Here’s How Many Republicans Have Publicly Denounced Trump’s Media Ban

So far, only one Republican lawmaker has publicly condemned President Donald Trump’s decision to ban three major news outlets from the White House. Idaho Representative Mike Simpson told Punchbowl News Monday that restricting CNN, MS NOW, and Politico’s access to the White House was “wrong.”“Just because you don’t like what the press is reporting or the fact that they wouldn’t call it the Gulf of America or something else like that, that’s not the reason to ban the press. You should never ban the press. The press is what keeps us honest,” Simpson said. “So I don’t like what they’re doing.”Republican lawmakers who have opposed Trump’s policies in the past, such as Senators John Cornyn, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski, all remained silent. Republican lawmakers who like to pretend to be free speech advocates, such as Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, also failed to respond to the president’s sudden crackdown on the press. Representative Thomas Massie only receives partial credit for posting a quip about the ban that was mostly about his opposition to Trump’s fictional $5,000 checks. Behind closed doors, however, it’s a different story. Republican strategist Melik Abdul told CNN Monday morning that Republicans secretly acknowledged that Trump’s press ban was a “problem,” but they were too afraid to say anything publicly for fear of backlash from the president. “If you talk to Republicans behind closed doors. What you’re hearing is this type of petulance, this type of performative thing the president does, it is truly exhausting,” Abdul told CNN.Trump’s move has generated plenty of immediate backlash. The three outlets he banned filed a lawsuit Monday, and the entire presidential television press pool has agreed to suspend its coverage in the wake of Trump’s decision.Federal agents on Sunday reportedly injured a U.S. citizen, who ended up at the hospital for his injuries. The Guardian reports that local police officers in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, were called to the scene of an argument between two people at 10 a.m. Upon their arrival, they found a man on the ground with injuries to his neck, head, and teeth, surrounded by people trying to help him and two SUVs parked nearby. Police spoke to a man in one of the cars wearing a vest with “police” written on it, who said he was a federal agent investigating a fugitive. “The agent told the officer that agents had attempted to identify an individual who resembled a person they were seeking. He said the individual refused to provide identification, was detained for fingerprinting, and resisted detention,” Evanston police said in a statement. “Agents later determined he was not the person they were seeking and learned that he was a U.S. citizen. He was released.”The statement noted that the federal agent appeared to have blood on his hands, which he said came from trying to handcuff the person. It’s not clear which agency the men in the SUVs were from, although witnesses told police they believed they were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. According to police, the agent they spoke to said that there were five agents in the area in separate vehicles, and that they had a warrant for a person with a Chicago address. “The agent also said the federal agents left the area after protesters began to gather because they feared they would be attacked,” the police said in their statement. Also on Sunday in Austin, Texas, ICE agents shot and wounded a Venezuelan man, Wilber Rafael Garcés Perez, making a DoorDash delivery, claiming he had a final order of removal despite his wife and lawyer saying he had an asylum claim and a work permit. And in July, federal agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston man who had lived in the United States for more than 30 years. Under President Trump, it appears federal agents are becoming recklessly violent while carrying out his mass deportation agenda. The Justice Department is pressing on with its “grand conspiracy” case against federal officials who investigated President Trump, even after the head of that effort—Joe diGenova, counselor to the attorney general—controversially resigned.DiGenova, a former Reagan administration prosecutor, Trump personal attorney, and peddler of the narrative that Trump was under attack from the liberal “deep state,” resigned earlier this month after insinuating that he was being pressed to find evidence of corruption that wasn’t there. “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” diGenova said. He later claimed that those comments weren’t what he actually meant. “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution,” he clarified. “It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others—and you can’t do that.”The investigation is centered around Trump’s claim that federal investigations against him—from the 2016 probe into Russian election interference to his indictments after he left office in 2021—were a calculated deep state plot.Despite diGenova’s resignation, the DOJ has issued multiple subpoenas, including to former CIA Director John Brennan last week. This is an extreme escalation of the quest to blame someone for this “grand conspiracy” against