Trump Unveils His Backup Plan After Banning Media From White House

The White House is pushing its phone app in response to the broadcast media blackout, offering up a smattering of press releases, scheduling details, and MAGA talking points as a replacement for America’s biggest news outlets.

The app, simply named “The White House,” first appeared on Apple’s app store on March 27. But it suddenly reemerged Monday as the administration’s apparent redirection away from a collective display of solidarity taken by members of the White House press pool after Donald Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House.

The push must have been effective. As of Monday afternoon, the app was charting at #11 in Apple’s news category—right behind The New York Times (X and Reddit took the top spots on the leaderboard, despite predominantly being social media platforms).

Yet the government software is far closer to propaganda than a bonafide news offering. The app’s front page highlighted Trump’s “historic deal with Greenland,” displaying a Truth Social post from Friday in which the president boasted that he had negotiated for the U.S. to develop and operate military bases on the island (it did not mention that this deal was originally set in place in 1951 by the Defense of Greenland agreement).

Below that, the app offered several banners displaying information pertaining to Trump’s campaign priorities—such as “grow the economy” and “lead the world in AI”—and achievements. However, the latter category was apparently so unquantifiable that the button to actually view such accomplishments took this reporter to the White House website, which first displayed a video of Trump swaying side to side on the stage of the American Business Forum before a scroll-down menu offered some statistics on deportations and, stunningly, a bullet point claiming that Trump had “ended the Israel-Hamas War.”

Other portions of the app presented advertisements for “TrumpTV” (described as “the essentials station”) and offered a compilation of social media feeds from the White House’s various accounts. It also suggested via a floating element that this reporter should “text President Trump.” That invitation opened up Messenger, where the link had created a pre-fabricated message for the White House’s text notification number. It read: “Greatest President Ever!”

The bottom of the app’s home page included a survey for inquiring minds. The question posed: “Should states that allowed noncitizens to register to vote—even through an alleged ‘software error’—face federal funding penalties?”

The options offered were: “Yes—states must be held accountable for election integrity failures;” “Yes—federal funding should be tied to election integrity compliance;” “No—software errors are accidents, not intentional misconduct;” “No—election administration is a state issue, not a federal funding matter;” and “Not sure—it depends on whether the error was negligent.” True to form for the rest of the administration, the poll did not offer any insight regarding its results.

The app’s recent recirculation was a sorry attempt by the president and his aides to keep the American public tuned in to his antics, hours after Trump was effectively muted during the unveiling of a new White House helipad because the press pool wasn’t there to mic him up.

The Republican Senate nominee in Iowa is trying to criticize the Iran war’s effect on ordinary people—without mentioning President Trump or her own voting history.

“Iowans are being squeezed and shouldn’t have to foot the bill at the pump or the checkout line for the war in Iran. We need to use every option at our disposal to provide some relief from high prices,” Representative Ashley Hinson posted on X Monday.

Not surprisingly, Hinson’s solution doesn’t mention how Trump created the mess in the first place. Hinson also didn’t mention her own voting record: She has voted six times against House resolutions calling for Trump to end the war.

Instead, she suggests “suspending the gas tax, pausing diesel exports, unleashing E-15 everywhere we can, reinstating the $1/gallon biodiesel tax credit, and creating a diesel relief program to help our farmers and truckers being crushed by the high costs.”

“These actions to lower costs are needed ASAP, and the war needs to be brought to a successful and immediate end,” Hinson said, adding that Iowa’s highway trust fund needed be “replenished, so that Iowans don’t suffer from crumbling roads and bridges while relief comes our way now.”

Fuel prices have skyrocketed in the last seven months, thanks to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, and, more recently, the takeover of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait in the Red Sea by Houthi forces in Yemen. The average price of gasoline as of Monday was $4.4786 nationally and $4.3698 in Iowa, according to the American Automobile Association. Diesel fuel prices are even worse: $6.5107 nationally and $6.3157 in Iowa, a state with a large agricultural economy whose equipment depends on diesel.

