outlets can return if they start covering him more favorably, and what the crackdown could mean for journalists across Washington.They also discuss the First Amendment implications of viewpoint-based press access, Trump’s broader use of legal and regulatory pressure against media organizations, the FCC’s actions under Brendan Carr, and the White House’s decision to elevate openly partisan right-wing media while shutting out mainstream news organizations.

Hi, friends and fellow students, Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. Register or get tailored support at votefromabroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second. Go to vote fromabroad.org now and click request my ballot and ask to receive it by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Vote fromabroad.org. Hey, everybody. It's Will Salatin from the bulwark. I am here with my colleague, Will Summer, the author of our False Flag newsletter.

We get to have two wills today, a very willful video, and we are responding to an insane attack on the press, again, from Donald Trump. So Donald Trump has announced a ban on a few news organizations, and people thought he was kidding. But today, representatives of those organizations were blocked from entering the White House. So let me back up a little bit. First, I want to tell you how this started. Yesterday, Trump wrote on Truth Social. He announced what he was going to do, and this is what he said. I am proud to announce that effective immediately, I am banning fake news, CNN, MS Now, and Politico,

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, and then he followed through on it. First of all, I got to ask you, Will, what is your response to the president just boldly announcing that he's going to ban news organization? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a pretty much unprecedented behavior from the president in terms of the treatment of the White House press corps, the idea of just banning news organizations. I mean, we've seen this kind of brinksmanship of a much lower level in the past with, let's say,

Obama didn't invite Fox News to a particular briefing or an interview once, and then the whole press corps kind of got in a revolt over that. So, but really nothing at this level like we've seen of just banning major news organizations. So CNN, MS Now and Politico, just saying entirely, you know, your staff is not welcome on the White House grounds. Yeah. And I don't know about you. I did not expect him to literally follow through and do this.

Are you surprised that these reporters showed up and got their badges confiscated? You know, on one hand, I am. I think, you know, it kind of seems like a classic Trump chicken out thing. like maybe he would post this morning, like, you know, MS now, I think they've really learned their lesson or something, you know, or whatever. But on the other hand, I mean, I think this, and we're going to get into this, but I mean, I think this is this sense of like the embattled White House, the fact that a lot of things are going really poorly for Trump.

And I think he's lashing out. I think he feels understandably. I think attacking the media is safer ground for him. I think he, there's a reason he was so desperate to have the White House correspondent's dinner happened so he could skewer the media. And I think he's kind of just trying to, you know, oh, what's something safe I can do that Republicans will at least be neutral about. Oh, I can beat up on the press. Right, right.

It is, it is, it feels totally crazy to me. I want to show folks a little bit of Trump explaining at the White House why he was doing this. Because obviously they were reporters present and they wanted to know why their colleagues were being blocked out. He got asked why, on what grounds he chose these particular news or news. organizations. So let's play the clip. They call and they try and explain things to it. They know that they know it. They know it as well. They're smart people. But they purposely write negative news. And they do that because they want to try and diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration. Okay. So he says they're writing negative news about me. And that's why I'm banning it.

This seems like a straightforward discrimination based on viewpoint, uh, based on criticism of the administration and not just criticism, but he says, you know, reporting what he calls fake news. But it's not actually an opinion that he's criticizing. It's reporting of stuff he doesn't like and he regards his fake. Does this make it worse or more dangerous the way that he's listing this as the criterion? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, and this is something we see the White House or Brennan Carr at the FCC

often run into with these attempts to crack down on free speech. the legally safer way for them to do it would be to say like, well, you know what? We just ran out of room in the office space or something like that. Some kind of like fictitious pretextual thing. But they just can't help but say, you know, there's another clip where Trump says basically, you know, well, maybe if they start saying nice things about me, they can come back. And I mean, that is pretty obvious, you know, abridgment of the First Amendment and attack on the free press. And I think, you know, I think we can assume these media organizations are going to sue over this. And I'm sure those words will come up again in court.

You know, that's a really good point about how he says if they shape up, if they get their act together, they can come back. Let me play the clip. Let's look at the clip where he said that if they do that, they might be able to come back into the White House. I was to keep them afloat and the stories they wrote a fake. So there's a lot of news and there may be others to join them and maybe they can get better and would like to have men. Okay, there's a couple of things there. First of all, he says there may be others to join them, implying that he's sending a message. to the other news organizations that haven't been blocked from the White House yet.