Trump, even after the DOJ’s main guy in charge left because even he couldn’t find any kind of conspiracy. No one who’s been subpoenaed has been charged with a crime thus far. “I’ve spent decades in and around the Justice Department. I’ve never even conceived of a situation like this,” Ken Wainstein, Brennan’s attorney, told the Associated Press. “[The Justice Department is] blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction.”Representative Lauren Boebert’s various affairs are apparently just a bunch of fake news, according to the MAGA lawmaker and her allies.The House Ethics Committee received a sworn complaint last week that accused Boebert of having sexual affairs with three of her staffers: District director Clarice Navarro Ratzlaff, district chief of staff Raven Finegan, and Boebert’s former chief of staff Jeffrey Small. The complaint, filed by American Muckrakers’ David Wheeler, also claimed that Boebert paid Ratzlaff $200,000 in 2025 to “secure her silence” after Ratzlaff threatened to take the allegations of their relationship public. Wheeler’s accusations included evidence from “House payroll records, Federal Election Commission filings, court records, and on-the-record sources.”A spokesperson for Boebert said in a statement Saturday that there is “zero truth” to the allegations, and further suggested that complaint was a violation of House Ethics rules since it was filed within 60 days of the election.“Swearing to it does not make it a complaint,” the spokesperson said. “This was a political smear packaged as an ethics filing and published before anyone checked whether it even qualifies under the Committee’s rules.”Also on Saturday, Boebert insisted that she’s “not a lesbian” and derided a group of reporters inquiring about the complaint on Capitol Hill, asking, “Why is everybody so horny here?”She followed up the next day with a video statement in which she called the complaint a “smear” and Wheeler a “sloppy, desperate, obsessive hack.”“This is more filthy garbage that reaches beyond me. This reaches into the homes of people who have dedicated years of service to Coloradans alongside of me,” she said, defending the staffers named in the complaint.Ratzlaff told the Colorado Times Recorder that the accusations were “entirely false, defamatory, and beyond ridiculous.”“There is absolutely no truth to any part of this claim,” Ratzlaff added.But Ratzlaff’s ex-husband took a remarkably different tone when speaking with the Muckrakers’ boss.“I assumed this would eventually surface,” Jace Ratzlaff told Wheeler. “I’ll have no further comment on this topic.”It wouldn’t be the first time that Boebert’s romantic interests have crossed a line: The congresswoman was ejected from a Denver theater in 2023 for allegedly groping her date during an evening performance of Beetlejuice—a caught-on-camera spectacle that has continued to plague her political career.But the recent allegations connote a bitter hypocrisy. The Colorado Republican has spent years tearing down the LGBTQ community for cheap political points. She has campaigned to end same-sex marriage, has repeatedly likened child-friendly drag performances such as Drag Queen Story Hour to “child abuse,” has introduced and supported legislation to end gender-affirming research that could help minors, and has claimed that gender-affirming surgery is tantamount to “mutilation.”President Donald Trump is looking for a way to veto billions of dollars’ worth of scientific grants from the National Institutes of Health in order to punish elite universities.Following a contentious meeting Friday, the White House began drafting an executive order that would establish an external committee to oversee NIH grants and keep federal funding away from schools that fail to comply with the president’s agenda. During the meeting, Trump had repeatedly complained that the NIH hadn’t done more to crack down on Harvard University and other Ivy League schools, The New York Times reported Sunday. The meeting reportedly brought the simmering conflict between Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director, to a head. Vought accused Bhattacharya of funding projects that contradicted the administration’s priorities to gut diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at the expense of scientific research. In June 2025, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s initial efforts to cut more than $1.81 billion from DEI-related grants constituted illegal racial discrimination. A few months later, another federal judge blocked the White House’s attempt to freeze $2 billion in federal research funding from Harvard University. Earlier this year, the White House wanted to impose a political test on federal grants, but was rebuked by the scientific community and blocked by Congress. Still, under the second Trump administration, the NIH has already slashed more than half a billion dollars in medical research on some of the leading causes of death in America—and all for political reasons.During the meeting Friday, Vought also sought to access NIH funds for the year that had not already been spent, but he was denied. This move follows allegations that the Department of Defense has tried to steal cash from the NIH in order to fund Trump’s disastrous war in the Middle East. Read more about medical research: