No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump “bans the free press” in gross announcement

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

Trump issues a proclamation banning several news outlets from the White House. Brian interviews David Corn about his new book, HOW RUSSIA WON.Order How Russia Won: https://howrussiawon.comWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Trump issues a proclamation banning several news outlets from the White House, and I'm joined by David Korn to discuss his new book, How Russia Won. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Here's one of the latest edicts from our free speech president. Quote, I am proud to announce that, effective immediately. I am banning fake news CNN, MS Now, 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 subscription,

an all-time record directly from the U.S. 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 media news outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. Trump was asked about this. Here's what he said. Oh, the ban on the free press, right? A very simple ban. I don't want him in the name.

my office. I don't want him here. I would say the ban would go as far as you can. Quote, oh, the ban on the free press. Not even trying to hide the fact that he is violating the First Amendment by banning the press from entering the White House for the crime of reporting critically on what he's doing. Fox's Jackie Heinrich, the president of the White House Correspondents Association, wrote, quote, the president said it plainly in the Oval Office, describing his own planned action as a ban on the free press, the Constitution protects the freedom of the press from government interference. That protection, does not depend on whether the president likes a news organization's coverage, agrees with its reporting, or approves of the questions its journalists ask.

This is about more than the rights of journalists. It is about the rights of the American people to receive a full and independent account of the activities, policies, and decisions of whoever occupies the nation's highest office. The White House Correspondents Association's standards in defense of our colleagues at CNN, MS Now and Politico who are being singled out for doing their jobs. Now, a few points here. Obviously, first and foremost, it is not lost on anyone how aggressively anti-free speech this president is and how overtly illegal this move is. He will be sued and this will be overturned in a hot minute. I have zero doubt about that. Like, I rarely make predictions.

I will make that prediction and I'll say it is 100% going to happen. Mark my words. But I hope all of these purported free speech champions, people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, take note that the figure they helped give rise to because they claim to be against censorship is the principal purveyor of exactly that. And this isn't even the first time. He's sicked his FCC on comedians for the crime of telling jokes.

He's already tried and failed to ban the AP from the White House for accurately describing the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of Mexico, and the list goes on and on. But here's my second point. We can all hear all the strongly worded letters in the world from people like Jackie Heinrich at Fox News. But her news outlet run cover for this guy on a daily basis. They paid $787 million to perpetuate his election lies.

So when ABC covers this and complains, remember that they paid him $16 million to settle with him. Same with CBS. Trump doesn't care about your strongly worded letters because he already knows that he owns these legacy media outlets. They've already shown him how weak they are. They fell over themselves settling every bullshit lawsuit that he brought forward. And so now when you wag your finger at him for these overt

attacks on the free press, you think he cares about that? He's not afraid of you because you already proved to him how weak you are by heaping millions of dollars into his pockets to try and buy goodwill. And what did that get you? Nothing. That's why, when Trump put my name on his enemies list, instead of quieting down, I talked about it every day. I wore it as a badge of honor and I dared him to add more names in the independent media

space to that list. I didn't cower, I leaned in. And guess what? He never added a single additional name. You don't beat a bully by cowering. to him, you beat a bully by punching back. That's a lesson that legacy media could learn, but refuses to. This is what it looks like when you prioritize access above your actual function.

And the natural conclusion of that is that Donald Trump's announcement here, shamelessly proclaiming his intention to ban the free press from the people's house is exactly what he's moving forward with. So again, Trump will be sued and he'll lose. But maybe our free press might learn a lesson from all of this, that if it wants to remain a free press, Sometimes that actually requires having a backbone, something they've failed to learn or show thus far.

Next up is my interview with David Korn. No Lie is brought to you by Ship Station. So I am a procrastinator, and nowhere is that more apparent than right before the holidays where I haven't bought any gifts, and I have to cram that all in before I go home empty-handed. I'm sure millions of people are in the same boat as me. Now imagine being the retailer having to deal with that mad rush

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Just in time for the upcoming midterms, we have a brand new cataclysmic story that involves the Russians and Don Jr. I'm joined now by David Korn, author of the new book, How Russia Won. David, I want to get into your book in just a moment. But first, on this breaking news, as it relates to Putin-linked oligarchs in Russia, apparently financing Don Jr.'s wedding. Is this happening as he would claim in a vacuum that he's just dear friends with these people? Or do you think there's some broader story that involves national security and his father that might come into play in all of this?

