‘Fake news’ v faker-in-chief: Why Trump’s media war is backfiring

OpinionSenior fellow at the US Studies Centre and former political stafferSeptember 23, 2026 — 3:30pmSeptember 23, 2026 — 3:30pmPresident Donald J. Trump booted CNN, MSNOW and Politico out of the White House because he is furious with how he is covered. Trump’s attacks against the Constitution are unprecedented. The media companies have taken him to court, arguing: “Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.“The four major television networks – including Fox News – have withdrawn their cameras from the White House. The president who loves to be on the air for hours a day now sits in the Oval Office with no big media cameras on him.Donald Trump urged supporters, even those unregistered to vote, to “cheat like hell, like they [the Democrats] do” and make sure they turn out for the November midterm elections.APHow did we get to this crisis over freedom of the press? Trump wields with abandon an idiom that is centuries old – all to flaunt his massive executive power as president. When asked about limits to his power, he said: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”To speak with a forked tongue is “to tell lies or say one thing and mean something else” and to “make empty or false promises”. It conjures up serpents, with their forked tongues.Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, was characterised as a serpent. The stunning new biography, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, by Kai Bird and Susan Goldberg, shows Cohn’s immense sculpting and shaping of Trump as he built his real estate empire in New York. As Carlos Lozada of The New York Times has observed, “One of the core parallels or similarities or lessons … between these two men [is] that sort of ultimate self-confidence, paired with ultimate disdain for rules and traditions and norms.”Freedom of the press under the first amendment is a sacred norm of the republic. Trump has sued, so far unsuccessfully, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal for defamation. He has threatened to have the regulatory agencies in his executive branch take away the broadcast licence of CBS and ABC because of how they report on him. He has defunded America’s public media, PBS and NPR.But what makes Trump vulnerable to the most critical coverage of any president, ever, including Richard Nixon, is that he speaks with a forked tongue on almost all major issues of the day. He hates being confronted by reporters who question the truth and legitimacy and contradictions of what he says.Trump declared on his social media soap box, Truth Social: “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX, no different from RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA – UKRAINE, UKRAINE, UKRAINE – IMPEACHMENT HOAX #1 — IMPEACHMENT HOAX #2 — and all of the other HOAXES and SCAMS that America was forced to endure.”Most AI leaders are genuinely fearful that artificial intelligence could cause or trigger an existential event threatening all of civilisation.The scale of this challenge is not unprecedented. In 1947, Albert Einstein and the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists wrote to the president Harry S. Truman: “Through the release of atomic energy, our generation has brought into this world the most revolutionary force since prehistoric man’s discovery of fire.” And what was needed was “the aroused understanding and insistence of the people of this world”.In his speech at the United Nations on Tuesday, and before discussing this with China’s President Xi Jinping, Trump rejected with prejudice any global oversight of AI.In taking the oath of office, Trump swore to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, which requires that the president takes care that the laws are faithfully executed. At the recent Republican midterm political convention in Dallas, Trump broke that pledge. He asked all those present to raise their right hands and affirm, “That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way – I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell, like they [the Democrats] do, they’d never, there’s never been bigger cheaters, they don’t care. I am gonna go out and I’m gonna get my friends, my family, and we are going to vote on November 3rd or we are going to vote before that!”Trump urged them to break election laws.On the economy, the consensus of almost all experts was that it was imperative for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in the US. Trump’s response was incendiary: the Fed was wrong. The US had to have “the LOWEST RATE of any country in the World”. He added injury to insult: “LOWER THE RATE OR I’LL STOP TRADING WITH COUNTRIES WITH WHICH WE HAVE A DEFICIT.” Such nonsense would trigger a global economic catastrophe.Trump hates the coverage of the war. From the podium of the UN this week, he threatened Iran with “annihilation”. Last week, he said, as he often does: “I will tell you this. Iran [wants] to make a deal so bad, they are calling constantly and they want to make a deal.” But no deal is evident. Trump regularly accuses journalists of treason, which is punishable by death.Trump hates the mainstream print and broadcast media. Their coverage has become increasingly probing because Trump speaks daily with a forked tongue. Any reporting he disagrees with is “fake”. His attacks on America’s democracy and the First Amendment are relentless. Retribution rules.But Trump’s flailing against the media, provoking a constitutional crisis, will not improve prospects for Republicans in the midterm elections in November. Steve Scalise, the House Republican majority leader, appears to believe that Trump did not understand his recklessness when it came to the media ban. “I don’t know why he did it.”We will soon understand the reckoning that will occur.Bruce Wolpe is a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre. He has served on the Democratic staff in the US Congress and as chief of staff to former prime minister Julia Gillard.The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform. Sign up here.From our partners