In so-called normal times and under business-as-usual administrations the job of White House Press Secretary doesn’t lead to renown or infamy. Those terms — normal, business as usual — don’t apply to Donald Trump’s tenure in the Oval Office, and his press secretaries have become household names mostly for the wrong reasons.

Sean Spicer’s claim to fame is being a terrible liar and an even worse dancer. Sarah Huckabee Sanders distinguished herself by reducing the once-frequent White House press corps briefings to very occasional insult exchanges peppered by lies.  Her successor Stephanie Grisham, meanwhile, spends her time appearing on the One America News Network, Sinclair Broadcast Group stations, and Fox News instead of serving as a liaison between the press corps and the Oval Office.

More than 300 days have passed since the White House has held a news conference with reporters. In light of the recent saber-rattling between the U.S. military and Iran, that number is stunning. Times such as these require an official briefings from the White House and the military, who are charged with a duty to convey information to citizens via the press corps with clarity.

Such times also present tremendous opportunities to spin the administration’s actions in a persuasive light, leading citizens to have confidence in its actions. Indeed, Ari Fleischer used his position as George W. Bush’s press secretary to sell a war that has been dragging on now for 17 years.

On Friday, Fleischer appeared in Pasadena to talk about the upcoming “American Experience” profile “George W. Bush,” part of PBS’ day of press conferences at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. This is where Salon sat down with him for an interview that took place before the “American Experience” panel.

Right around the same time, 13 former White House press secretaries, military and foreign service officials published a letter on CNN calling for the restoration of regular press briefings.

“An informed press corps strengthens our ability to govern,” the letter states. “Yes, presidents are now able to communicate directly via the internet, social media and tweets. But most Americans will learn about the work of the White House in the reports they see, read, and hear in what we collectively call ‘the press.'”

The statement then observes that regular White House briefings generally lead to better and more responsible reporting, later adding, “In times of military conflict and international crisis, these briefings take on even more importance. Americans want to know the latest developments and seek the truth. On social media, wild rumors can fly, and our adversaries can manipulate disinformation to their advantage. This is now well documented.”

“For that reason, among many, the country needs trusted sources of information delivered on a timely and regular schedule. That is the fundamental responsibility of people who serve as spokesmen and women for presidents, cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking government officials.”

White House spokesman Hogan Gidley responded to the letter by calling its writers “D.C. establishment swamp creatures.”

Among those who signed are Victoria Clarke, who worked under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Scott McClellan, who worked under Bush as his press secretary.

Missing from that list are McClellan’s fellow Bush-era press secretaries Dana Perino and Fleischer. Perino is now a Fox News anchor, and Fleischer is a contributor at Fox News.

In this one-on-one conversation with Salon, Fleischer talked about his view of the press’ relationship with the White House in the current climate and was asked to reflect on his time as press secretary to the second President Bush, specifically with regard to conveying false information about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction that led us to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Please note that this interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

 I don’t know if you read the recent Twitter challenge from authors Don Winslow and Stephen King to Stephanie Grisham.

No, I haven’t.

 They stated that if she would hold a press briefing, they’ll give $200,000 to St. Jude’s Charity. This was a serious offer, speaking to the fact that there has not been a White House press briefing for more than 300 days.

Yeah.

You held that job and observed the traditional means of operating as an information bridge between the White House and the press corps. So what do you think about the fact that the last couple of press secretaries have been not only less approachable, but granting less access to official information coming out of the White House?

I’m a traditionalist, so it concerns me a lot and there’s a tremendous value to the briefing. There certainly was during the Bush era, and historically now, the advantage to a president is you have people reinforce his message and buttress what he says. The advantage to the country is it gives reporters a chance to ask more probing, longer follow-up questions.

But everything’s changed now in this era of hostility between President Trump and the press. And I’ve never seen such rancor and hostility in both directions. And so as much as I’m a traditionalist and see the benefits of the briefing, I don’t know that if they brought the briefing back in this current environment, it would serve the press, the public or the press secretary any good cause. I just think it would turn the room into nothing but a TV show that was full of nasty arguments both directions.

I’m not going to disagree with the partisan rancor in this country. That is abundantly clear. But I do not believe that what you’re saying about the animosity in terms of the press, particularly the actual people in that briefing room, is justified.

 I say that because there is a habit nowadays, as we’re consuming media, of conflating the people who are on the ground and in that room doing their job as journalists and asking questions, with punditry. You know this. You’re a pundit.  So I understand that you’re going to have a viewpoint on this topic that’s going to be a bit skewed. But I just want to say that when you’re blaming both sides, I need to disagree with that.

 The questions that are being asked are probing and they’re certainly pressing tough issues with the president. But I would also say that the reaction the president has had, and the press secretaries from Sean Spicer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders and now what we seen of Stephanie Grisham, that is where the rancor has showed up. And you can call me biased on the behalf of those journalists, but when I’m watching the news, the rancor is really elevated from the [White House] side.

 Just one other factor I’ll mention – and I’ll come back to that.  But there’s another big factor here that’s changed things. And that’s the accessibility of the president himself versus President Obama, President Bush, President Clinton. No predecessor has been as open and accessible to the press as the president himself. And that is the primary job of the White House press corps, is to ask the president hard questions. So he’s doing it on virtually a daily basis, whether it’s a good day for him or a bad day —

As he’s getting on a helicopter with very loud rotors where he limits amount of time spent answering questions.

