Trump’s Ban on White House Press Backfires Immediately

Donald Trump’s attempts to silence the media have only turned out to silence him.

The president participated in a ribbon cutting ceremony for his new helipad on the South Lawn of the White House Monday, speaking in front of a hard-hatted crowd wearing neon yellow, high-visibility vests. But exactly what Trump was saying remained a mystery, as the press pool wasn’t present to mic him up.

Instead, the White House’s official feed was unable to pick up any noise apart from the blaring drone of a stationary Marine One helicopter parked yards away. Trump’s audio was completely garbled.

Even Newsmax—one of the few networks to air the event—recognized that it was “one example” of the president’s censorship scheme “backfiring just a little bit.”

“Obviously the ramifications are right here. Can’t hear what the president’s saying,” remarked Newsmax host Bianca de la Garza.

Trump announced Friday that he was banning MS NOW, CNN, and Politico from the White House, writing on Truth Social that the prohibition was the result of “FAKE NEWS.”

Other broadcasters considered the ban an assault on the First Amendment and an affront to news institutions across the country. By Monday, all the broadcasters in the White House press pool—including NBC, ABC, CBS, and Fox News—had joined together to suspend coverage of the president and his actions until he reversed course.

MS NOW, CNN, and Politico also filed a lawsuit against the president and his administration Monday, describing the selective ban as a “a blatant violation” of the First Amendment.

A coalition of their attorneys further argued that the Constitution “does not allow a president or any other government official to deprive the press of their First Amendment rights and liberty and property interests with no notice or process based solely on his dislike of the content of their reporting.”

Trump responded to the backlash shortly after, writing on Truth Social that “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.”

Iran has threatened to unveil a new weapon and alter the landscape of the war if Donald Trump follows through on his pledge to “wipe out” the nation.

“If a new aggression takes place, we will definitely change the weapons and geography of the war,” Hossein Mohebbi, a spokesman for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, told Fars news agency Monday.

Mohebbi did not elaborate on the weapon types, or clarify which new areas could be hit. But he did add that the world would be “astounded” by the new weapons, and reiterated that the U.S. has already “been defeated in this war” but “it does not have the courage to admit and accept this defeat.”

The inflammatory language was a direct response to comments that Trump made to Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst on Sunday. The president reportedly said that his current options include “wiping Iran out, letting them rot economically, or making a deal.”

“My question is: If and when do I blow the entire nation up? They better behave,” Yingst recalled Trump saying during a phone conversation earlier that day.

Trump told Yingst that he would “probably” be open to meeting with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly this week, though he added that this weekend is “no different from any other weekend.”

Trump has promised for months that his real estate developer son-in-law Jared Kushner and real estate developer turned U.S. Special Envoy Steve Witkoff were on the brink of negotiating a peace deal with Tehran. That has not panned out.

Instead, the war has dragged on for seven months. Some of Trump’s closest advisers—including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—have reportedly discussed the possibility that the conflict could extend beyond Inauguration Day 2029.

The Iran war has done nothing good for America since it began. The conflict has so far killed at least 22 U.S. service members and wounded more than 820 others. It has also killed more than 3,500 people in Iran and injured tens of thousands of locals, according to data published by Al Jazeera.

The conflict has also taken an enormous toll on daily life in the U.S., inflaming the cost of practically everything as shipping companies contend with rising oil costs. As a result, Trump’s approval rating has plummeted, with trust and loyalty rattled even among his base, which is reportedly losing patience with the unyielding violence.

So far, only one Republican lawmaker has publicly condemned President Donald Trump’s decision to ban three major news outlets from the White House.

Idaho Representative Mike Simpson told Punchbowl News Monday that restricting CNN, MS NOW, and Politico’s access to the White House was “wrong.”

“Just because you don’t like what the press is reporting or the fact that they wouldn’t call it the Gulf of America or something else like that, that’s not the reason to ban the press. You should never ban the press. The press is what keeps us honest,” Simpson said. “So I don’t like what they’re doing.”

