Privately, Trump’s aides are gloating. He can cross any lines he wants

In November 2018, I was serving in the first Trump administration. The midterms had just delivered a stinging repudiation of the President’s leadership, and the mood was eerie inside the White House the next morning. Anyone hoping the losses would humble him was sorely mistaken. Donald Trump was on the attack. He fired his attorney general, spoke openly about ejecting his chief of staff and set his sights on cabinet members who challenged his erraticism and frequent impulses toward illegality. He didn’t want anyone around to say “no” to whatever his warped conscience cooked up next. On the same day, Trump blew up at CNN’s Jim Acosta during a post-election press conference for asking uncomfortable questions about the Russia investigation and the president’s immigration policies. Afterwards, Trump decided he would simply throw him out of the White House, breaking with decades of norms that credentialed members of the press are given access to cover the American presidency. That night, I was at dinner in the restaurant of the Trump Hotel with a member of the president’s cabinet and senior national security officials. A few tables away sat the White House communications chief with a group of aides. They were openly gloating and celebrating, before the story had even hit the news. They’d had the Secret Service stop Acosta and take away his pass. If the press didn’t report on Trump the way Trump wanted, he’d censor them. There were high fives. It had the feel of a table toasting a game-winning goal, except the game was blacklisting a reporter, and the people doing the toasting worked for the government of the United States. Donald Trump arrives at John F Kennedy airport in New York on Air Force One on Monday (Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP) I looked at the cabinet secretary sitting across from me and delivered a series of unprintable expletives. The response has stayed with me ever since. “It’s not our lane,” I was told. “We’ve got other battles to fight.” Sentences like that are how press freedoms die a quiet death. If everyone thinks it’s momentary controversy, with no immediate effect on them, then would-be autocrats can steadily muffle free speech until the mouth of the media is covered with duct tape. I said as much a year later in A Warning, writing anonymously that Trump would go on the warpath against the media if he were re-elected and that terms like “enemy of the people”, which is what he designated the free press (borrowing from the Soviet Union), wouldn’t be mere words. After Trump uttered those words, describing reporters as society’s foes, the US Senate unanimously passed a resolution rebuking him, including every Democrat and every Republican. That was 2018. Seven years later, a president is physically barring news organisations from the White House, and his party has said nothing at all. Actually, they’ve cheered it on. On Friday, the President banned three news organisations from the White House. All three (CNN, MS NOW, and Politico) have had bombshell exposés this year on Trump administration corruption. By Saturday morning, Secret Service officers were taking badges away from reporters at the gates to the White House. On Monday, the three outlets sued. This goes beyond a personal grudge: CNN revealed the extent of the coverup around the Epstein Files, MS NOW exposed the surveillance of the President’s critics, and Politico has sounded the alarm about thousand of unlawful detentions. If Donald Trump is able to censor any outlets that dig into the administration’s misconduct and reveals illegal activity, the purpose of the free press will face a mortal threat. Trump has moved on from discrediting journalists to the thing I once warned he’d do. He’s actively censoring them using federal power, including arresting journalists, conducting FBI raids on their homes, suing critical news outlets, threatening to use regulatory power to take them off the air and removing reporters from government buildings. A sign in support of AP, CNN, MS NOW, and Politico near the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room after their ban from the White House (Photo: Daniel Heuer/Getty) He didn’t learn the lesson his critics thought he would after 2018’s Acosta episode. The reporter sued, the courts sided with him, and he got his White House pass back within days. Even Fox News backed its rival’s case. But Trump was unfazed. The lesson he took from losing wasn’t that there was a red line he should never cross but that crossing it had cost him nothing. He faced no real consequences. The media kept covering him, just as always. Emboldened, the President has referred to his latest action as an “assault on the FAKE NEWS” and insisted: “I don’t have to let them into the people’s house.” This isn’t a man who’s worried about a court ruling over freedom of speech. He’s wielding the weapon of intimidation to get anticipatory obedience — to send a warning signal to everyone still covering the US government, domestically or internationally. It’s up to the press to defend their profession. And this week’s gathering of reporters from around the world, for the UN General Assembly in New York City, offers that opportunity. Bev Turner, a reporter for GB News, poses for a photo before boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Monday (Photo: Demaree Nikhinson/AP) Trump may not care what a judge says. But he’ll care if he can’t talk about his “wins” and “accomplishments” without getting interrupted by reporters asking why he’s turning against America’s own First Amendment, why America is going down the road of Russia and China and why the United States is no longer the vanguard of free speech. Most of the foreign correspondents flooding New York this week owe this president nothing. Their credentials are issued by the United Nations, not the White House. It costs them little to ask the American president why he’s afraid of three newsrooms. The cost of not asking will arrive one day at their own borders and bureaus because — if left unchallenged — censorship in America could easily be adopted elsewhere. Seven years ago, I sat in a hotel dining room and listened to a member of the American government explain that the free press was “not our lane”. I’ve spent the years since then regretting that I accepted the answer. This week, the world’s reporters will be standing in the same room as the man who taught me the price of that silence. I hope they remember: it’s absolutely their lane.