Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump’s press ban is already running into legal trouble. The White House offered a response to the lawsuit against the ban brought by news organizations, and legal experts quickly poked some pretty big holes in it.
This comes as Trump seems to have fixated, for some reason, on CNN as his main target. He exploded in fury at reporter Kaitlan Collins this week and also tried to publicly humiliate her. Amusingly, he’s only uniting the media against him, Fox News included. And we think this is a harbinger for the deeper institutional resistance he’s set to face as his power diminishes.
So we’re talking about all of it with New Republic staff writer Timothy Noah, who’s been writing well on Trump’s shrinking influence. Tim, thanks for coming on.
Timothy Noah: Thanks for having me, Greg.
Sargent: So Trump banned CNN, Politico, and MS Now from the White House grounds. The three organizations sued. The White House just filed its response in court and claims the ban is pursuant to national security and some other stuff. Tim, what is the White House arguing here exactly?
Noah: The White House is making several arguments, all of them so ridiculous that I wonder whether the White House even wants to win this lawsuit. First of all, they emphasize that this is the president’s house. And as we all know, that is not the president’s house. That is the people’s house. He happens to be living in it at the moment.
Surely somebody who’s in the real estate business ought to understand who owns that building.
Sargent: Trump is unable to recognize that the White House and the presidency is a public thing.
Noah: Right, right. Which echoes Mussolini. Mussolini had a famous statement that everything is encompassed by the state. And so his claim that this is his house is ridiculous. He also says that it is a privilege, not a right, for the press to have access to the White House. And that’s quite wrong. It is a right for the press.
It is not necessarily a right for every member of the press, but it is a right, collectively, for the press to have reasonable procedures for admitting members of the press. And such admissions can’t be based on displeasure with what a particular reporter is writing.
Sargent: There has to be consistency in the way the media is treated, and clearly this is all just arbitrary and rooted in Trump’s theory. Trump’s also been making this other weird argument.
He’s been pointing out that initially the press pool was suspended in solidarity with the banned outlets, but now he says, hey, news organizations did cover me during my UN speech. And he’s flaunting this fact as if it’s supposed to show his dominance over them. Tim, the juvenile nature of this is hard to avoid, isn’t it?
Noah: It’s quite juvenile and childish. But to me, the most important thing is that it’s self-damaging. The actual value of what a reporter is going to pick up by sitting in the White House press warren, the actual value was never great, and it is probably smaller now than it’s ever been in human history. The real business of gathering news about what’s happening in the White House is never going to happen in the White House press room.
It is handy just as a way to handle kind of routine information. But almost all of that routine information—possibly a hundred percent of it—is all stuff that Trump wants to get out. It’s because it’s the place where the White House–controlled information feed takes place.
So he’s essentially cutting off his own propaganda channel, and he’s also denying himself distribution of his propaganda through a much larger network—i.e., CNN, MS Now, and Politico—than he possesses himself.
Sargent: Well, his whole argument that, OK, you said you were cutting me off, but now you showed up at the UN—this is at the center of his explosion of fury at Kaitlan Collins. Trump posted this:
“All of the SLEAZEBAGS, like third-rate reporter Kaitlan Collins of Fake News CNN, a truly unhappy person, said they weren’t going to be covering me. Then why were they ranting and raving like lunatics at the United Nations? Why was she there? She’s got a TRUMP addiction, and so does CNN and MSDNC. They’re all sick, treasonous, and demented!”
Tim, as we said before, this whole line is dumb, but what do you make of the obsession with Kaitlan Collins there?
Noah: Castration complex. No, it’s straight up. I mean—I’m not even joking. We’ve seen his behavior around women who challenge him. He lashes out at them in ways that he never does to male reporters.
I find myself wondering sometimes whether that’s why the networks make a special effort to send women his way—because they always know he’s going to respond with some crazy outburst, in a way he’s less likely to even from someone he hates, like Jim Acosta.
Sargent: Well, we should point out, Tim, that women of color particularly set him off.
Noah: Yes, yes. And so, you know, we know this about Trump. He calls them pigs, he calls them stupid. It’s—he’s not a subtle guy.
Sargent: I want to point out also that at the UN, Trump went out of his way to confront Kaitlan Collins, saying something like, you said you wouldn’t be covering me, but here you are covering me.