This is a big piece of a narrative that's been smothered for years. Donald Trump and his close relationship with Russians business-wise and also denying the Russian attacks on the various elections. He has looked to basically forge a bond. with Vladimir Putin. It goes back over 12, 13 years now. And the Russians have clearly, clearly try to court him and have interfered in our elections, not just in 2016, but in 2020 and 2020 for his benefit.

So anything happening now, a Russian oligarch close to Putin, financing Trump's son's wedding to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's all part of this larger picture of Trump and Russia. And you know, Brian, If Hunter Biden had gotten his wedding paid for by a Russian oligarch or Ukrainian oligarch,

it would make heads explode throughout MaguWorld and Fox Media. So this is a big, big deal that's part of a larger story that Trump has tried really hard over the last 10 years to smother and dismiss. Well, when Don Jr. comes out and justifies all of this by saying that the Putin-Aprudence, was just our dear friend. That was his quote, our dear friend. Is it possible that he might think this person is their dear friend, but in fact he might be the victim of a campaign where the Kremlin expressly needs to find ways to get ingratiated with the Trump family? And so he might be, you know, Don Jr. might be thinking this person is their real friend or not, but the reality is,

like, if the campaign is aimed at ingratiating themselves into the Trump administration, isn't this exactly that. And you might have Don Jr., who's just an unwitting or winning participant in all of this, but whose naivety just might be so obvious that it's allowing the Kremlin to gain a foothold in U.S. politics. You know, there are 50 people at this wedding. He says he met this oligarch just within the last couple of years. Is any of it you've met in the last few years, Brian, who would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on your wedding? If so, you're probably a much better friend than I am. I mean, this is, this is, this clearly has the outline. of a Russian effort to get even closer and deeper into the Trump family than already exists.

We know that Trump made money off a Russian oligarch when he held the Miss Universe Conscious there in 2013. Both Don Jr. and Eric have talked about Russian money coming in and supporting their properties. There's clearly been an effort on the part of the Russians to do two things. To get into the Trump clan through money, they offered Trump a deal while he was campaigning for president in 2016, in a tower deal in Moscow, and to affect American elections with influence operations and all sorts of things that I outlined in the book, disinformation campaigns, to affect politics here for Trump's benefit. This is clearly all part of the same thing. And I mean, Donald Trump, Jr., and senior, and everyone else, they try to sell the public on a lot of bullshit. It's really hard to believing

that this just happened because this Russian oligarchy is a lot of. One more question on Russia and our elections. You know, it's widely known at this point, not only because of U.S. intelligence agencies, but also guilty pleas, that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election, in previous elections. We've had U.S. officials who've pleaded guilty to participating in that whole effort. Is there any evidence that Russia is continuing to meddle in our elections? modern day, like 2026 and likely beyond. Yes, I mean, this was part of the reason I did this book, because we've been stuck in

this argument over 2016, whether there was collusion, the steel dossier, and all this stuff, and Trump has been able to basically escape accountability for being complicit in the 2016 attack by denying it was happening and helping to cover up what Vladimir Putin did. But then in 2020 and 2024, there were other Russian intelligence operations aimed at helping Trump. And they did so in the midterm elections between those presidential elections. So they've been doing this nonstop for over 10 years now. And we just started seeing the beginnings of this happening again in this election. MS now a couple days ago reported that a Russian intelligence network called Matriashka, which I write about in my book, was starting to put out

disinformation, fake videos of celebrities that are slamming and dismissing and saying terrible things about Democrats and urging people to vote Republican, people like Julia Roberts and Jessica Sarah Parker. So again, they're starting to amp up on this. They've been nonstop in terms of disinformation to discredit Vlodomioz Zelensky and U.S. support for Ukraine. This same outfit, Matrioshka, in 2024, put out videos that they branded as Washington Post, CNN, Bellingcat videos. They They had the little logos in them. They put them out, and they claim that Kamala Harris had an abortion, that she was tied in with big pharma.

They put out things of denigrating Tim Walz, her running mate. So they were very active in 2024. And now, as we get close to the midterm elections, we see them again. And the key thing to remember here, Brian, is that in the last two elections, we had government agencies and offices that were countering and tracking what Russian disinformation operatives were doing. And they were sometimes letting the public know. This was the office of the director of national intelligence. It was a foreign influence task force at the FBI.

It was a foreign maligned center at the ODNI and a unit at the State Department. They all were actively tracking and doing something. Well, guess what? Since Trump has come into office, he has basically decimated. And in some instances, just ended these organizations and these outfits. So we don't know. And Trump doesn't want us to know. So in my book, I chronicle how this has been going.

on for 10 years and how Trump has been doing everything possible to keep it from becoming a big story. And now, since he controls the U.S. government, he's making sure that we the public won't really know what Russia is doing. No lie is brought to you by SimplySafe. When your home is under threat, you need more than a recording of a break-in. The video is all well and good, but I assume what's more important is preventing that break-in from happening in the first place. Simpliceph stops break-ins before they start.

