Trump and the media are in a shared nightmare after he inadvertently bans himself from TV
Shortly before travelling to New York to meet his favourite “communist”, mayor Zohran Mamdani – and to deliver, on Tuesday, his annual blitzkrieg of insults to the United Nations institution – president Donald Trump stood outside the White House surrounded by men in yellow hard hats. He was giving an urgent building update on the new helipad. Unfortunately, nobody could hear him. “There is no microphone because the pool cameras aren’t there,” explained a host on the resolutely conservative, and pro-Trump, Newsmax. “This is maybe one example of it backfiring a little bit.” “It” was Trump’s already-notorious ban on the broadcasters CNN, MS Now and the publication Politico from the White House, which he announced on Friday, reportedly catching his communications staff – still down a permanent press secretary – unawares. The move was both impulsive and blatantly unconstitutional. And it inadvertently pitches both president Trump and the broadcast media organisations he loves to loathe into a shared nightmare. The three organisations immediately announced their intention to sue the Trump administration. “Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference,” they said in a statement. Over the weekend, a parade of legal and constitutional experts agreed that Trump’s order will almost certainly be thrown out by the courts. On Monday, Trump retorted via social media, declaring that the White House is “not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America. It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully co-ordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW.” But Monday’s announcement by Bryan Broughton, Washington bureau chief for Fox News and acting chair of the White House television pool consortium, that the designated broadcast pool outlets will not cover presidential events “following the White House’s position preventing CNN from fulfilling its assigned pool duties”, effectively meant that Trump had inadvertently banned himself from the television screens. No president has gamified or manipulated the American media tradition of the White House press pool as adroitly or as brazenly as its current president. A dedicated team of reporters has followed US presidents since the Roosevelt era. After the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, that constant coverage intensified. All presidential trips are covered by both broadcast and print outlets, on a rotating basis, drawn from the dedicated pool of outlets, who absorb the significant travel and associated costs. Weekends are often dull and unnewsworthy but the president’s every move is nonetheless covered. And Trump has often given the networks bang for their buck: the notorious dressing-down of Volodymyr Zelenskiy just a month after returning to power; the televised cabinet briefings in which various secretaries are invited to pay homage; the “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. Trump behaves as though in order for something to have truly happened, it must occur through the medium of a live television broadcast. The reason for that is written on his birth certificate. He is a product of the ironclad broadcast news age, when trust in the major networks was paramount. His emergence as a flamboyant and ruthless property developer in 1970s and 1980s New York coincided with the roaring age of network cable news broadcasts – and the phenomenon of the 24-hour rolling, dedicated news networks. His phenomenal assault on American political politesse was facilitated by using his fame as a television show host to trampoline his way into the national consciousness. In the 10 years since, he has all but normalised the concept of US presidential politics as an extension of the reality television show: it started when he laid waste to the field of Republican primary contenders in 2016 during the televised debates. While Trump was deftly steered towards the potency of new media during the 2024 election, from fawning hard-right influencers to pliable mass-market podcasters, it is through the remote control and night-time couch surfing that he seeks validation from the traditional broadcasters. It never came. On Friday, Kelly O’Donnell, the widely respected NBC chief justice and national affairs correspondent, was in the Oval Office and pointed out that every president “takes an oath to uphold the constitution which includes the First Amendment”. “How do you justify this?” O’Donnell asked him of the ban. “Because they are fake news,” Trump told her. “You get so tired and seeing fake news – when you look at CNN it is just fake. That is why their ratings are no good. When you look at MSNOW, which used to be MSNBC, which some people call MS DNC – it is fake news. And when you look at Politico, the government under Biden gave them eight million to keep them afloat. Our country has to have honesty. Borders, good voting, we straightened that out. And you need a free press. You need a fair press and an honest press. You know it and everybody knows it – you’re an intelligent ... I have known you a long time, you know how fake their reporting is. It is one sided. It is never good. Look at the story today – we lowered drugs costs by 60/70 per cent – they won’t even put it on. If they put it on, they will find a reason why that’s a negative.” Trump and senior White House figures like to describe the president’s fondness for rolling, meandering live-streamed media events as “transparency”. But “transparency” is the objective behind the questions that O’Donnell and other White House press reporters ask, questions that habitually irritate Trump. He has frequently, and infamously, used dismal, derogative terms in responding to female reporters. “Proximity” is a more accurate word for what those press sessions represent. The Trump administration undeniably offers the dedicated White House press pool, broadcast and print, extraordinary surface access to the working days of a sitting president. And that access gives Trump what he craves most: proximity to the oxygen of network television, of being broadcast throughout the inland empire; of setting and dictating the narrative on a daily and, sometimes, hourly basis. It would take an uninitiated visitor to the United States no more than an afternoon of watching dedicated news television to figure out which networks are hostile to Trump and which are favourable. Over the years, a kind of hopeless partisanship has taken hold of the general coverage of successive administrations – which made Monday’s broadcast alliance a remarkable rarity. Trump believes in the power of incantation: that if you repeat a thing often enough, it becomes true. There is little doubt that he believes he is treated unreasonably by the liberal wing of the US broadcast media – and it would take a deep trawl of the archives to uncover a segment that reflects well on his presidency. But there is also no doubt that he is not authorised to ban those outlets. There are two ways of looking at the current impasse. One is that the press outlets Trump believes to be unfairly interrogatory are the only bulwark between the fair reportage of US news and outright state propaganda. The flipside is that Trump and his administration use a combination of communication skill and bullying to render the point of an interrogatory press moot. Yes, those journalists present are free to ask the questions, which sometimes provoke the president into incendiary or boorish replies. But irrespective of the question, he will steer the answer into whatever his on his mind. All of which made the proposition of a Trump media blackout intriguing. The prospect of Trump enduring a week in the Oval Office without the presence of those cameras is something that he may find privately terrifying. How can a television reality show continue to be that if it’s not on television? Equally, a decade of Trump has been like a narcotic for the rolling news channels of the major networks. He’s a non-stop story and font of controversies, themes and outrages. Going cold turkey on live coverage would mark a major turning point in the 46-year history of dedicated 24/7 television news. The White House moved quickly to promote its own feed online, branding it “Trump TV”. The channel purports to show “top past moments, announcements, and the latest and greatest from the administration all in one place”. “Get real-time updates and live events streamed DIRECTLY to your phone,” the White House posted on social media. “No noise. Just the news that matters most – straight from the Trump Administration.” By Monday afternoon, Trump was in New York. He was, unsurprisingly, also back on television when he emerged from his meeting with mayor Mamdani in Gracie Mansion. Their joint remarks were covered by CNN, who used a Spectrum News NY1 feed, and their reporter was present on the invitation of the mayor’s office. “I told the president that we are going to have all the members of the press here on the lawn and that is something that I believe is ever going to matter – the opinion or critique – that we engage,” Mamdani, in steadfastly neutral mode, said when asked about the ban. Trump, though, carried a gloating tone as he surveyed the scene before him. “It is interesting because they said they were going to boycott me. But they never boycott me. So, I wasn’t very worried about that. Look at all that press!” The show goes on – until it doesn’t.