The White House would love to curate a press pool consisting only of right-wing crackpots. On Tuesday, that endeavor suffered a setback.
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Press freedom scored a much-needed win on Tuesday when a federal judge, who was appointed by Donald Trump, ordered the administration to provide the Associated Press with access to the Oval Office, Air Force One, and other limited spaces made available to members or the media.
The AP had been banned from covering Trump in those settings because it refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America,” which is the name the president gave the body of water.
Like a petulant child who throws a tantrum when an adult won’t eat the “cake” he “baked” from twigs and sand, Trump sought to punish the country’s oldest and largest news agency for refusing to go along with this name change.
However, District Court Judge Trevor McFadden ruled that this was an impermissible reason to exclude a news organization. Nevertheless, his decision also provided a possible roadmap for the administration to contrive some other reason to harass the AP.
“This injunction does not limit the various permissible reasons the Government may have for excluding journalists from limited-access events,” McFadden wrote. “It does not mandate that all eligible journalists, or indeed any journalists at all, be given access to the President or nonpublic government spaces. It does not prohibit government officials from freely choosing which journalists to sit down with for interviews or which ones’ questions they answer.”
Instead, he added that his order “simply holds that under the First Amendment, if the Government opens its doors to some journalists — be it to the Oval Office, the East Room, or elsewhere—it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints. The Constitution requires no less.”
In other words, it is quite possible that the administration may grant the AP access but then freeze out its reporters.
This would also make more questions available to the crackpots that the White House has been courting and who have gotten to ask unserious questions in serious settings.
Case in point is an encounter that took place during press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s daily briefing on Tuesday.
She gave a question to a “reporter” from LindellTV, the “news outlet” of election-denying conspiracy theorist and My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, who asked about Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett objecting to allowing the Trump administration to keep using the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members (for now).
“Does the administration have a comment on her decision to go with the liberals and go actually with the Tren de Araguas?” asked Cara Castronuova. “This is the same justice that actually sided against January 6th hostages last year.”
That last bit is useful context because it shows just how insane it is to give somebody like her a question.
Of course, in MAGA speak — where people are falling all over themselves to use terms like “Gulf of America” — the insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, were convicted for their crimes committed in furtherance of Trump’s coup, and then pardoned on the first day of his second term, are referred to as hostages.
Sadly, it stands to reason that we’ll be hearing a lot more from “LindellTV” in coming White House briefings than from AP reporters, which is a pretty powerful illustration of where things stand right now in terms of this administration and the media.