So it looks like he's trying to affect the broader media. But the other thing is he's saying if they shape up, you know, if they get their act together, maybe they can come back. It sounds as though he is trying to influence the broader press that if they change their coverage, they can come back in. So he's not just trying to block people. He's trying to recolor all of the coverage of the White House. Is that how you see it?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, our colleague Sam Stein, who memorably was the first blogger to ask a question at the White House press briefing long ago, who knows something about White House coverage? I mean, he pointed out on Twitter today. He said, look, I mean, this is an attempt to have a chilling effect on the press. I think particularly on outlets who don't have the massive amount of resources as to say, a CNN or even a political or MS now. I mean, if you are a relatively small White House reporter, you're looking at this, your whole job is being at the White House and covering things. You're saying, geez, Louise, I can't really have a legal battle. You know,

maybe my question is going to be a little nicer at the next press briefing, a little less probing. Maybe I won't run that article. Maybe I'll kind of sand the edges off of it. And so look, I mean, that's something Donald Trump has tried to do with his legal threats to media organizations, the various shakedowns he's done on organizations like CBS News. And so, you know, yeah, I mean, I think clearly there's this idea of, you know, well, maybe you write nicer articles, maybe you run higher more conservatives. I mean, I think there's a couple ways that one could imagine the White House applying pressure. Yeah. Can we talk a little about the history because you're alluding to some of these things? So one of them is Trump forever has been filing lawsuits against news organizations for any

coverage he doesn't like. He's even, I think he sued what the Des Moines Register over a poll he didn't like. So he uses that, it sounds like, as leverage, again, to threaten them, to intimidate them. And the other thing you brought up was the FCC. I'm not sure a lot of people have followed this. Can you talk a little bit about what he's been doing and what Brendan Carr's been doing at the FCC to intimidate journalists. Yeah, I mean, so Brennan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, has been on a sort of unprecedented rampage of sort of shakedowns, attempts to sort of threats, barely veiled threats. You know, one thinks about ABC and Jimmy Kimmel, is the example that springs to mind where he said,

well, you know, geez, you guys might not want to, you know, have Jimmy Kimmel making these jokes about Melania and Trump, or, you know, you might have to lose some licenses or this idea that, you know, he could interfere with, with broadcast. mergers or you know all these companies want to stay on his good side and and so I think this is sort of a this is a new development certainly in terms of the idea of just banning whole news organizations from the White House but on the other hand it is also a you know long line and of course the the probably the most significant example here in terms of the White House press corps is was banning the AP from from probably I believe some attendance at the White House after they wouldn't accept the

Gulf of America instead of the Gulf of Mexico yeah I am and there's one other episode that really bothers me. I'm trying to find it in my notes. I can't find it at the moment. But I believe it was that ABC News said as part of their litigation, when Trump was suing them to influence their coverage, they said that they had given live coverage to Trump's bizarre speech about election security, which he made all sorts of false allegations, because they felt intimidated. They were afraid that there would be more retaliation against them if they didn't give it to So in other words, this chilling effect is already working in the sense that he's inducing behavior, more cooperative, more conciliatory behavior from the press, including helping him distribute some of his propaganda. Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth noting historically the White House has had a very broad access in terms of the press.

I mean, it's pretty easy for basically anyone to get a day pass in the media to just visit the White House for a day. if there's a press conference you want to cover or whatever. Even when you talk about people with permanent passes, that's harder to get. But these are, you know, they've had a lot of cranks there. You know, in the Biden administration, Simon Ataba, who was kind of like this representing essentially a non-existent African media outlet. And Republicans, when the Biden administration was like, all right, let's, is this guy even really a journalist?