—that matters. I mean, if you’re, if you’re sitting there, they’re getting seven, eight, nine, 10 questions —

They’re getting in a couple of questions repeated seven, eight, nine, 10 times…And he’s not really answering those questions.

 I don’t think that’s the case.

 I’m just saying that there’s a difference between those formal briefings, which as you know, you have a controlled environment that you, as the press secretary, used to your advantage. Just in terms of being able to distill information accurately and effectively to the press.  What you did, and I’m not saying this was right, but you distilled the message to the press, and the press gave it credibility and repeated it. I’ll also say the press should have questioned you even more. I would say that to every press secretary.

 But the role that the press secretary plays carries a certain level of respect with the press. By saying Trump is more accessible, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the press is getting a better value in the information he’s sharing.

That’s on the press, not on the president. They have daily access and the press can get out of it whatever they seek. And I don’t think venue matters. They have access to the president, which is an improvement over prior White Houses for the press. So given the fact that the president is so accessible, I still wish as a traditionalist there were the briefing, but I’m realist enough to know that that rancor, that hostility would turn into a nasty red hot TV show where the few grandstanders in the room will spoil it for the lot of them, particularly print reporters who really do just want to get questions answered.

[CNN White House correspondent] Jim Acosta, for example. He acts like a pundit when he should be a correspondent. He states his opinion. He tells the White House what they should be concluding, and I think it’s that type of grandstanding along with the breakdown of the media in the modern era that has led to such polarizing media outlets. We used to have a much more dedicated, neutral fact-finding press corps and now, in both directions, the press takes stands for and against. And I think that’s a reality that’s going to live long after President Trump as well. There’s just been a breakdown on what the media represents that’s changed with this polarization. All of it in the Trump era leads me to think that as traditional as I am, and as constructive as the briefing can be, it makes little to no sense to fiddle with the Trump administration.

At the same time you have to also consider who is that in that room. You’re talking about the breakdown in the media. But there are people in that room who aren’t actually, and I am saying this politely, traditional media. They’re not even really media at all. The White House has invited propaganda machines into that room.

They’ve always been there.

So you’re saying this is normal, that you let in the likes of One America News, conspiracy bloggers ,and newsletter writers, you let those in during the Bush era?

 Oh yeah. I mean, my approach during the Bush era was the press secretary should not be the person who decides who was or who was not media. There were people who worked for me who made that decision based on logistics and Secret Service reviews. I don’t think it’s helpful for the press secretary to decide you are acceptable as a journalist. That’s a thin line on thin ice. So I had people in there who were far, far left pundits and then far, far right pundits. That’s the way it goes.  I’d spend most of my time taking questions from the front couple of rows, which is where the traditional mainstream outlets sit.

The difference now is that when Trump has appeared and asked questions, he’s gone to the “friendlier” outlets that aren’t actual news organizations. And that’s something as press secretary when you would brief Bush, my guess is, and you can clarify this, but I suspect you encouraged him to take questions from the traditional news outlets that carried the most weight.

He did, regularly. What really changed is the internet and social media has created profound changes in the way the media operates. And then breakdown of the media in terms of the polarization that the rest of the nation is going through as well.

When I was there, there was no Facebook, there was no Twitter, it was the dawn of the social media internet era. Toward the end of the Bush years, Twitter existed and Facebook existed, but I remember thinking if we ever wanted to produce a White House video, we would have released it through government channels and I’d have been hammered for creating government propaganda.

Technology changed, and the Obama administration regularly released YouTube videos and it was widely accepted. It was measured then by how many clicks it got as a measure of whether it was popular, whether it was successful. Gone was the notion that this could be propaganda even though the only difference was who carried it: YouTube versus the government channel.

Technology has really changed everything for the media probably in many ways that are positive in many ways that are negative and we’re still flushing that out.

Let’s talk about that. A lot of your tweets and recent interviews have been quoted. You are getting on Fox News and saying a lot of things in the moment, that you’re having thrown back in your face and you’re being asked to defend yourself.

 I’m talking about everything that’s happening in Iran, the missile strikes in Iraq, and all the reaction around this new conflict in the Middle East. People have taken issue with your recent initial reaction of  “we’ll be greeted as liberators,” which is what you said in 2003.  After that, there were marches in the streets of Iran showing that not to be the case.

 Looking at this part of a 17-year war – one which you had role in starting – it’s curious to me that now, 17 years later that you wouldn’t look back and observe that maybe we shouldn’t be doing this, maybe we shouldn’t be increasing tensions with Iran.

Yeah, I’d do it the same way I always have. And that’s to say what I believe. It’s not complicated.

Not even in hindsight?

First off, you have to make the distinction between the military operation, the war itself, and then the occupation. The aftermath fact is from March of 2003 till roughly July, August of 2003, we were greeted as liberators. You could go to cafes and downtown Baghdad, sit outside and have meals. It was a peaceful city. People welcomed the Americans. Starting in the fall of 2003 predominantly, that’s when the occupation turned terrible. And that’s when we start to lose many more lives. And that’s when the tide turned.