Republican lawmakers who have opposed Trump’s policies in the past, such as Senators John Cornyn, Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski, all remained silent. Republican lawmakers who like to pretend to be free speech advocates, such as Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, also failed to respond to the president’s sudden crackdown on the press.

Representative Thomas Massie only receives partial credit for posting a quip about the ban that was mostly about his opposition to Trump’s fictional $5,000 checks.

Behind closed doors, however, it’s a different story.

Republican strategist Melik Abdul told CNN Monday morning that Republicans secretly acknowledged that Trump’s press ban was a “problem,” but they were too afraid to say anything publicly for fear of backlash from the president.

“If you talk to Republicans behind closed doors. What you’re hearing is this type of petulance, this type of performative thing the president does, it is truly exhausting,” Abdul told CNN.

Trump’s move has generated plenty of immediate backlash. The three outlets he banned filed a lawsuit Monday, and the entire presidential television press pool has agreed to suspend its coverage in the wake of Trump’s decision.

Federal agents on Sunday reportedly injured a U.S. citizen, who ended up at the hospital for his injuries.

The Guardian reports that local police officers in Evanston, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, were called to the scene of an argument between two people at 10 a.m. Upon their arrival, they found a man on the ground with injuries to his neck, head, and teeth, surrounded by people trying to help him and two SUVs parked nearby. Police spoke to a man in one of the cars wearing a vest with “police” written on it, who said he was a federal agent investigating a fugitive.

“The agent told the officer that agents had attempted to identify an individual who resembled a person they were seeking. He said the individual refused to provide identification, was detained for fingerprinting, and resisted detention,” Evanston police said in a statement. “Agents later determined he was not the person they were seeking and learned that he was a U.S. citizen. He was released.”

The statement noted that the federal agent appeared to have blood on his hands, which he said came from trying to handcuff the person. It’s not clear which agency the men in the SUVs were from, although witnesses told police they believed they were Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. According to police, the agent they spoke to said that there were five agents in the area in separate vehicles, and that they had a warrant for a person with a Chicago address.

“The agent also said the federal agents left the area after protesters began to gather because they feared they would be attacked,” the police said in their statement.

Also on Sunday in Austin, Texas, ICE agents shot and wounded a Venezuelan man, Wilber Rafael Garcés Perez, making a DoorDash delivery, claiming he had a final order of removal despite his wife and lawyer saying he had an asylum claim and a work permit. And in July, federal agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Houston man who had lived in the United States for more than 30 years. Under President Trump, it appears federal agents are becoming recklessly violent while carrying out his mass deportation agenda.

The Justice Department is pressing on with its “grand conspiracy” case against federal officials who investigated President Trump, even after the head of that effort—Joe diGenova, counselor to the attorney general—controversially resigned.

DiGenova, a former Reagan administration prosecutor, Trump personal attorney, and peddler of the narrative that Trump was under attack from the liberal “deep state,” resigned earlier this month after insinuating that he was being pressed to find evidence of corruption that wasn’t there.

“If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem,” diGenova said. He later claimed that those comments weren’t what he actually meant. “There’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution,” he clarified. “It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others—and you can’t do that.”

The investigation is centered around Trump’s claim that federal investigations against him—from the 2016 probe into Russian election interference to his indictments after he left office in 2021—were a calculated deep state plot.

Despite diGenova’s resignation, the DOJ has issued multiple subpoenas, including to former CIA Director John Brennan last week. This is an extreme escalation of the quest to blame someone for this “grand conspiracy” against Trump, even after the DOJ’s main guy in charge left because even he couldn’t find any kind of conspiracy. No one who’s been subpoenaed has been charged with a crime thus far.

“I’ve spent decades in and around the Justice Department. I’ve never even conceived of a situation like this,” Ken Wainstein, Brennan’s attorney, told the Associated Press. “[The Justice Department is] blatantly trying to frame somebody for a crime that is complete fiction.”