After we recorded, a federal court issued a temporary restraining order halting the ban.
Donald Trump’s press ban is already running into legal trouble. The White House offered a response to the lawsuit against the ban brought by news organizations, and legal experts quickly poked some pretty big holes in it.
So we’re talking about all of it with New Republic staff writer Timothy Noah, who’s been writing well on Trump’s shrinking influence. Tim, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds. The three organizations sued. The White House just filed its response in court and claims the ban is pursuant to national security and some other stuff. Tim, what is the White House arguing here exactly?
Surely somebody who’s in the real estate business ought to understand who owns that building.
Noah: Right, right. Which echoes Mussolini. Mussolini had a famous statement that everything is encompassed by the state. And so his claim that this is his house is ridiculous. He also says that it is a privilege, not a right, for the press to have access to the White House. And that’s quite wrong. It is a right for the press.
Sargent: There has to be consistency in the way the media is treated, and clearly this is all just arbitrary and rooted in Trump’s theory. Trump’s also been making this other weird argument.
Noah: It’s quite juvenile and childish. But to me, the most important thing is that it’s self-damaging. The actual value of what a reporter is going to pick up by sitting in the White House press warren, the actual value was never great, and it is probably smaller now than it’s ever been in human history. The real business of gathering news about what’s happening in the White House is never going to happen in the White House press room.
So he’s essentially cutting off his own propaganda channel, and he’s also denying himself distribution of his propaganda through a much larger network—i.e., CNN, MS Now, and Politico—than he possesses himself.
“All of the SLEAZEBAGS, like third-rate reporter Kaitlan Collins of Fake News CNN, a truly unhappy person, said they weren’t going to be covering me. Then why were they ranting and raving like lunatics at the United Nations? Why was she there? She’s got a TRUMP addiction, and so does CNN and MSDNC. They’re all sick, treasonous, and demented!”
Noah: Castration complex. No, it’s straight up. I mean—I’m not even joking. We’ve seen his behavior around women who challenge him. He lashes out at them in ways that he never does to male reporters.
Sargent: Well, we should point out, Tim, that women of color particularly set him off.
Sargent: I want to point out also that at the UN, Trump went out of his way to confront Kaitlan Collins, saying something like, you said you wouldn’t be covering me, but here you are covering me.
Tim, since you’re going down the psychological road, I want to excavate another bit of psychology here. Trump actually thinks he’s winning as long as he’s the center of attention. He’s owning CNN because they’re still treating him as newsworthy, right? I think that’s interesting.
He’s infantile. And I wrote another piece this week that said, you know, I think that his cognitive decline is accelerating, and this is just further evidence of that. His judgment is really impaired. It was never great to begin with, and now it’s worse.
But as NYU professor Ryan Goodman pointed out, the examples they cited included protected First Amendment activity, very clearly so. One was a political story on how the GOP midterm convention was a disaster. Like, what?
Sargent: That literally confirms the whole point that the news organizations are making, that this is all about the content of their reporting.
Sargent: Right. And another one the White House cited was an MS NOW story on our depleted weapons stockpiles that relied on a public document to make that case. It wasn’t like out of left field or anything. A third was a political story that simply quoted something from Bari Weiss’s CBS News. I don’t know, Tim, that doesn’t seem like a strong argument.
But if the Pentagon is a test case, it seems to me that since the expulsion of national security reporters from the Pentagon, we have seen, if anything, an improvement in the quality of Pentagon coverage—particularly a stunning series of articles in the beleaguered Washington Post. And so it truly is a childish and futile gesture on the part of Pete Hegseth, and now on the part of President Trump.
Like, even if a judge rules, we’re going to get an appeal. Since Trump has decided that this is his cause of the moment, White House lawyers have got to pursue it, right?
Who knows? He may be on to something else in two days. It’s—you know, trying to predict the behavior of a senile person is difficult.
In this case, a bunch of news organizations signed on to an amicus brief, siding with the ones that have sued and have been barred from the White House grounds. And one of the news organizations that signed on was Fox News.
Noah: Yeah, in the case of Fox News, I would say that even a supplicant like Fox News has—just as a pure business matter—no choice but to sign on to that, because they need their access to the White House. And you know somebody on Fox might say something that would anger Trump.
It does nothing to prevent the stories they don’t like. The main thing it does is it prevents the flow of self-interested information that emanates from the White House press warren.
A big victory against Donald Trump, and all of a sudden he starts to look like a really, really diminished figure. And I don’t know what happens then, Tim. What do you think it could look like?
My guess is that it will accelerate after the election, if it’s a blowout election for the Democrats. And right now he is supported by the Republican caucus in Congress—not because they have any regard for him, except for maybe a handful of people, but because they’re scared of him. And the smaller his approval rating, the less scared they will be.
Sargent: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely plausible. We should point out, by the way, that in the FiftyPlusOne polling averages, Trump is now below 35 percent. He’s at 34.6 percent. I think that’s the first time polling averages have shown him below 35.
As I said in my piece, it’s very much like—imagine if Woodrow Wilson’s physical and mental decline after his stroke in 1919, instead of being hushed up, had happened in view of all Americans. That’s kind of like what you’re seeing with Trump, except in Trump’s case, it’s not a stroke. It is mental decline.
There were a number of experts who expressed concern about this during the 2024 election. And then 18 months later, another set of experts, this time both Democrats and Republicans, said, you know what, over the last 18 months, we have seen his condition worsen a lot. It’s the subtext of almost every story about anything Trump does.
There’s almost like a weird dichotomy, where he’s both clearly diminishing, but on some level he must still be so powerful that we’ll never be able to get out of this. And I wish people would just lose that latter thing already.
Sargent: I think we need to get to a place where we’re wary of what Trump can possibly do, and we’ve got to be as vigilant as possible at all times, but we also should stop seeing him as this all-powerful, deviously formidable figure.
Sargent: As a master tactician, and a profoundly formidable figure who ultimately always wins and, Houdini-like, escapes from every single situation he’s in, no matter what.
I remember a memorable Saturday Night Live skit where you’d see the amiable Reagan sort of nodding and saying vacuous things in public, and then he’d close the door and he’d sound like a genius strategist with his aides. And it was a very funny conceit, but it was not the truth.
Noah: All right. Thank you, Greg.
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