So two things can be right at the same time. We were greeted as liberators, and then a guerrilla war became a highly successful guerrilla operation. And we didn’t handle the occupation, right? We handled the military invasion. We didn’t handle the occupation.

But I’m talking about the information that was dispensed to the press before the war.

I’ll get back to that. The other big thing was the issue of weapons of mass destruction. This is an entirely legitimate issue. Of course, I faithfully and accurately reported to the American people precisely what the CIA concluded. The CIA concluded the Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, biological or chemical, no if, ands, or buts.

And the UN investigators went in and didn’t find any conclusive evidence of WMDs.

 The CIA said that he had them. That was the CIA’s conclusion. And that was what the president relied on when he made the decision to go to war.

Now, tragically, that intelligence turned out to be wrong, and we all acknowledge that that’s what led to the creation of the war. They called the Robb-Silberman Commission, a bipartisan investigation into how and why it went wrong. Their conclusion was it was an intelligence failure. That’s the heart of it.

And to this day, I’m certain that if the CIA had said to President Bush, “We don’t know. We’re not sure if he has weapons of mass destruction or not,” there never would have been [a war].

And the tragedy is the information turned out to be wrong and we went to war based on a wrong conclusion by the CIA.

[Editor’s Note: Fleischer elaborated on this in a Twitter thread back in March 2019. The Washington Post Fact Checker column followed up with a closer examination of its veracity.]

Famously, you said that you didn’t support Trump in the election. But you do now. At what point do you look at the events that are either connected to Trump or that he’s precipitated in terms of tensions not just between party but also between the people of this country and say to yourself, “Enough is enough”?  Or, “You know what? Looking back, I might not have been correct in this initial assessment”? At what point do you maybe reassess and actually say in public, “Maybe I wasn’t correct?”  Do you apologize for anything?

In the primary, I voted for somebody else. I wanted to be for him in the general against Hillary Clinton. And as I watched it all unfold, I ultimately left my ballot blank at the presidential level and voted for him all the levels below president. And as I have watched President Trump, there are many times I have criticized him and there are many times that I have praised him. I’m not afraid to be independent and call it as I see it.

I regularly defended [Special Counsel Robert Mueller] because I know Bob Mueller. I know what a man of integrity is. I was one of few, if not the only person, on Fox News from start to finish to defend Bob and Bob Mueller’s honor and integrity and how he conducted that investigation. And I’ve never hesitated to criticize the president on Twitter or on Fox News.

. . . So I don’t hide what I think or say. And I think one of the highest duties you have having once worked at the White House is no longer to be a spokesperson for any one president or cause. That’s what I used to do with tremendous pride. Now the more important thing is to try to shine a light on what’s right, what’s wrong, what worked, what didn’t, and explain it.

And that’s what I’ve tried to do with President Trump. There are things that he’s done that . . . I don’t support his manner. His style is not mine. It’s not like that any of the people that I’ve worked for. It’s too truculent. It’s too offensive.

But I’ll also point out that many of the criticisms against him are too truculent and too offensive. He’s been called Adolf Hitler, he’s been called Mussolini. As soon as he was the president-elect, a movement [arose] that was based on the word “resistance,” which was the word used against the Nazis in France. . . . Talk about going beyond the norms. These are all actions beyond the norms.

But do you believe that he has been a normal president? You’ve worked for a man who I think people would say operated within the social contract of what we expect from a president.

He’s the president that the American people through the electoral college elected. And I see a lot of people who rejected that, who tried to overturn it in the electoral college, if they could have, who are now trying to overturn it through impeachment if they can. And I think that is equally, if not more so, violative of the norms that I believe are important to the traditions that George Bush represented and the people that I used to work for represented. So I think there’s way too much hostility in the system. But it’s on every side. It’s not just President Trump.

Just to clarify, what would you say those norms are?

To treat people you disagree with, with respect. When President Obama was reelected in 2012 I tweeted the next morning, congratulations to President Obama. He’s my president and he’s all our president. I think that’s the way we should all be. That’s how you show respect for the American people and the decisions made within our constitutional system. I didn’t vote for President Obama. I voted for Mitt Romney, but I recognized he’s my president. As soon as President Trump was elected, you had this massive movement on Twitter and social media saying, “not my president.”

That same thing happened with Obama.

But not by me. You’re asking me questions of me. That’s why I said to you, I instantly tweeted, he’s my president. I wanted to strike that civil tone that much more representative of the Bush family’s tone. So if you’re asking about my behavior, I can just tell you what I’ve done. And that’s represented by what I believe about President Bush. and how you treat people, and how you should be civil with people even if you disagree with them.

You’re a contributor to Fox News and a lot of people have pointed out that Fox is one of the less respectful, less civil, less considerate proponents of discourse right now, particularly in politics. So when you’re talking about respect and civility — obviously they employ you, so there’s only so much you can say — but what do you see that they’re contributing to this conversation?

Well, I think you have to make a distinction between opinion shows and news shows.

Viewers don’t make that distinction.