And then Trump posted this idiotic video that was entitled “Day in the Life of a CNN Reporter.” It showed some schlubby guy lying around in bed, and then he got out of bed and talked about how he was going to spend his day lying about Trump. Like, wow, you really owned CNN there, Mr. President.
Tim, since you’re going down the psychological road, I want to excavate another bit of psychology here. Trump actually thinks he’s winning as long as he’s the center of attention. He’s owning CNN because they’re still treating him as newsworthy, right? I think that’s interesting.
Noah: Right. It’s, you know, it’s like the eight-year-old boy who sort of pulls the ponytail of the girl in front of him because he’s got a crush on her, and she doesn’t like it, but at least she’s paying him attention.
He’s infantile. And I wrote another piece this week that said, you know, I think that his cognitive decline is accelerating, and this is just further evidence of that. His judgment is really impaired. It was never great to begin with, and now it’s worse.
Sargent: Well, absolutely. Let’s go back to the White House’s legal argument for a second, because it’s so preposterous. As evidence against the organizations, the White House identified particular stories that supposedly spread falsehoods or threatened national security.
But as NYU professor Ryan Goodman pointed out, the examples they cited included protected First Amendment activity, very clearly so. One was a political story on how the GOP midterm convention was a disaster. Like, what?
Noah: Yeah, there were at least two or three examples about the White House ballroom.
Sargent: That literally confirms the whole point that the news organizations are making, that this is all about the content of their reporting.
Noah: And of course, even if they were revealing national security secrets—which reporters do on a fairly regular basis—that is their job.
Sargent: Right. And another one the White House cited was an MS NOW story on our depleted weapons stockpiles that relied on a public document to make that case. It wasn’t like out of left field or anything. A third was a political story that simply quoted something from Bari Weiss’s CBS News. I don’t know, Tim, that doesn’t seem like a strong argument.
Noah: No. And what they’re doing is they’re echoing the arguments that were made at the Pentagon. I mean, the dry run for this was when the Pentagon expelled reporters through three orders over the course of 2025 and 2026. And there is a legal challenge there. I’m not quite sure what the status of it is.
But if the Pentagon is a test case, it seems to me that since the expulsion of national security reporters from the Pentagon, we have seen, if anything, an improvement in the quality of Pentagon coverage—particularly a stunning series of articles in the beleaguered Washington Post. And so it truly is a childish and futile gesture on the part of Pete Hegseth, and now on the part of President Trump.
Sargent: Well, we should probably clarify for people that by the time you all listen to this, the judge may have ruled in this case, but that would probably be just preliminary anyway. This is going to continue, right?
Like, even if a judge rules, we’re going to get an appeal. Since Trump has decided that this is his cause of the moment, White House lawyers have got to pursue it, right?
Noah: I guess. I have a hard time—I mean, the pattern in the past has been that Trump figures he gets his best shot with the Supreme Court. And he does. But I think even the Supreme Court in this instance would side with the news organizations.
Who knows? He may be on to something else in two days. It’s—you know, trying to predict the behavior of a senile person is difficult.
Sargent: Well, let’s go big picture here. I really think that what we’re seeing in miniature here is sort of a bit of a hint of what’s to come. And you kind of got at this in your piece about Trump’s diminishment, which is just a thing that the whole world is witnessing. It’s an extraordinary spectacle, really, like the shriveling public figure of Donald Trump, right?
In this case, a bunch of news organizations signed on to an amicus brief, siding with the ones that have sued and have been barred from the White House grounds. And one of the news organizations that signed on was Fox News.
Now, I don’t want to go and say that Fox is suddenly getting religion about Donald Trump or anything, but the dynamic here seems to be that Trump is becoming such a ludicrous public figure that you’re seeing a level of institutional resistance almost collectively develop here that we haven’t seen before. And I think that’s a harbinger of what’s to come. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Noah: Yeah, in the case of Fox News, I would say that even a supplicant like Fox News has—just as a pure business matter—no choice but to sign on to that, because they need their access to the White House. And you know somebody on Fox might say something that would anger Trump.
He’s going to lose this fight. And I’m not even sure he wants to win this fight. If he does, it’s because his judgment is impaired. I’m guessing that his aides don’t want him to win this fight, because it makes it harder for the White House to put out its message.
It does nothing to prevent the stories they don’t like. The main thing it does is it prevents the flow of self-interested information that emanates from the White House press warren.
