The most remarkable thing about President Donald Trump’s hissy-fit expulsion of CNN, Politico, and MS NOW from the White House grounds is how difficult it is to tell that they’re gone. That’s not to denigrate these three news outlets, two of which previously employed yours truly. (I was labor policy editor at Politico, and before that I wrote a web column on contract for MS NOW when it was called MSNBC.) My target rather is the press room inside which the White House beat reporters are confined. The dirty little secret of this prestige address has long been that very little news emanates from it.
One could almost state it as a mathematical formula: The value of White House reporting is inversely proportional to its physical distance from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of The Washington Post broke the Watergate story, and then continued to own it, from half a mile away at the old Post headquarters on 15th Street. Maggie Haberman delivers the best Trump coverage of anybody from 225 miles away at the New York Times building on Eighth Avenue. One current White House reporter told me that 90 percent of the job consists of working the phones.
I’d argue that Haberman’s coverage is mostly gossip, not hard news, but the rest of that is on target. There’s very little value to the White House Press Corpse, and the group that has the highest opinion of them is, well, them. Early in Trump I, Jay Rosen wrote a piece called Send the Interns, which argued that interns, not seasoned reporters, should be used to staff the White House press room. I think that piece is more true now than ever.
That said, Trump clearly shot himself in the foot here. He has the same insight about the role of the President and the media that AMLO and Claudia Sheinbaum have in Mexico: as long as you’re talking, they have to cover you. And, man, has Trump II spent a lot of time yakking in the Oval Office, with his every idiotic mouth fart being reported without much pushback. Now, when it looks like Republicans are about to get destroyed in the midterms, Trump needs to use his ability to distract as much as he ever has.
There’s a lesson here for the next Democratic President — Biden’s trouble talking really hurt his presidency. The institution of the mañanera, the daily morning press conference, should be adopted by Democrats from Morena in 2029 if we still have a country.
This is not to say that the WH press finally waking up and showing a smidgen of solidarity means that they deserve high fives and attaboys. They’re as guilty as other institutions of crumbling after the slightest threat. Greg Sargent puts it well:
[…] It’s hard to know whether the press would have banded together to confront him in quite this way if his approval rating were what it was, say, throughout 2025 and even into early 2026. Certainly other institutions were not doing so. In one way or another, law firms, universities, and media companies all surrendered.
As Michelle Goldberg writes in The New York Times, a big factor driving all that early capitulation was serious elite miscalculation: Figures at these institutions got spooked into overestimating the price of getting on Trump’s bad side. Indeed, if the last two years have confirmed anything, it’s that the logic of collective resistance is sound. Not only is the immediate price for bucking Trump small; it actually works. It’s one of the only things that can really disarm him.
This move by the press is probably the first step in the One Day, Everyone Will Have Been Against This phenomenon that Omar El Akkad pointed out about Gaza, but is true about a lot of other horrible things that have happened with the acquiescence of our weak institutions and the careerists who inhabit them.