But I think there is a distinction between the opinion shows and the news shows, and the news shows are superb. I think Bret Baier’s show at six o’clock is one of the best, most fair shows in journalism, and their daytime shows as well. I wake up in the morning, I watch CNN in the morning, and I watch Fox in the afternoon because I like the balance. I want to hear what all parties are saying and I think you can make many of the same points you made about Fox, about CNN and certainly about MSNBC.

So that’s part of that polarization, the breakdown in the media that I was talking about. But I also suggest if you see the things that I say on Fox, it is very much an independent voice and a voice that reminds people about the importance of civility.

This is the point I was making to you about Bob Mueller and I could give you dozens of examples where I’ve said things that were critical of the president and said things that are supportive of the president. I don’t have to be polarizing.

The “American Experience” two-part biographical profile “George W. Bush” with Fleischer airs Monday, May 4, and Tuesday, May 5 at 9 p.m., on PBS member stations.

The post Why Ari Fleischer is against resurrecting the extinct White House press briefings appeared first on Salon.com.

President Donald Trump’s administration barred CNN from traveling aboard Air Force One on Saturday, just two days after a federal judge ordered the White House to restore the network’s access.

CNN had been scheduled to serve as the television pool for Trump’s trip to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he was set to attend a college football game between the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas. Instead, White House guidance listed conservative network Real America’s Voice News for the trip.

Real America’s Voice is not a member of the five-network television pool, which rotates responsibility for recording presidential events and sharing the footage with other news organizations.

The latest restriction came less than 48 hours after U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly temporarily blocked Trump’s ban on CNN, MS NOW and Politico from White House grounds. Kelly, whom Trump appointed during his first term, found that the administration had failed to provide the outlets with due process before revoking their access.

Reporters from all three organizations returned to the White House following the ruling.

CNN also resumed its role in the television pool Friday, providing coverage as Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the National Archives. The other four television pool members had refused to participate after CNN was barred last week, leaving several presidential events without the usual network video coverage.

Kelly’s temporary order specifically addressed the outlets’ White House “hard passes” and did not directly address Air Force One or pool assignments. The news organizations have argued that the court’s ruling should apply to their pool access as well.

Trump, meanwhile, renewed his attacks on CNN Saturday morning.

“Why should perpetrators of FAKE NEWS, like CNN and MSDNC, be allowed access to a very sacred place, the White House?” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The president also complained about negative coverage of his administration, days after criticizing CNN for supposedly failing to cover his events during the media standoff.

CNN correspondent Kaitlan Collins disputed that claim after Trump confronted her during the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the White House had no authority over her credentials.

“We never said we were never going to cover the president,” Collins said.

Trump announced last week that CNN, MS NOW and Politico would no longer be permitted at the White House, accusing the organizations of spreading “fiction and lies.” The three outlets sued, alleging the ban violated their First and Fifth Amendment rights.

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The dispute also disrupted the White House television pool. ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News declined to provide substitute crews after CNN was removed from its scheduled assignments, temporarily leaving the administration without the network equipment normally used to distribute video and audio of the president.

Normal pool operations had only resumed Friday. And as of Saturday morning, CNN was off the rotation again.

The post Trump finds another way to shut out CNN appeared first on Salon.com.

There is a striking development buried inside the administration’s escalating confrontation with the press that’s turned a familiar Donald Trump-versus-the-media fight into a potentially consequential rupture inside the right-wing media ecosystem. By banning CNN, MS NOW and POLITICO, the president tried to extract a cost for challenging coverage. The move backfired. Instead, it united competitors behind a press-freedom principle, prompting Fox News — the biggest booster of Trump’s political ascent — to participate in an unprecedented pool-coverage stoppage. 

Fox’s own Washington bureau chief, Bryan Boughton, who happened to be chairing the pool this week, sent the note announcing the shutdown. Now Peter Navarro, one of the president’s most loyal foot soldiers, is on a crusade against “the back-stabbing Fox News Corporation” and pushing the White House toward a punitive boycott of the outlet. 

Navarro, the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, is actively orchestrating a campaign to persuade the White House to formally cut ties with Fox News and isolate the network, thereby dismantling its status as the supreme arbiter of conservative media. Calling it “CNN with better lighting, a fake slogan and a flag graphic,” he has accused the network of “helping the other side undermine the president.” In recent days Navarro has argued that Trump’s Cabinet secretaries and senior officials should stop appearing on Fox News and Fox Business. Not only has he attacked network executives, but he has also celebrated Real America’s Voice as a potential replacement for MAGA’s loyalties. 

The proximate cause of Navarro’s rage is Maria Bartiromo, the Fox Business and Fox News anchor whose sudden firing earlier this month is key to understanding everyone’s motives in this fight. The longtime business host had been preparing to interview Navarro following Trump’s July 16 primetime speech in which the president made unsubstantiated claims about foreign interference in the 2020, 2022 and 2024 elections. After a Fox executive subsequently instructed her not to cover Trump’s claims, Bartiromo canceled Navarro’s appearance and shared the executive’s message with him. He then passed the communication up the White House chain of command. Fox treated the disclosure as a fireable offense, cutting Bartiromo loose after over 12 years, isolating her from her own staff in her final weeks and firing her executive producer alongside her. Trump himself seemed blindsided, posting that he “can’t believe” Bartiromo no longer has her shows. 

