Is there any stupider—or more revealing—scandal of the many that Donald Trump has already unleashed in his second term than the President’s sudden, arbitrary decision last month to ban the Associated Press from the White House press pool because its editors refused to go along with his whim to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America?
On Thursday morning, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, a Trump appointee, held a hearing in the A.P.’s lawsuit to block the President’s latest and arguably most flagrant ever transgression of the First Amendment in his effort to control coverage of himself. I would have liked to stay in my office to await the latest updates on Signalgate, which will surely rate as one of the capital’s other most stupidly revealing scandals, given that it was set off by Trump’s national-security adviser inadvertently inviting the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to join a text-message group chat about bombing Houthi rebels in Yemen. But Thursday’s hearing struck me as a good opportunity to watch one of the signature events in Trump’s Washington—a government lawyer embarrassing himself in defense of an almost laughably indefensible case.
Trump, in justifying his attack on the A.P., had left little room for avoiding the truth about his ban: it was pure retaliation for the organization making its own decisions about how to report on him. “We’re going to keep them out. Until such time as they agree that it’s the Gulf of America,” Trump said last month. He called the A.P.—the all-American, middle-of-the-road, nonpartisan, always-there A.P.—a collection of “radical-left lunatics.” Perhaps even more worrisome, Trump has not confined his vengeance to the wire service; in seizing control of the press pool, Trump is challenging a prerogative of the White House press corps that goes back more than a century. It’s power he wants, not just petty retribution. As an unnamed Trump adviser summed up the case in an interview with Axios: “The AP and the White House Correspondents Association wanted to f–k around. Now it’s finding out time.”
Finding-out time is a good way of putting it; the bully in the White House is going to bully. The question is who, if anyone, is going to stop him. The A.P. made the quote the epigraph in its brief to Judge McFadden, seeking an emergency injunction.
In the hearing itself, nobody said anything about radical-left lunatics or the President’s absolute right to redraw the map of the world if he so chooses. Appearing for the government, Brian Hudak offered a subdued, if at times obtuse, defense. “There is no First Amendment right to access facilities by the press,” he said. I never heard him mention anything about the Gulf of Mexico, or the Gulf of America, for that matter. The A.P.’s lawyer, Charles Tobin, opted for a more straightforward point about what he called “viewpoint discrimination.” Trump’s White House has thrown up “unconstitutional retaliatory roadblocks” against the news agency, he said, which, if allowed to stand, will have a “chilling effect on the entire journalism industry.”
Perhaps the most perfectly Trumpian moment came when Tobin held up a large coffee-table-size book. On the cover was a photograph from Trump’s campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, last summer, when he was nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet and thrust his fist in the air, shouting “Fight! Fight!” before being rushed off the stage. Evan Vucci, the A.P.’s chief White House photographer, was testifying at the time. Tobin asked Vucci to identify the book—“Save America,” by Donald J. Trump—before asking him if he recognized the photo. Vucci said it was his own award-winning picture of that historic moment. “He used your photo on the cover?” Tobin asked. Yes, Vucci replied. “He used my photo on the cover.”
Could there be anything more on-brand for this President than banning the A.P. from the Oval Office for refusing to grant him veto power over their editorial standards, while, at the same time, marketing himself with one of their pictures? The book, published last September, currently retails for $92.52 on Amazon. I suppose it should be noted that Vucci, an earnest twenty-one-year veteran of the A.P., who speaks of his work as a “public service,” was no more a radical-left lunatic when he took the photograph than he was on the stand Thursday, testifying about how Trump’s campaign against America’s premier news agency has left it “basically dead in the water on major news stories.” And, even if he were, who cares? Isn’t that the whole point about the First Amendment?
Such is the front line in Trump’s Washington today, where lawyers in generic gray suits tread the long, marble-swaddled corridors of the U.S. District Court building on Constitution Avenue, litigating over previously uncontroversial matters that would seem to have been hashed out in the writing of the Constitution. In the less than ten weeks since Trump returned to office, his actions have produced so many federal cases involving so many core principles that it’s hard even to keep track of them all. He’s challenged the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship; claimed that he can simply “impound” federal funds that have been duly appropriated and authorized by Congress; tried to impose emergency tariffs on foreign trade partners without there being an actual national emergency; and asserted that he can deport people who are legally in the U.S. without hearings or due process because they participated in public protests that the Administration did not like. There are ongoing lawsuits about his decision to cancel billions of dollars in federal funding and to fire tens of thousands of federal workers. And the list goes on.
At Thursday’s hearing, I noticed one of Politico’s ace legal reporters, Kyle Cheney, sitting on one of the hard wooden benches behind me. He later posted a list of all the court cases he was tracking that day:
Talk about a busy day at the office.
The theme of it all is about much more than any single principle, even one as foundational to the Republic as freedom of speech. It’s about Trump’s power—about a vision of the Presidency so sweeping that it does not recognize the basic precedents that the courts have created over decades of legal battles seeking to define the contours of the executive’s authority.
But it’s also no accident that many of these tests of the American system from Trump involve the media. In his first term, Trump tried—and failed—to have a reporter he didn’t like, CNN’s Jim Acosta, banned from the White House. As a politician, his default setting is to blame the “fake news” and demean journalists as the “enemies of the people.” In the 2024 campaign, he sued news outlets such as CBS over their coverage. In a speech at the Department of Justice earlier this month, Trump denounced reporting he did not like from independent news outlets as “illegal” and said that CNN and MSNBC were “corrupt.” And all this week, Trump’s White House has savaged the reputation and impugned the integrity of Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, whose accidental inclusion on the national-security adviser’s group chat became the basis of Signalgate.
As I was on my way to the federal-court building on Thursday morning, a news alert flashed across my screen: the BBC’s correspondent in Turkey, Mark Lowen, had been thrown out of the country while covering mass protests over the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor, a leading opposition figure standing up to Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “Press freedom and impartial reporting are fundamental to any democracy,” Lowen said in a statement. In a tweet, he added, “Journalism is not a crime.”
The timing could not have been more sadly appropriate. America once had grandiose—if often unsuccessful—dreams of exporting its model of rule-of-law democracy abroad to countries such as Turkey. No more. It’s got less attention than it should amid all the other crises, but Trump has also acted swiftly to gut America’s foreign-aid programs that promote democracy and the rule of law abroad, seeking to effectively eliminate the Voice of America, the National Endowment for Democracy, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and the U.S. Agency for International Development. As with his assault on the A.P., all of those decisions are the subject of lawsuits, too. Radio Free Europe’s example shows that going to court can produce results—after the Administration lost a ruling earlier this week, it abruptly restored funding for the network on Thursday.
But, even if he loses all of his cases in court, and let’s hope he does, Trump has communicated something all too clearly: he wants to emulate the world’s autocrats, not undermine them. What really is the difference between Erdoğan’s thugs throwing the BBC’s correspondent out of Turkey and the Trump Administration snatching a Tufts University student off the street and seeking to deport her because the Administration does not like what it calls her “pro-Hamas” views about the war in Gaza? I don’t recall the provision in the Constitution that says the First Amendment is just for stuff that Donald Trump agrees with. ♦
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