Hinson is polling neck and neck with her Democratic opponent, state Representative Josh Turek, and is clearly worried that failing to acknowledge the war’s impact could hurt her in November. Trump won the state by 13 points in 2024, but Republicans and the president are polling lower and lower each day with the ongoing war only getting worse.

The Trump administration has agreed to pay at least $410 million to facilitate its so-called “third-country deportations” for immigrants.

As of the end of June, 31 countries, mostly in Latin America or Africa, have made deals to take immigrants expelled from the United States—despite having no connection to the deportees themselves, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The effort to secure the deals was led by Christian Ehrhardt, who was tapped to lead the Trump administration’s brand new Office of Remigration, a 15-person office named for the racist, far-right scheme to expel minorities from Europe. The deals were sought under the explicit orders of Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and resident White House ghoul.

For several months, Ehrhardt has rushed to lock in deals with numerous foreign leaders. “The messaging is not just that he is a deputy assistant secretary of state. He’s really part of the White House, so they roll out the red carpet,” a U.S. official familiar with his meetings told the Post.

As part of those deals, the Trump administration has agreed to pay $81 million directly to 13 foreign governments, which represents a sizable expansion of the sums being sent to authoritarian leaders. The agreements allow countries to specify what kinds of immigrants they will take—where they were originally from and their criminal background. For example, the government of Burundi accepted a $12 million agreement to take up to 250 African nationals who were non-violent criminals, while Cameroon accepted a $30 million to take up to 1,000 African nationals with a preference for non-violent criminals.

The secret deals were written without the typical statutory requirements to assure human rights safeguards. The State Department’s own human rights reports explicitly warn of violations in several of the countries, including Cameroon, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea.

As part of those deals, the Trump administration has also promised to award $179 million to the International Organization for Migration and $124 million to the U.N. Refugee Agency for third-country deportations. For example, the Central African Republic agreed to accept 1,500 immigrants in exchange for an $85 million donation to the IOM. The highest contribution to this agency under the Biden administration was $14 million.

Immigration attorneys and advocates have argued that the third-country deportations are simply a loophole to bypass the United States’ own rules against sending immigrants back to their country of origin if they are at risk of persecution or torture there. In many cases, third countries simply send the immigrants back to their home countries anyway.

On Friday, a federal appeals court ruled that these “refoulement” policies are unlawful. The Trump administration is expected to appeal this decision to the Supreme Court.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is now hiding the locations of thousands of immigrants who received a final deportation order. 

The Associated Press reports that the agency’s online detainee locator database no longer contains any record of these individuals, preventing their family members and legal representatives from locating them. The move also hinders their lawyers from filing habeas petitions for their release since they don’t know which federal district to file in, and means ICE could quickly detain and deport a person before they have a chance to fight their case. 

In July, about 16,000 people who were arrested and processed into detention by ICE were given final removal orders, the AP reported, citing data collected by UCLA and U.C. Berkeley as part of the Deportation Data Project. That’s more than a third of all of ICE’s bookings that month.  

“Families are freaking out because they think the person has been deported and they don’t know where the person might be,” Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the AP. “On the attorney side, this has serious implications for the ability to contact their client. It certainly has implications about how it will interfere with the attorney-client relationship.”

Detainees held at ICE facilities in Adelanto, California, as well as temporary holding centers in Minneapolis, New York City, and suburban Chicago appear to be exempt from the new change, thanks to litigation requiring ICE to document these detainees in the online locator system immediately when they arrive. 

ICE made the move on September 15 without announcing it publicly, according to three unnamed current and former agency officials who anonymously spoke to the AP. Immigration lawyers confirmed to the wire service that they suddenly couldn’t find their clients in the online system this week, and the AILA alerted its members on Friday. 

It’s yet another move meant to thwart legal challenges to the Trump administration’s callous mass deportations, while adding the cruel measure of preventing family members from knowing where their relatives are. Considering ICE’s record of medically neglecting detainees, some could even be experiencing serious health issues at the same time. But for this administration, spreading fear and cruelty is by design. 

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.”