Navarro has treated Bartiromo’s exit as proof of a wider “muzzling” of MAGA. He has spent the following weeks constructing an increasingly elaborate theory of Fox as captured territory, run by executives who he claims are secretly sabotaging the president. Writing in the Washington Times and The Daily Caller, he has laid out a rap sheet: Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott is, by his account, “the same executive responsible for the decapitation of three of the network’s most intelligent talk heads”: Lou Dobbs in 2021, Tucker Carlson in 2023 and now Bartiromo, all pro-Trump voices who were pushed out while “useful RINO idiots like Karl Rove” enjoy free rein to criticize Trump’s tariffs. Navarro accused Fox of joining the entire White House television pool — which consists of ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC and Fox — to form a “Five Network Cartel” exercising illegitimate “veto power” over what Americans see of their own president. In Navarro’s view, the only acceptable resolution would be a primetime apology from the network to Trump and its viewership.

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Before he ran for office, Trump built his national political relevance through cable television, especially with Fox appearances during his birther campaign against President Barack Obama. Fox has been the top-rated network in total day and primetime cable news viewership every year since January 2002, a 24-year winning streak built precisely on the grievance-driven conservative audience that provided Trump with his political foundation. He, in turn, drove up the ratings even more. 

Fox did not build Trump alone, and Trump did not cultivate Fox’s audience alone. But their feedback loop mattered enormously: Each gave the other cultural authority with conservative voters. Members of the president’s Cabinet — from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former “Fox & Friends Weekend” host, to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — were recruited directly from the network’s anchor desks. 

Yet as Trump’s second administration reaches a critical turning point, that historic alliance has devolved into open, bitter warfare. The president’s own personal frustration with Fox predates even Navarro’s critique, though it often manifests in petty grievances and public score-settling. On Truth Social, the president has repeatedly vented his annoyance with the network, publicly berating anchor Shannon Bream — and misspelling the insult as “Milktoast” — for using outdated visual graphics of White House ballroom construction and for challenging Attorney General Todd Blanche on legal impartiality. Trump has similarly attacked Bret Baier and the network’s polling unit for displaying “Fake Polls” that reflect his declining national approval ratings.

Trump’s anger at Fox highlights a fundamental vulnerability for both himself and the network. Fox finds itself caught in an unsustainable commercial position; the network’s historically dominant ratings are showing signs of erosion as Trump’s poll numbers decline. When Fox hosts attempt to reflect the changing mood of the public or question controversial policies, they face immediate backlash from both the White House and their core audience.

This friction has become acutely visible in recent months as prominent Fox personalities have openly broken with the administration on his war of choice in Iran. Anchors who are generally supportive of the president, including Laura Ingraham and Jesse Watters, have repeatedly questioned Trump’s handling of the ongoing war. The conflict has drawn strong disapproval from a large segment of Trump’s populist base, who are feeling economic pain at the fuel pumps and growing skeptical of the president’s repeated claims that the military engagement is drawing to a close. Former Fox stars like Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have amplified this backlash from the outside, creating an unprecedented wave of right-wing dissent against the administration’s foreign policy.

Domestic economic policy has produced similar ideological fractures on air. Host Will Cain expressed visible frustration over Trump’s recent outreach to New York’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Pointing to lip-reading analysis of off-mic exchanges where Trump invited Mamdani to the White House and offered to look after his interests, Cain warned that MAGA and democratic socialism were beginning to blur, citing data showing that over half of young conservatives support government-run grocery stores and more than 40% would welcome a Democratic socialist presidency.

A week after his Oval Office temper tantrum, Trump’s press crackdown has succeeded only in exposing deep ideological fractures within the conservative movement and uniting historically fierce media competitors against his overreach. (On Thursday, a Trump-appointed judge issued a temporary order restoring access of the outlets to the White House for 14 days, while the legal challenge is ongoing.)

The president’s crackdown assumed Fox would play the compliant beneficiary, scooping up airtime and access that CNN and MS NOW no longer had. Instead Fox recognized, correctly, that a press pool that can be selectively gutted by presidential fiat today is also one that offers no institutional protection to others tomorrow, including Fox itself. In fact, after pool coverage resumed on Friday, the White House barred CNN from traveling with Trump on Air Force One. 

Instead of establishing Trump’s control over the media, the White House’s attempt at press suppression showed the limits of that control and, in the process, placed Fox News in the crosshairs of the very movement it helped build.

The post Fox News could suffer the most under Trump’s press crackdown appeared first on Salon.com.

We’ve been afflicted with the Donald Trump show for far too long. For more than a decade, American public life has been suffocated by a relentless, 24/7 reality television nightmare centered on his insatiable ego. The entire political existence of the self-described “king of ratings” has depended on a toxic, symbiotic relationship with the press that consists of bombastic press conferences and constant visual dominance designed to suck all the air out of the room. But when a clown’s only trick is shouting into a live microphone, the absolute worst thing that can happen is for the cameras to simply turn off. It’s clear by this week’s spectacle that Trump cannot survive the possibility that America has finally changed the channel.

On Friday, in a fit of authoritarian pique, Trump banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House press pool. It was a classic bully move. Yet, in a rare and long-overdue display of institutional solidarity, the rest of the press corps refused to play along. Major networks including NBC, ABC, CBS and even Fox News suspended their pool coverage of the president. Photographers from major wire services and news organizations like The New York Times and The Washington Post stopped publishing new images of the octogenarian chief executive.

