What Natalie Harp Showed Trump Before He Banned CNN from White House

Moments before Donald Trump banned three of America’s biggest news organizations from the White House Friday, he was chatting with Natalie Harp.

His beloved executive aide had reportedly shown Trump a compilation of coverage from MS NOW in which several broadcasters flamed Trump’s administration. The president was already irate that his executive decisions (most notably, the financially deleterious and illegal Kennedy Center rebrand) did not have more defenders, but the clips pushed his mounting frustrations to a “fever pitch,” The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

Hours later, Trump banned MS NOW from the White House, alongside CNN and Politico.

The unprecedented move caught most of the White House by surprise, according to sources that spoke with the Journal. Nonetheless, they immediately got to work putting Trump’s plan into action. By Saturday, the outlets’ reporters were officially barred.

A White House official noted that senior staffers were with the president when he made the announcement. One senior official was exasperated when they spoke to the Journal, remarking that the ban would do little to improve the tone of Trump’s press coverage.

“Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Trump did not identify specific stories that he felt fell into that category, though earlier in the day, he lamented online that “CNN is so dishonest.”

“Everything they say is slanted against the Republican Party,” Trump wrote. “They are truly FAKE NEWS!”

Trump has floated the idea of banning news entities from the White House several times before, but he never actually went through with it. That was reportedly thanks to his aides, who were previously able to convince him that there were other, less obvious avenues to restricting access to the executive mansion, such as limiting reporters’ participation in the press pool.

But Trump has made it his mission since he first descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to sow public distrust in America’s news institutions. Time and again he has said the less-than-devotional coverage of his political campaigns, his fraudulent business practices, his dubious personal connections, and his presidential administrations are tantamount to “fake news.”

In recent years, Trump has aggressively pursued legal action against several major news entities, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC News, and CBS News (as well as the broadcaster’s parent company, Paramount). He also sued the Des Moines Register, its parent company Gannett, and pollster J. Ann Selzer in December 2024, retroactively claiming that presidential polls the paper had published prior to Election Day were election interference.

The man Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and wounded in Austin, Texas, in the middle of a DoorDash delivery was not allowed to see his wife before federal agents moved him to an undisclosed location.

Wilber Rafael Garcés Perez, 28, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, was delivering food at 1 p.m. when he encountered ICE agents, who reportedly shot him in the torso. It’s not confirmed what happened in the lead-up to the shooting, or what his condition is at this time.

“Today at 12:30, Wilber called his wife to tell her that he had been shot,” his attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said in an interview with KHOU-11. “And he was yelling in agony, and the call cut off. That was all she knew.”

Lincoln-Goldfinch posted on X that the hospital did not allow Garcés Perez’s wife access to him or “meaningful details on his condition,” and ICE later moved him to an undisclosed location.

“We not only were lied to and told that he wasn’t there, but we were thrown off the hospital grounds by several officers who treated us as trespassers,” Lincoln-Goldfich told NBC News.

NBC News said that social media video showed a dark SUV stopping in front of a blue sedan, and a person exited the SUV. Three gunshots were reportedly heard as the person approached the sedan.

A DHS spokesperson said that Garcés Perez had a final order of removal and entered the country illegally during the Biden administration, but did not say if there was body camera footage or if Garcés Perez has a criminal record. His lawyer said he entered the country legally and had a valid work permit.

CNN, MS NOW, and Politico are suing President Trump after he banned them from the White House on Friday.

“We are filing a lawsuit today to protect our First Amendment rights and defend the principle that the government does not decide what the press reports or publishes,” they announced Monday morning. “Without notice or process, the White House revoked our journalists’ credentials because it objected to our reporting. Left unchallenged, this threatens press freedom and the public’s right to independent journalism free from government interference.”

The outlets are suing the president and his top advisers, and asking a Washington, D.C., judge to quickly intervene to restore their access to the White House after they were denied entry on Saturday.

Trump quickly responded to news of the lawsuit just hours later.

“The White House is not instituting an assault on the Free Press, something which I cherish. It is instituting an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America,” he wrote on Truth Social. “It is corrupt, purposeful, pervasive, fully coordinated, and totally out of control. It is a threat to our National Security, and must be stopped, NOW!”

This is a culmination of Trump’s long-waged war against the media, particularly with CNN. He has already sued The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC News, and CBS News for perceived slights and alleged inaccuracies—all while even more blatantly biased outlets like Fox News, One America News, Newsmax, and other right-wing networks are treated with legitimacy and respect.

The Trump administration may be hiding exactly how many American troops have died in the Iran war. 

The Washington Post, citing six anonymous U.S. officials, reports that more U.S. service members have died than the Department of Defense has publicly disclosed. Five of these officials told the newspaper that there have been 22 military deaths during the war, four more than the 18 currently appearing in the Defense Casualty Analysis System, the DOD’s public database. 

Another unnamed official says that 23 service members have been killed since February 28, when the U.S. and Israel first launched airstrikes on Iran. Not all of the alleged undisclosed deaths are directly tied to the war, this official reportedly said, but all of the deceased soldiers were in the Middle East while the war was going on. 

This official also told the Post that three American contractors based in the region have also died since the start of the war. The details behind the undisclosed deaths are unclear, including who they were and how, when, and where they died. The Pentagon refused to answer the newspaper’s inquiries about the disputed death figures.  

The Iran war is extremely unpopular with the American people, with the risk to U.S. troops among one of many reasons why. If Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and the rest of the Trump administration are hiding military casualties, that raises questions as to the circumstances of their deaths and what incentive White House officials have to keep them secret. 

President Trump, Hegseth, and everyone else in the administration continue to insist that the Iran war is going well, despite the Strait of Hormuz remaining closed and Iran’s allies in Yemen, the Houthis, taking over the Bab al-Mandeb Strait on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula. Hiding American deaths further exposes the White House’s attempts to fool the American people that the war has been a success.  

President Trump’s seven-month war on Iran has cost the American taxpayer $45.1 billion, according to estimates the United States Central Command gave Congress this week. They also estimate that they’ll require another $28 billion to cover the cost to replace lost munitions.

According to the CENTCOM estimate, $28.1 billion went toward replacing spent munitions, $11.2 billion went toward general operations, and $4.3 billion went to weapons and tools that were “lost.” Another $1.5 billion went toward fuel. The estimate tracks up until September 3. It does not, however, account for the massive damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East. There was also not a more detailed breakdown of the costs.

In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth estimated that the Pentagon had already spent $37.5 billion on the war at that point. That total has quickly been eclipsed, and the war has no end in sight.

Literally no one voted for this war. Trump moved on his own, at the behest of the Israeli government. Now everyday Americans are paying for it, even as the vast majority disapprove of the war and how the president has handled it. And yet Republicans don’t seem to care, even as gas prices spike and midterms draw closer.