The Two-Year Temper Tantrum to Come
· The Atlantic
Yesterday when a judge ordered President Trump to lift a ban on journalists accessing the White House, the immediate crisis appeared to be averted: Trump had lost, and reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico largely returned to their normal work on the grounds. But the maneuver Trump had attempted is a preview of what to expect over Trump’s remaining time in office—especially if Democrats take control of one or both chambers of Congress. To put it another way, the country is headed toward a two-year temper tantrum.
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Last Friday, Trump announced on Truth Social that he would ban journalists from the three outlets from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” The reporters promptly sued; in the meantime, the television networks responsible for White House pool coverage suspended that work. The counterproductive result was an odd several days during which Trump went without the traditional passel of reporters hanging on his every word. On Monday, at the unveiling of a new White House helipad, Trump’s remarks were inaudible without the powerful boom microphones used by TV crews. Video streamed by administration staffers showed the vaguely comic sight of Trump silently gesticulating, his mouth moving but no sound coming out. The whole kerfuffle was a display of both Trump’s power and his impotence: damaging to democracy yet also undermining of his own authority.
What prompted this particular round of White House abuse of the press is not entirely clear. But Trump often resorts to attacking the media when he receives news he dislikes—and amid rising fuel prices caused by the war in Iran, sinking poll numbers for the congressional GOP, and Trump’s own declining popularity, there is a lot of bad news for the president to avoid. So he created a safe space. “I don’t have to let them into my—into the people’s house,” he declared from the Oval Office of journalists writing “purposely negative stories.”
During that same exchange with reporters, Trump was asked whether he thought the ban would survive a court challenge. He didn’t seem to care: “I think it’s good to point it out, whether it survives or doesn’t.” Timothy Kelly, the Trump-appointed judge assigned to the case filed by CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, had previously ruled in 2018 that the White House could not bar CNN’s Jim Acosta. Kelly was now also armed with a 2020 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that journalists granted access to the president could not be stripped of it without due process. By banning the three outlets, Trump had chosen to pick a fight that he had already lost twice in court and would almost certainly lose again.
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The Department of Justice’s litigating approach this time around proved haphazard. Perhaps seeking to exploit the courts’ traditional reluctance to interfere on national-security issues, DOJ invoked those magic words as a justification, saying that the outlets had supposedly used their White House access to obtain leaks dangerous to the country’s security. But one of the ostensible leaks published by Politico turned out to have been a quote provided during an authorized White House press call by an administration official—Vice President Vance himself, according to the media reporter Oliver Darcy.
The whole exercise was a tidy summary of the Justice Department’s transformation into an extension of Trump’s id. At one point, hours after a court hearing, the DOJ lawyer leading the case, Michael Velchik, submitted a legal filing that consisted primarily of a brand-new Truth Social post from the president. Judge Kelly appeared unimpressed. The argument that national security required the revocation of press access “lacks factual support,” he wrote in an emergency ruling early yesterday morning, ordering the White House to allow the journalists back in.
When the press arrived at the White House gates hours later, however, the reporters from the three disfavored outlets were still barred from entering. What appeared at first to be Trump’s defiance of a court order may instead be attributable simply to incompetence, thanks to delay and confusion on the White House and Secret Service’s end in implementing Kelly’s directive. Either way, the TV press pool refused to resume operations until this morning. The result was that Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to the White House yesterday took place without any American live television coverage. Trump also barred some—though, confusingly, not all—CNN and MS NOW journalists from covering the state dinner, which does not directly violate Kelly’s order but could land the White House back in the courtroom.
There is no strategy here: The only real result of his fit of pique has been to deprive himself of the attention he covets. Meanwhile, he managed to inspire media organizations to join together in solidarity—depriving him of pool coverage. Even the Trump-friendly Fox News joined an amicus brief filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press against the ban. (The Atlantic joined the brief as well.)
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Trump’s standoff with the press reflects the fury of a man who has grasped, however dimly, that he cannot control everything. (“You should not be here covering me,” he told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins at the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York earlier this week, seemingly not understanding that banning CNN from the White House did not mean the network would be universally banned from his presence.) It is also the fury of someone insistent on exerting as much power as he can over the steadily shrinking universe of what does remain directly under his control. If Republicans lose unified control of Congress in the midterms, then Trump’s old allies will be less likely to swear fealty, and that universe will diminish even further.
There is a danger to democracy here, but it is less the danger of a strategic shift toward authoritarianism and more the danger of petulance and stupidity. Every president struggles with irrelevance in the waning years of their power, and Trump has never been one to decline gracefully.