The immediate result was an unadulterated farce. Stripped of his apparatus, Trump stepped onto the White House lawn to host a ribbon-cutting ceremony for his prized new helipad. He preened, grabbed his oversized scissors and opened his mouth to boast, but no one could hear a single word over the deafening roar of Marine One’s idling engines. The White House’s own official feed lacked the audio equipment that network pool crews typically provide. Viewers were left watching a silent movie of a shrinking figure gesticulating wildly into the wind. Even anchors on right-wing channels like Newsmax were forced to admit on air that the media ban was backfiring.

Trump got the closest thing to a full media blackout that modern television has ever handed a sitting president and his answer, apparently workshopped over a single weekend, was to build his own tiny replacement network out of recycled clips and call it a triumph. On Monday, the White House rolled out “Trump TV: The Essentials Station,” a 24-hour YouTube livestream on the official White House channel. The promotional hype promised an unedited, nonstop look at the administration’s “greatest hits” to circumvent the supposed censorship of the mainstream media. What they delivered instead was a glorified, automated graveyard of old clips. Viewers who tuned in expecting cutting-edge propaganda were greeted by a two-month-old Trump speech from Mount Rushmore, followed hours later by a rerun of a months-old address regarding creative uses for artificial intelligence and, eventually, a year-old broadcast of a dinner with Britain’s King Charles III. On Tuesday morning, while Trump was actually delivering a live address to the United Nations General Assembly, his own channel was airing his remarks from a prayer breakfast held at the White House in February. 

The numbers tell the story. “Trump TV: The Essentials Station” went live on the White House YouTube channel Monday at 7 p.m. Roughly 8,000 people tuned in for the premiere. Ninety minutes later that number had been reduced by half. By the next morning, as the cable news shows Trump was supposedly trying to render obsolete came on the air, his own channel had cratered to a little over 1,000 viewers, out of more than three million subscribers to the White House’s YouTube account. The viewership figures were a brutal reality check for a man whose self-worth is entirely tied to Nielsen points.

Trump has spent a lifetime mistaking attention for affection and ratings for legitimacy. Reporting and testimony from Trumpworld have long suggested that his 2016 campaign began at least partly as a vehicle for attention, leverage and perhaps a Trump-branded media enterprise. He was reportedly shocked by his victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. But once he discovered that the presidency provided a permanent camera crew, a global stage and an endless supply of people forced to listen, he developed an addiction that makes the rest of his behavior easier to understand. Stripped of the drama generated by actual journalists asking tough questions, however, Trump’s unfiltered echo chamber is excruciatingly boring. 

Trump TV’s desperate launch fits a decades-long pattern of grandiose vanity projects that inevitably collapse under the weight of their own cheapness. Before he became president, he was a brand in search of a platform. The list of failed enterprises bearing his family moniker is as long as it is embarrassing. There were the frozen steaks, the fraudulent university, the ill-fated airline shuttle, the bankrupt Atlantic City casinos and a short-lived dating show spun off from “The Apprentice” that was canceled after two seasons. There was the failed search engine, the closed charity, the cheap furniture line and the mortgage company launched right before the housing bubble burst. Trump TV is merely the latest entry in a long line of hollow grifts. 

Unable to command the airwaves from the Oval Office this week, Trump was forced to decamp to New York City to find a camera. In an ironic twist, the self-proclaimed media titan had to rely on a joint appearance with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — that reportedly angered some Republicans — to get his face back on television screen feeds. Standing at Gracie Mansion in the heart of liberal America, the president squeaked to reporters about how he had somehow beaten the boycott, boasting about the crowd of journalists while visibly shrinking in stature. Mamdani gracefully reminded the audience of the critical importance of a free press, while Trump predictably rambled about himself.

Later, at the United Nations, the president threw a visible tantrum when he spotted CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins in the briefing room, whining that she should not be allowed to cover him because of the network’s stance. Collins calmly noted that her credentials were issued by the U.N., not the West Wing, and proceeded to press him on national security concerns surrounding his unsanctioned military maneuvers in Iran. 

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It’s becoming clearer every day that the country is already moving past the Trump show. Beyond the broadcast networks, the wider media ecosystem is tuning him out. An analysis of nearly 70,000 hours of political podcasts conducted by The Wall Street Journal revealed that mentions of Trump’s name on conservative platforms have plummeted by nearly 70% from their 2024 pre-election peaks. His audience is exhausted. 

None of this is merely embarrassing. It is also very possibly illegal — and not in some abstract, symbolic sense. 

For 75 years Congress has barred federal agencies from spending appropriated money on publicity or propaganda that lawmakers haven’t explicitly authorized, a restriction currently codified as Section 718 of the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act. Any government resource used to produce partisan content that glorifies an official or an administration runs straight into that wall, and there is no minimum dollar threshold that makes a violation too small to count. Under the Antideficiency Act, federal employees who knowingly commit the government to spending beyond its appropriations for such content face fines up to $5,000, up to two years in prison or both, with a five-year statute of limitations that will still be running long after this administration leaves office. Slapping the Trump name on the Kennedy Center, hanging his portrait on federal buildings and, now, producing a taxpayer-funded YouTube channel that exists to replay his own speeches with no disclosed staff and no editorial standard — all of it likely clears that bar. Nobody expects this Justice Department, led by Trump’s former personal attorney Todd Blanche, to prosecute itself. But somebody is eventually going to have to answer for how the funds behind Trump TV were spent and justified.

