Trump Is Punishing Reporters for Doing His Bidding

In the annals of government-press relations, the Trump White House will go down as the first to punish reporters for publishing information it wanted to get out.For those unfamiliar with how Washington works: The only fake news to be harvested inside the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room and its adjacent cramped offices, and indeed the only news of any kind, is planted there by the president’s designated spokespersons. As I explained earlier this week (“Why Trump’s White House Reporter Ban Matters So Little”), virtually the only consequence to Trump’s exiling CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from this urban smallholding was that these reporters were briefly and partially impeded in bringing to market whatever officially sanctioned utterances, many of them transparent lies, that the president wished to convey. That makes Trump’s expulsion of these news organizations—overturned in court early Thursday by a temporary restraining order from a Trump-appointed judge—not only illegal but bizarrely self-defeating. In game theory it’s called a subgame imperfection. In life it’s called called “a really stupid thing to do.”I’m not aware that game theory has yet come up with terminology to describe Trump’s after-the-fact justification for these expulsions, because the man is breaking fresh ground. In a letter the press office sent Politico after that publication got kicked out, the White House cited six specific “reporting incidents” that failed to “abide by standards of professional conduct” or “demonstrate a level of trustworthiness commensurate with the privilege of unfettered access to the White House Complex.” These included instances “that have threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods.” (As my colleague Matt Ford explains, Trump has lately acquired a fetish for redefining everything as a national security concern.) One of the six reporting incidents concerned information that was spoon-fed to Politico by the White House press office itself. As Scott Nover reported in The Washington Post, the White House sent a Politico reporter—presumably Cheyenne Haslett, who covers the White House for the publication, though possibly Felicia Schwartz, a national-security reporter who shared the byline on the resulting story—an invitation to interview a certain administration official. I like to think this invitation was hand-delivered on cream-colored cardstock lettered in Cormorant Garamond. More likely, though, it came in a routine email that Haslett opened at home or inside Politico’s newsroom across the river in Rosslyn, Virginia. At the appointed hour Haslett and/or Schwartz, along with representatives from various other news organizations that Trump didn’t kick out of the White House, phoned the press office and heard a White House press aide say,: “Good afternoon, and thank you for joining this press call. The contents of this call are on background, attributable to a senior administration official. By remaining on the line, you agree to those terms.” Nover has a copy of the recording.If you’re shocked that the White House itself would officially designate some government official as an anonymous source, don’t be. “The ship of state,” The New York Times’s James Reston famously observed, “is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.” Even Trump does it. We know that because Trump admitted as much on social media. In August 2018, The Toronto Star ratted Trump out for telling Bloomberg News off the record that he would not make any trade compromises with Canada. “Here’s the problem,” Trump told Bloomberg. “If I say no—the answer’s no. If I say no, then you’re going to put that and it’s going to be so insulting they’re not going to be able to make a deal.” After Trump’s off-the-record remarks leaked out, Trump took to Twitter (it was called Twitter then) to complain, “Wow, I made OFF THE RECORD COMMENTS to Bloomberg concerning Canada, and this powerful understanding was BLATANTLY VIOLATED.” Translation: “Yes, I speak to reporters off the record.”“It is my opinion,” Trump tweeted in May 2017, “that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media.” He’s uttered that sentiment many times since. But a more accurate assessment would be that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the White House, to which the White House wishes not to be held accountable. Trump’s off-the-record comment to Bloomberg was a good example. Trump said, sotto voce, that he would make no trade compromises with Canada. One month later, Trump made trade compromises with Canada, in the U.S. Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. For example, the United States wanted the USMCA to expire after five years. Canada and Mexico said no. They insisted that the USMCA expire after 16 years. So that’s what the final treaty said. Eight years later, in July 2026, Trump took advantage of a scheduled review period to walk away from USMCA. Therefore, a more truthful off-the-record statement to Bloomberg back in 2018 might have been: “Whatever deal I make with Canada, I’ll welsh on it later.”Vice-presidents leak, too. “May I go off the record for just a minute?” a vice-president I will not name said to me once. I don’t remember what the off-the-record comment was, but I do remember being surprised that even vice-presidents played this game. (I was much younger then.) They still do. The “senior administration official” the White House press office served up to Politico and other news organizations on that fateful phone call, Oliver Darcy reported Wednesday in Status, was Vice President JD Vance. The subject was the likelihood of a deal to end the war with Iran. Vance said it was 80 to 85 percent certain, and that was true; the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding was released less than a week later. But the deal fell through soon after, leaving us still at war with Iran three months later. Anybody who wants to complain the information Politico imparted was somehow wrong will have to blame Vance.The White House’s denunciation of Politico for publishing material that it spoon-fed Politico and many others is the most outrageous rationale for Trump’s press expulsions, but they’re all pretty ridiculous. Another pretext cited in the letter sent to Politico was its publication of “a document detailing funding for the White House ballroom containing intricate descriptions of how the Secret Service would invest in security improvements.” Here is the document, which the Secret Service handed out to a bunch of Republican Senators at a meeting with Secret Service Director Sean Curran. Note that it is not marked “Top Secret” (not that reporters shouldn’t report on Top Secret documents). Its contents, to whatever extent they’re truthful, are unexceptional.In a letter to CNN, the White House press office appeared to dispute, seven months after the event, that the United States military attacked an Iranian school, even though various other news outlets and a United Nations report confirmed the strike. Indeed, all the offending CNN story reported was the publicly-released UN report’s conclusion that the attack was a war crime. If I ever get kicked out of the White House, I’d like it to be for showing more enterprise than that. In a letter to MS NOW, the White House press office claimed that it violated national security to report that the FBI was conducting a criminal leak investigation after the Atlantic’s Sarah Fitzpatrick writer reported that Kash Patel was drinking heavily and behaving erratically. If there were any national security concern here, wouldn’t it be that our FBI director, who we know for an absolute fact has given away bottles of Patel-branded whiskey, might be kind of unstable? Instead, the White House press office felt the injury was that Fitzpatrick and her sources were tipped off that the FBI was trying to harass them.What’s most striking is that none of the many stories used to justify CNN’s, MS NOW’s, and Politico’s expulsion were untrue. Individual news outlets do get it wrong now and then, because nobody’s perfect. Couldn’t White House lawyers find any examples? I guess they were in too much of a hurry. Vance’s background comments were unreliable insofar as they conveyed false optimism that the Iran war would end soon. But even Vance doesn’t appear to have been telling deliberate lies. (Maybe the headline should have been: “Vice President Tells Truth!”) What the “reporting incidents” have in common is that most contradicted the Trump White House line. If Trump doesn’t like being exposed as a liar, then instead of kicking out reporters he might consider lying less.