Republicans are like, oh, my gosh, they're cracking down on the bravest truth teller on the White House lawn. And as I mentioned, you know, the Obama administration had, you know, the Obama administration had, you know, sort of snubbed Fox News on a couple interviews or some group interviews. And then the whole press corps was up in arms over that. And I think understandably so because people recognize that once you start these crackdowns, you know, the next Democratic president could turn it right back around. And I have seen some of this from conservative commentators who are saying, you know,

this looks weak. This looks like, you know, the president is throwing a tantrum. And ultimately this is something that the left could use against us. You mentioned this just now. Can we talk about who is actually in the old? Oval Office, who he lets in. Because I don't know about you, when I watch these Oval Office briefings with reporters, these exchanges, you know, and the Trump White House brags that their guy, Trump, is the most transparent president ever because he's very open to the press. But, Will, the press that

I see in there asking questions is like Gateway Pundit, Lindell TV, One American News. It's just the right of the right of the right. And it seems really weird that they're claiming to be open to the press, but the press that they speak to is just the press that cooperates with them, which just looks like old-fashioned censorship to me. Do you get this impression when you see the exchanges with reporters? Yeah, I mean, it's a great point. I mean, if this was a question of, like, journalistic quality, which I think is the White House and some of the president's defenders are trying to make it out to be, I mean, the people that they are highlighting that they're putting in the new media seat, so you get to have the first question. I mean,

these are like PizzaGate conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobic. You know, these are people who are are just like, you know, not really journalists, really in even a very broad. I mean, these are partisan actors. And so I think the idea that the White House is promoting these people and cracking down on, you know, what are obviously sort of mainstream media organizations really shows, obviously, that there's a hand of censorship at play here. So there's one more clip I want to play from Trump explaining this because it really, there was a phrase in this that really struck me where he talks about this being my office.

this is, again, from his exchange with reporters when he was asked about why he was doing this ban. And I should preface this by saying, he gets asked a question. He was asked several questions about the ban. And this is well into that exchange. He's been asked several times. And a reporter again asked him about the ban. And he says, which ban? And he goes on for quite some time trying to, because he can't figure out.

He says, I ban a lot of things. And then finally, he gets which one they're talking about. And he says it out loud exactly what it is. Let's play that clip. Hi friends and fellow students. Americans living abroad can legally vote in the U.S. election. Register or get tailored support at vote fromabroad.org. Look, state deadlines are super close, so don't waste another second.

Go to vote fromabroad.org now and click request my ballot, asked to receive it by email. All you got to do is fill it out and send it back in. Don't miss this chance to shape the future. Don't delay. Vote from abroad.org. I sure don't know what... What do you envision the bands of the black? Oh, the ban on the free press, right? A very simple ban.

I don't want them in my office. I don't want them here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. Okay. I mean, first of all, I mean, he says out loud the ban on the free press. Yeah. I mean, Will, if you're a lawyer arguing for the press in the first amendment case here, it just seems like he just gave you the case.

Is that right? Yeah, it's sort of like Operation. you know, infringe on the First Amendment. You know, I mean, they really are not, they're not covering it up. And I mean, I think this is, it makes me, it does make me think that Trump just really wants a positive news cycle for him on the right and that he's, you know, I think he's probably acknowledging here even. He's saying, well, you know, I don't know, as much as we can get.

I mean, he knows this is going to go to court like the AP case did. And I think these outlets are going to claw their way back eventually. So wait, this is all, this is all a play to the right. Like he's openly directly attacking the first. Amendment because he thinks the political right likes that, wants that? You know, I think at least that's the theory. I mean, I think on one hand, I do think this is probably just sort of personally satisfying for him because, you know, he's frustrated with a lot of things with the warner Ron with

gas prices and he's saying, you know, go darn it, let's just kick CNN out if they're going to say, you know, talk about how poorly my administration is going. On the other hand, it is sort of a playbook that right-wing media is used to saying, you know, They run the clip of the MS now reporter who can't get her badge in and they say, oh, she's flipping out. I mean, that's not really the case at all. But they're saying, you know, oh, these liberal tears taste so good. But on the other hand, you know, it's, I don't know. I just feel like we're in this moment.