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you know, I think Putin called it like a five-day war. He thought it was going to take, you know, five, three, whatever it was, days to take over Kiev. And so what do you mean when you say how Russia won as it relates to both Ukraine and the United States? Well, Russia clearly has not won the war in Ukraine, but what it has clearly done is help put into place in the White House an agent of chaos and authoritarianism, who has weakened the Western Alliance, who has made it even more difficult for Ukraine to resist the brutal illegal invasion of Vladimir Putin, and who has weakened the U.S. standing in the world, and who has exacerbated political discord and divisions within the United States.

Vladimir Putin is fighting a twilight war against the West. You can hear officials in France, in Germany, and England say this time and time again. Trump administration won't recognize this. This twilight war is really aimed at fracturing the West and NATO and convincing his own people that democracies are messy and they don't work, which is why you need a strong man like Vladimir Putin in charge. And if you look at what's happening in the United States in the last year and a half and what happened under the first Trump administration, he has clearly created a lot of chaos here. And that has made it harder for the U.S. to stand up against Russia. And in fact, now we see in the war in Ukraine that Trump, in the last

couple of days, we have Jared Kushner saying, what really counts here is Ukraine has to give up land to end this war. So they are siding. They are siding with Vladimir Putin. They let him send his finance minister to the G20 meeting that was recently held, where Russia had been previously ostracized. So while Putin has not won the war in Ukraine, he has achieved a lot in weakening the U.S. internally and in its relationships abroad, creating discord between the United States and Canada, its most important trading partner and most important ally. So in that sense, this twilight war that Putin has been waging, which Trump doesn't. recognize, Republicans don't recognize. He's succeeding there. He's not using military power.

He's using disinformation and now in Europe sabotage campaigns to destabilize or try to destabilize the nations that he sees as his geostrategic foes. So in that instance, he's won several battle so far. The war's not over. American politics, as you know, swings back and forth, happens the same thing on the geopolitical stage. But his his operation to weaken the West and weaken the United States, I think in some ways, has been perhaps the most successful COVID operation in modern history. You know, I think people are going to hear about covert disinformation campaigns and cyber war that's being waged on behalf of the Russians.

And it feels distant to normal people. In what ways has this presented itself? for regular folks, folks who are scrolling online, for example. Are there ways in which this is touching regular Americans to the point that we don't even realize that we are the unwitting victims of this very campaign? That's a good question. And a lot of this can sound abstract and distant,

and a lot of it happens in the shadows. I mean, I wrote a long book about this, but I'm sure there's a lot going on that I could not uncover. Right? It's kept secret for a purpose. But what we see here is a subversion of American democracy in which in 2016 and 2020 and 2024, Russia came in and tried to put its thumb on the scale. Now, I'm not saying they alone got Donald Trump elected, but in these close elections in 2016 and 2024,

their intervention, their subterfuge was one of several factors that landed Donald Trump in the White House. And then you have to say, okay, what does it mean to you that we now have Donald Trump in the White House? He's launched this war in Iran that has raised prices for gasoline. He has launched these erratic tariff wars, these trade wars, that have not succeeded. And they have, again, caused inflation. So there's some direct impacts that way. What is he done in terms of health care? What is he done in terms of, you know, Medicare, Medicaid?

These are all things that have impacts on people. And I would argue that the overall consequences have been negative for America. They've weakened the country, and they've actually created more internal distress than discord. And so to the degree that any of that affects you, whether it's shopping at a grocery store, or whether it's what your kids see at school, however that affects you, the Russians, Vladimir Putin, had a hand in it. I mean, if we're going to make mistakes in this country, we should make them on our own.

I think it's a good principle to have. And if we care about American democracy, about getting the best people elected, with the best debates and the best discourse we can have here, we don't want this diversion, and we don't want it coming with an administration or a presidential candidate helping it happen, which is what Trump has done again and again.

And, you know, people talk about whether there was collusion with Trump and Russia in 2016. But to me, the key thing was Russia attacked and he denied these attacks. He was aiding and abetting after the fact. After the fact. He was echoing what Putin said. He was siding with Putin in order to benefit himself politically. That is a profound act of betrayal. And someone who engages in such action is not going to be working for the public good.