The legal fight over the press ban itself is proceeding on a parallel and even more consequential track. CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW sued the administration Monday, arguing that stripping their credentials without notice or a chance to respond violates due process and the First Amendment. Their case leans on Sherrill v. Knight, the 1977 D.C. Circuit ruling that grew out of a reporter’s fight over a revoked White House press pass and established that access, once granted to bona fide journalists, cannot be pulled arbitrarily or because officials dislike what someone writes. The judge assigned to the case is Timothy Kelly, a Trump appointee who, in an earlier chapter of this same fight, ordered the White House to restore then-CNN correspondent Jim Acosta’s credentials back in 2018, citing that very precedent. 

In its response this week, the Justice Department didn’t just defend the specific ban. It asked the courts to overturn Sherrill entirely, arguing that access to the White House is a privilege rather than a right, and that the president should have the same discretion over the whole complex that he has over more sensitive spaces like the Oval Office. The filing is not a defense of one bad decision. It is a request for permission to make the president’s media ban permanent, to convert selective access into a standing tool for punishing unfriendly coverage every single day this administration remains in office, regardless of how this particular ban is ultimately resolved.

The cruelest, most effective thing the press could do right now is exactly what it is already doing: nothing. Keep the boycott going. Let the Trump TV feed play to a couch of true believers and stray insomniacs. Trump has spent his entire adult life treating attention as oxygen, and for the first time in a decade, the room has actually gone quiet around him.

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Blame Natalie Harp. On Friday, seemingly out of nowhere, Donald Trump banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House after whining for the umpteenth time about “Fake News,” his decade-long catchphrase to demonize accurate but unflattering press coverage. (It remains unclear if the president, whose paternal grandfather was from Germany, knows the term is an English translation of the infamous Nazi term “lügenpresse.”) Trump has been complaining about the media’s insufficient reverence for him throughout his entire political career, but there seems to be no precipitating cause for this particular tantrum. To the contrary, POLITICO reported that “senior staff were surprised by the directive, which happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town.”

“You get sick of it,” was all Trump would offer in the way of explanation for his media ban. 

Soon, though, reports showed that it was likely a response to provocations from Trump’s aide, Natalie Harp. “Aide” is probably too generous a word for Harp’s job, which is reportedly to follow the president around and attempt to soothe him with an endless barrage of flattery from herself and with print-outs of his followers saying nice things about him online. Even though she recently wrote “I never want to bring you anything but joy” to the man she she calls her “Guardian and Protector,” it appears Harp is actually quite comfortable showing Trump materials guaranteed to hurt his notoriously fragile ego.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Harp “showed him clips of anchors on the cable network MS NOW criticizing his administration” on Friday, which sent the agitated president into “a fever pitch.” CNN followed up with a report that she also provided him with clips from CNN and POLITICO, resulting in a rage from Trump that led to an impulsive ban of the three outlets. 

Harp became famous earlier this summer, when Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., mentioned in a campaign speech that Trump would rather “travel with Natalie” on the new Air Force One than do his job as president. The White House responded with a five-alarm overreaction, a move that only served to draw more attention to his relationship with a woman that New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman has described as Trump’s “human binky.” At first, the relationship was mostly the source of mockery that someone of the his stature apparently needs a full-time ego masseuse who often totes around enormous bags, which have generated speculation about their contents. (Some have connected them, with no concrete evidence, to the strange shape of the president’s prominent posterior.) 

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This new wrinkle in the Harp story, though, suggests that she’s not just a human Band-Aid for Trump’s insecurities — she is actively dangerous. It’s unclear why she apparently showed the president clips that were guaranteed to anger him, but the result is that he launched the most serious assault in his ongoing war on the free press and the First Amendment. The episode shows that Harp isn’t just there to flatter and soothe Trump; she is also willing to get him worked up so that his terrible decision-making skills deteriorate even further. 

This move works out very nicely for Harp; it will almost certainly make Trump more dependent on her. She’s setting up a contrast for the praise-hungry Trump, between the “nasty” media that says stuff that offends his ego and what she has on offer as a lithe blonde exalting his magnificence. Plus, having had his feelings hurt by the press coverage, he’ll be even more eager for her services as a professional ego-fluffer. 

The situation is potentially dangerous for the country. As his press ban shows, Trump’s sense of entitlement and demands for adulation are getting worse, making him more prone to lash out at those he feels show insufficient deference. He also seems to feel less constrained by the law in exerting his power to punish those who aren’t sufficiently compliant, an attitude that goes beyond his outrage at the media. For months, Trump has been illegally withholding federal funds to states that didn’t vote for him. 