I mean, we know these senators and these red states are embattled. Maybe they won't win. It's this moment where I think like even a lot of people on the right are just sort of over the trolling. It doesn't hit like it used to. And so maybe Donald Trump is the only person who's really enjoyed. going this. Okay, I want to, let me go to the embattled thing, but first, I just got to say, when he says, I don't want him in my office, to me, that's a shocking statement. I mean, he thinks that he owns the office the way he, I mean, he's a, you know, he has his own company,

so he's used to like, I get to make all the decisions. And he's operating as though being elected to the presidency of the United States entitles him to treat the White House the way he would treat, you know, a C-suite. I mean, that's, that's insane to me that he would say it's my office. And I wonder whether there will be some political backlash just from the president claiming that it's his office and he can block the press out. So you're free to talk about that if you want. But I also want to ask you about the politics that you were alluding to that this is all about. Well, tell me which one would tell me what you'd like to do. Well, sure. I mean, I think to the point you're making, I think it's similar to how he's sort of treated the White House in general,

how he treats all these federal buildings, how he treats the Kennedy Center as sort of like his personal property. I mean, to be clear, Donald Trump, can keep the press out of the Oval Office. It's not like Maggie Haberman gets to march in there every day, got to snoop around. It reminds me, and the other press, I know we should mention here, is Pete Higgs-thes cracked down on the Pentagon press corps,

where they sort of cast it as like, well, these guys are just snooping around. They're behind every couch, you know, we just have to do it for security reasons. And it may eventually head to that argument. Trump is kind of suggesting that, you know, I can't have the press just hectoring me all the time. But I think to the point you make,

I think Americans, even a lot of Republicans, I think they recognize the, the point of having the press at the White House, that this is our government, that we are supposed to be keeping an eye on it, and this idea that, well, they're a little annoying to the president, so they get kicked out. I don't think it's really going to fly. Yeah, okay. So on that question of accountability, that the press supplies accountability and that Trump is trying to deprive it, this is happening, as you've pointed out a few times here, in the larger political context.

People are unhappy with the Iran war, with prices, his own, as you said, his own base on the right, is unhappy with a lot of this stuff. He's, as you said, not just him, but the Republicans in Congress. Everybody is up for election on the Republican side this fall, they're feeling embattled. He's feeling embattled. So this looks to me like it's gonna read like president

who's, not just that the president is blocking the press out and violating the First Amendment, but that he's doing it to prevent, to deter the press from telling the public about all of the bad stuff that the voters basically know about, right? And so he's trying to suppress issues that people, ordinary people are and should be genuinely concerned about. I feel like that's going to have a bigger hit than just taking out the First Amendment.

Yeah, I think it sort of plays into a trope we're used to, which is like losing politician in tailspin bans the press, whether it's banning them from campaign events or things like that or banning them from the White House in this case. And I think people, even people who are not like super plugged into politics or don't care about, you know, Politico's White House reporter or not being able to do their job. I mean, I think that just reads as weak loser behavior to people. And I think that that is how it's going to be perceived is that he's throwing a tantrum. He's upset. He or, you know, works for the president that he's doing something bad.

And, you know, frankly, he is. But like, that he's trying to cover something up. And I think that's how it reads. Yeah. I mean, I would love to believe because I've been at the bulwark for a while. And I've been kind of depressed, honestly, about how little the larger process and norms issues that we care about are affecting voters, the violations of the Constitution. Well, how does that affect me? Do I care about that? Or do we just, do I just want, you know, jobs and low prices? But it does raise the prospect in this particular situation that the violation of norms, the violation of the Constitution is taking place in a context where it will be read by the public as about ordinary kitchen table issues.

that the economy is not doing as well as he promised. People are unhappy. And he's trying to suppress and hide that from the public. So I'm holding that a little bit of hope. I don't know if you are that it's actually going to cut this time. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, we'll see. I would also like to see a lot more action from other media outlets.

You know, the New York Times has not been affected by this. They had a statement out. But, you know, I think we need a lot more. I'd also like to see it from Fox News, you know, which got a lot of solidarity back in the day from the liberal and the mainstream outlets. As far as I can tell, they've been silent. You know, I think the way to beat this is, you know, is with kind of like sort of a collective action even from the conservative outlets. Yeah.

Well, we can end on that note because at the bulwark, we are totally covering this. And we are absolutely standing with our colleagues. And we're going to be on this story as long as we can. First of all, everybody out there, subscribe to Will's awesome newsletter, false flag. Subscribe to this YouTube channel. We do a YouTube channel. And we've got a website where we report lots of good stuff. and you can get Will's column and lots of other stuff.

It's at the bulwark.com. See you guys.