I want to work backwards on that point a little bit. We're talking about the consequences that regular Americans have to shoulder. Why is that important to the Kremlin? What are the Kremlin's objectives here that would lead them to want to engage in these covert influence campaigns expressly to weaken American democracy? What is their goal in this? Vladimir Putin has a geostrategic mission. He wants to restore the Soviet Empire. call it the Russian Empire. And whether that means taking over countries next door to him or just

expanding Russian influence throughout the world, the biggest roadblock to that is the West. It's NATO, it's United States. It's the idea of democracy, freedom, free markets. That is the antithesis to what he wants to see for Russia and for himself. So he has been looking for years to weaken, not just the United States, but the West overall. He's interfered in elections in France and Poland and Moldova. He was interfering in the Brexit decision. And more recently, and it failed in the election in Hungary. So he wants to expand Russian influence and weaken the West

and create all this conflict within the West. And if people are fighting more against each other here in the United States, the U.S. is going to be less able to lead the world and to put up any counter resistance to his imperial ambitions. And, you know, Ukraine just encapsulates that, but he goes beyond that. Joe Biden, you know, people can say what they want to say about Joe Biden, but he did lead a coalition that was essential in helping Ukraine resist Vladimir Putin's invasion. Now, Donald Trump promised patriot missiles to Vladimir Zelensky, but they're not coming.

And we have Jared Kushner taking the side of Putin in the ongoing negotiations because Putin doesn't want these negotiations to succeed. So Putin has these ambitions. The U.S. and the West are standing in his way. If he weakens the coalition, and if he weakens the United States, I mean, look what's happening into our global standing in the world of finance. You have countries dumping dollars, taking their gold out of the United States. The U.S. is becoming weaker in terms of its influence around the world. The war in Iran has put us in a weaker position. This is all to Putin's advantage.

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When a country like Russia who has a vested interest in dismantling the West so that they can be ascendant, as you said, so that the Russian empire can be reconstituted, what do you, What do you presume they think when they see a party where the leader of that party is effectively a useful idiot for them and will be perfectly content to, you know, allow himself to be manipulated by the Russians because all he cares about is his own self-enrichment and the Russians are perfectly content to enrich him?

And you've got the rest of the party that because their sole goal is to curry favor with the guy at the time, of the party, they're content to go along with it. And so really all they have to do is spark a little flame. And then our own political parties will allow that flame to grow into a full-blown inferno. I mean, what do you presume the Russians think when they see this state of just our political environment right now in the United States? I think I make it pretty clear in my book that they are rubbing their hands with glee. Yeah. Donald Trump has made this much easier for them. They did not expect in 2016 for their meddling to result in Donald Trump's victory. They were just throwing oil on fires already burning. And they were very smart, though. They figured out how to put out a series of leaks in the last campaign of material that they themselves had stolen from Democrats that had an actual impact on the campaign. My book opens with the story from that very night.

election night 2016. At some point, we don't know when, U.S. intelligence intercepted some conversation between Russian disinformation operatives, and one is telling the other, on that night, we couldn't believe it. We popped champagne, and we looked at each other, and we said, we made America great again. So they know what they're doing, and I think they've become more ambitious with the success that they've had. And, you know, it's a cliche now to talk about Vladimir Putin as a former KGB officer, but this is what intelligence officers do. They look for vulnerabilities in the targets, and that could be an organization, a country or a person, and they try to exploit them. They go right at them. And they found, you know, Trump's vulnerabilities and his vulnerabilities extend

to America at large. So they see chaos and discord. And the other thing, that we didn't re-talk about was one of Trump's key things is badmouthing, trash-talking, American elections. He's out there more than anybody else, more than the Russians, saying you can't trust our elections. And that is a core message for Vladimir Putin. Elections don't work. They're messy. You can't trust them. You've got to put your faith in me. So Trump is doing double duty dismissing elections here and making it easier for Vladimir Putin to sell authoritarianism to his own people. We'll leave it there.

The book, again, is How Russia Won. For everybody who's watching, I'm going to put that link right here on the screen and also in the post-description of this video. If you're listening on the podcast, I'm going to put it in the show notes. Highly recommend you get this book. This was monumentally helpful in terms of understanding all of what's going on right now. Very often information that is purposefully kept under wraps or beneath the radar as far as possible. So again, grab that book if you have the opportunity to do so. David, I appreciate your

time and thank you for writing this book that you've told us a little bit about today. Thank you so much, Brian. Thanks again to David. That's it for this episode. Talk to you on Wednesday. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show, please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to bryantellercoen.com to learn more.