The president’s addiction to flattery has always made him vulnerable to manipulation by bad actors. But this appears to have increased during his second term. Nowhere is this more obvious than with his war in Iran. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hawkish Republicans, led by the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, spent years trying to lure the U.S. into a war with the Islamic Republic. They were unsuccessful, never quite able to persuade past presidents, including Trump in  his first term, to ignore the military experts warning against taking action. But in February, Graham finally managed to get Trump over the line, appealing to his vanity by shamelessly comparing him to Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

This time, Trump’s demand for nothing but fawning coverage backfired. The major networks that comprise the White House press pool, including Fox News, responded to the media ban with a boycott. “Mr. Trump, for whom television is better than any narcotic, finds himself for the first time at least partially deprived of the major networks that have covered nearly every movement and utterance he has made for more than a decade,” wrote Peter Baker of the New York Times.

Deprived of his attention fix, the president visited New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani at Gracie Mansion on Monday, crowing, “They never boycott me” and “Look at all that press,” ignoring the fact that they were there at the invitation of the popular Mamdani and not himself. In reality, the boycott has already resulted in one major humiliation for Trump. The president’s comments were inaudible during a ribbon-cutting ceremony for his vaunted South Lawn helipad because his streaming team couldn’t get the sound working in the absence of CNN. 

Now the White House is attempting to salve the president’s wounded ego by launching “Trump TV,” which appears to be nothing more than a hasty rebranding of the existing in-house video team that livestreams events on social media. This is unlikely to quell Trump’s angst over losing the media coverage he himself banned, especially since the White House livestreams have already given his team headaches in the person of Aaron Rupar, the independent journalist who seizes opportunities to grab unflattering shots of the presidential backside.

Trump very obviously craves the validation that can only come from getting attention from major media outlets. While he may have a professional enabler in Harp, nothing can beat the narcissistic fix of national cable news coverage. Even she probably can’t keep him from soon rescinding the ban and recovering his access to those sweet, sweet cameras. 

The post Natalie Harp isn’t a joke — she is Trump’s dangerous enabler appeared first on Salon.com.

On Monday, President Donald Trump launched what is ostensibly state-run media, dubbed “Trump TV,” while decrying the “fake news” media. Late last week, Trump abruptly banned CNN, MS Now and Politico from the White House. In response, the outlets sued on First Amendment grounds as major television networks — including ABC, CBS, NBC and even Fox News — boycott the White House press pool in solidarity. During one press conference Monday, Trump was completely inaudible while C-SPAN said it would not show the president’s White House helipad ribbon-cutting because it relies on the pool for its feed.

So now Trump is launching his own news service, which is mostly just a live feed on the White House app and YouTube channel. “The press, in some cases, reported inaccurately or not at all on the Administration’s many record breaking accomplishments on behalf of all Americans,” Kaelan Dorr, the White House head of digital strategy, claimed on social media. “Trump TV is a 24/7 livestream of the Administration’s greatest hits, unfiltered.”

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Such greatest hits include, according to Variety, “Trump’s July 3, 2026, speech at Mount Rushmore, in which he dubbed his political rivals ‘godless’ and ‘evil’ communists.” Yet Trump TV is attracting comparisons to state-run TV in actual communist countries like China and North Korea, though with presumably much less viewership. “At its launch Monday night, Trump TV peaked at 8,000 viewers, dipping to around 4,000,” the Independent reported. 

“It’s official, we live in North Korea,” commentator Dean Withers said, while Trump’s former White House Press Secretary during his first term, Stephanie Grisham, said “Trump TV” is similar to what U.S. adversaries use. “You know who else does this? Russia, China, and Iran to name a few…”

“This is truly autocratic behavior from a failed President,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said on X.

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One of the largest media mergers in history has been given the green light after California and 11 other states settled lawsuits Monday. For most of the year, Paramount Skydance has tried to purchase Warner Bros Discovery for a reported $110 billion, but those efforts were stalled over the summer.

Paramount and the states agreed to certain concessions to complete the deal, California’s attorney general Rob Bonta said at a news conference. Bonta led the coalition of states, plus a Hollywood writers union, that sued in July to stop the merger.

“This settlement is not a vote of support for this merger. It is not a blessing of the broader merger,” Bonta said Monday. “Broadly speaking, we believe further consolidation of markets that are central to American economic life doesn’t serve the American economy.”

The Block the Merger Coalition released a statement saying “This is a bad deal for the future of film, entertainment, independent journalism and a strong democracy in this country. We are disappointed and angry that the interests of average Americans have been trampled to benefit oligarch billionaires.”

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“A completion of the blockbuster deal would create one of the largest entertainment companies in the world,” the New York Times reported. “It would pair Paramount’s movie studio with Warner Bros., which has made films like ‘Superman,’ ‘A Minecraft Movie’ and ‘Sinners.’ The combined company would also own two major streaming services, Paramount+ and HBO Max, and control both CNN and CBS News.”

Additionally, CNN reported, it will be “financed with the help of sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi that will indirectly own just under a 50-percent equity stake in the merged Paramount–WBD.”

The clear winner in the deal is David Ellison, Paramount’s CEO and son of billionaire Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech company Oracle. Both Ellisons are allies of President Donald Trump, whose Federal Communications Commission on Thursday approved Paramount’s petition to allow 49.5% of its equity to be held by foreign entities. There is normally a 25-percent cap on foreign broadcast ownership.

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