Sargent: Let’s talk about the bigger picture. You wrote that he’s kind of this diminishing political figure, and I do think that’s the story of the moment. I think that we’re not prepared for what that could look like after a decisive midterm victory, which is really starting to look more plausible by the day with the polling we’re seeing.
A big victory against Donald Trump, and all of a sudden he starts to look like a really, really diminished figure. And I don’t know what happens then, Tim. What do you think it could look like?
Noah: Well, I just look at the trend lines. And one of the trend lines is Trump’s cognitive decline. And we know that is not going to stop. That just never stops. And another trend line is that his approval rating has been declining since the day he entered office. The reason that didn’t get more attention before was because it was a very gradual decline. But it has gone down.
My guess is that it will accelerate after the election, if it’s a blowout election for the Democrats. And right now he is supported by the Republican caucus in Congress—not because they have any regard for him, except for maybe a handful of people, but because they’re scared of him. And the smaller his approval rating, the less scared they will be.
And at some point, to rescue their party or rescue their own skins, they will turn against him, I believe, and either pressure him to resign or sign on to impeachment. I mean, you know, I wrote this, and several people wrote back to me and said, they won’t have the courage. And my answer is, courage has nothing to do with it. Self-preservation has to do with it.
Sargent: Yeah, I think it’s absolutely plausible. We should point out, by the way, that in the FiftyPlusOne polling averages, Trump is now below 35 percent. He’s at 34.6 percent. I think that’s the first time polling averages have shown him below 35.
Noah: Right. And the lowest ever recorded was Harry Truman, in ‘51 or something, when he hit 22 percent. And I think that record could well be broken in the coming months. The other thing that’s going on, if you want to sort of look at surveys, is that people are asked whether he’s mentally fit to be president. And the number of people who say no has been going up, because, again, as you say, this is happening in public.
As I said in my piece, it’s very much like—imagine if Woodrow Wilson’s physical and mental decline after his stroke in 1919, instead of being hushed up, had happened in view of all Americans. That’s kind of like what you’re seeing with Trump, except in Trump’s case, it’s not a stroke. It is mental decline.
It is growing confusion. It’s falling asleep in meetings. It’s more and more statements that make no sense. It’s more and more actions that reflect what doctors call poor executive function. We’re all seeing it.
There were a number of experts who expressed concern about this during the 2024 election. And then 18 months later, another set of experts, this time both Democrats and Republicans, said, you know what, over the last 18 months, we have seen his condition worsen a lot. It’s the subtext of almost every story about anything Trump does.
Sargent: I think we’re in a weird moment with the discourse as well, where half of the story is everything you just said, this very visible decline, this very obvious deterioration. But the other half of the story—people’s heads are still in another place, where they say, every time Trump tweets that he’s going to do this or that, everybody freaks out and says, he’s got us again, he’s going to steal this election and there’s nothing we can do about it. You know what I mean?
There’s almost like a weird dichotomy, where he’s both clearly diminishing, but on some level he must still be so powerful that we’ll never be able to get out of this. And I wish people would just lose that latter thing already.
Noah: Well, to defend them a little bit, he has a lot of sycophants around him, some of whom possess some competency—I think especially of Russell Vought, who is not a dumb person. And so, he is trying in various ways to rig things.
Sargent: I think we need to get to a place where we’re wary of what Trump can possibly do, and we’ve got to be as vigilant as possible at all times, but we also should stop seeing him as this all-powerful, deviously formidable figure.
Noah: As a master tactician, right?
Sargent: As a master tactician, and a profoundly formidable figure who ultimately always wins and, Houdini-like, escapes from every single situation he’s in, no matter what.
Noah: He is not a master tactician. He never was. Neither was George W. Bush when he was president, and people were always saying that about W as well. And to tell you the truth, neither was Ronald Reagan when he was president. And people were always attributing all sorts of deep wisdom to Ronald Reagan.
I remember a memorable Saturday Night Live skit where you’d see the amiable Reagan sort of nodding and saying vacuous things in public, and then he’d close the door and he’d sound like a genius strategist with his aides. And it was a very funny conceit, but it was not the truth.
Sargent: That’s all very wise stuff, Tim Noah. Thank you so much for coming on. Hopefully we can get through this without too much more damage.
Noah: All right. Thank you, Greg.