After we recorded, Trump again did a ban, yet this time it was only CNN and it was more narrow, excluding it from Air Force One. But’s unclear whether that will last.
Donald Trump is in a fury because news organizations have joined together to resist his effort to ban some of them from the White House. He exploded over this, but in the process revealed something important. Collective institutional resistance to Trump actually works.
Paul Waldman’s been writing well on Trump’s waning power on his Substack, The Cross Section. So we’re talking to him about all of it. Paul, thanks for coming on.
Sargent: So a quick recap. Donald Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds in a fit of tyrannical rage. And then the White House pretended it had something to do with national security. A judge has blocked this, and it appears the news organizations are now allowed back in.
Waldman: Yeah, it’s really hard to see what Trump thought this would accomplish. I mean, what did he really have to gain by doing this? Maybe he didn’t realize that the other news organizations were going to rally behind their colleagues. But is one more fight with the media really something that is good for him at this point? Does it do anything for him? Does it make Republicans any less likely to lose the midterms? It’s really hard to see.
And as time goes on, I think more and more of his impulses are going to get translated into action and policy. And that’s never good for anybody.
Before we get into the guts of this, Paul, what do you think of that decision by all these news organizations? It seems like Trump wasn’t anticipating that. He just assumed he’d divide and conquer them, right?
Trump loves to put on a show. And then it wasn’t broadcast, and all these news organizations did reports on it with, you know—TV news did reports on it with still photos, because they didn’t have audio and video, because the pools weren’t there. And that must have just killed him.
Sargent: And in fact, Trump did explode in rage over the failure of networks to carry the arrival at the White House. He posted this:
Trump also claimed that the media refuses to give Trump credit for his world historical successes and for his popularity. Paul, what do you make of that explosion from Trump?
He wants their attention. But he also wants to be in this kind of conflict with them. That’s been the story since he was a young real estate developer in New York, trying to get onto the gossip pages of the New York tabloids.
And I think that this also reflects a realization that he’s in a weak position. And, you know, this may not be in the conscious mind of any reporter, but I think that they’re more willing to be tough with him when he is perceived as politically weak. And he is extremely weak right now.
Sargent: I think there’s no doubt that that was going through at least some of these media executives’ heads. But for now, let’s credit this. Let’s point out here that by banding together, the media actually revealed something important, which is that Trump needs their attention really badly. He needs them. What enraged him so much is that the news organizations refused to be divided against each other and agreed to stick together in defense of press freedom.
And this is where the logic of collective resistance comes into all this. And this is how institutions should resist an authoritarian, right?
And we had discussions about this when the whole thing with the White House Correspondents’ Dinner happened. And I think a lot of people felt like it was wrong of them to invite him at all.
There’s a reason that the free press is in the First Amendment to the Constitution. It’s because the founders understood how important it was. And so they—I think they understand that the more authoritarian Trump gets, it’s not just a threat to them personally or professionally.
Sargent: Right. And I think by doing this, they found a kind of Achilles’ heel on Trump’s part. It’s when institutions decide that Trump’s power is not going to roll over them, that things actually turn against Trump. That is the way to disarm Trump. And if you return to early 2025, when it became obvious that Trump was going to use retribution and threats to get institutions to bend the knee—at the time it seemed like some of these institutional elites really misread the moment, kind of along the lines of what you’re saying, right?
Waldman: Yeah. And you can understand the logic at the time, in early 2025, that maybe if you were a university president, you could say they have this power over us, that they could stop all these millions of dollars in grants we get that are so important for our research, and they could retaliate against us in other ways. And I, as a university president, am just going to, you know, take one for the team and try to protect the institution, as painful as it might be.
And I think that that understanding is now pretty widespread. You may not be able to stand up to the administration if you’re one of these institutions in all cases, but there are certain moments when you really don’t have much of a choice. And if Trump had gotten away with banishing these three news organizations from the White House, everybody knows that he would not have stopped there.
If I write this story, is he going to kick me out of the White House? Am I no longer going to be able to do my job and report there? And had that been effective, then he would have kept on kicking more and more news organizations out.
Sargent: Let’s talk about how weak Trump is right now, since you referred—you wrote a good piece about this the other day, how his power is just really dribbling away. He had this crazy line in that screed that he wrote, in which he described news organizations this way: “They only write badly about a man who won the election in a giant landslide, winning all seven swing states, the popular vote, and 86 percent of the counties, and whose popularity has grown because of the unprecedented success our country is having.”
It’s clearly a growing lead. Red state Senate races are all really slipping into the toss-up category. In addition, Cook Political Report has shifted 15 House races in the Democrats’ direction. Astoundingly, they are now rating some races in districts that Trump won by as many as fifteen or seventeen points as toss-ups. This is not someone whose popularity has grown, Paul, is it?
And then you get this self-reinforcing cycle, where Trump is low in the polls, and Republican candidates start looking at that and saying, well, you know what, maybe it’s in my interest to kind of back away from him. Even if I’ve been right at his side for 10 years, I’m going to be in trouble.
And when that happens, that sends a signal to other candidates that they can do the same thing, and it’s what’s necessary to survive. And this kind of edifice that he’s built, of fear and intimidation in his party, begins to crumble. And that’s, I think, what we’re seeing right now. And as we get closer and closer to election day, I think that’s only going to accelerate.
I think the history of the last two years would have been maybe not quite as bad. But again, this sense of Trump as having won this gargantuan cultural referendum in 2024 kind of encouraged this institutional cowardice and capitulation and kind of elite softness that I just wish hadn’t happened, Paul.
But, you know, even today, he’s still talking about what a landslide victory he has. And the reason is that he knows that part of his ability to intimidate people is based on the conception that he does have this power, and he does have the public behind him, and that his election victory was kind of a resounding ratification of everything that he is and wants to do. And that therefore to stand against him is to stand against the great mass of Americans.
Sargent: Right. What triggered him, at least in part, is the clear perception that the news organizations were treating him as a weak and diminished figure and weren’t being cowed by him. And so that gets him to default to this reminder about the 2024 win, which he still sees as this kind of weapon that he can wield over his own party and everybody else.
Waldman: Yeah, it’s going to be a pretty chaotic two years. You’re going to have the Democratic Party, which will be undergoing its own identity crisis, I guess you could say—where all these different people are going to start running for president, and they’re going to start debating, what does it mean to be a Democrat? What do we believe in? How should we act? How should we govern when we get the chance?
And I think it’s hard to see some kind of major turnaround from Trump on policy. That maybe the economy will get better in one way or another—there are a lot of variables and things that are not really in his control. But at this point, it’s hard to imagine him coming up with, like, some incredibly deft policy move that really changes how people think about him and lets him leave office with a 65 percent approval rating.
And so that will then probably kick off a cycle where he’ll be even angrier and be lashing out even more and be even less likely to do kind of responsible things and be more obsessed with this ballroom and everything. It’s like everything that’s happening now is only going to be intensified once we get past this midterm.
He’s, I think, going to be in a worse position than Bill Clinton. And Democrats can’t go into this with that kind of mindset. But of course, that is possible, isn’t it, Paul?
It may be a good thing in and of itself, but you cannot expect any political benefit from being responsible. That’s just not how things work. So it’s going to be its own debate among Democrats, of how aggressive they want to be.
Waldman: I believe so, yes.
Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.
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