Trump Fully Gives Away the Game on Why He Banned News Outlets

President Donald Trump claimed that the media outlets he banned from the White House threatened national security—without bothering to provide any actual evidence.

In a court filing Tuesday, the Department of Justice defended Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. But a closer look at the supposedly supporting evidence reveals that the Trump administration has a weak basis for this argument, Politico reported.

“The President determined that Plaintiffs have failed to maintain minimum professional journalistic standards by publishing classified and national security information,” Trump’s brief says.

In addition to the filing, the DOJ attached letters addressed to each outlet citing the stories that were the basis for their removals. The letters, which were unsigned and did not appear on official letterhead, did not claim that the stories cited there contained classified information—in fact, some of them had nothing to do with national security at all.

For example, the letter addressed to Politico complained about a report describing the “bad vibes” at the Republican midterm convention in Texas.

The DOJ also cited a Politico article about security improvements made to Trump’s ballroom, but the supposedly “intricate” and “internal” document was actually just a handout given to Senate Republicans.

Other reports the DOJ cited, such as those about depleted U.S. munition stockpile and the FBI investigating leaks to a reporter that led to an unflattering article about Kash Patel, have been repeatedly refuted by the Trump administration. If the stories aren’t true, how does it threaten national security to publish them?

The letters, which were purportedly sent out Tuesday before filing, grant each media outlet an opportunity to contest their removal by EOD Friday. The three outlets go to court Wednesday to ask a judge to overturn the ban.

President Trump didn’t want to adhere to building safety codes for his White House ballroom and fought with its original architect until he quit. 

The Washington Post reports, citing anonymous sources, that James McCrery II withdrew from the project in October after warning repeatedly that the ballroom Trump wanted didn’t have adequate emergency exit routes or fire containment measures. The president reportedly didn’t care about McCrery’s concerns, saying that building codes did not apply to anything built at the White House.

“I am the code,” Trump said.

Trump has directed much of his time and attention to the ballroom, and the Post obtained documents, including early ballroom designs that have black Sharpie writing on them in the president’s handwriting. The newspaper’s reporting indicates that Trump is bypassing or overruling the federal agencies that usually handle White House construction and renovations and are legally required to follow national building safety standards to the “maximum extent feasible” except for national security reasons. 

In fact, Trump’s White House construction projects are going through the Executive Residence, which is not a federal agency and is not subject to any of their rules. And buildings on federal property are out of District of Columbia jurisdiction, which means that they are not subject to local building codes. That responsibility falls on the contractors hired to design and build them, and right now, Trump has them working almost around the clock to meet his deadlines. 

After McCrery resigned, the White House continued to discuss safety concerns about the ballroom’s design for months afterwards, according to the Post, but it’s not clear if the more recent designs from the architecture firm that took over the ballroom, Shalom Baranes Associates, addressed them in any way. 

Trump has been wholly focused on the expensive ballroom, going back on promises that it would be financed entirely by private donations and invoking national security justifications that have been debunked. If he is overruling safety codes, he is actually risking national security.  

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took millions of dollars away from the Office of Minority Health and used it to beef up his own personal security.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Kennedy moved $12 million from the office, which was created by Republican President Ronald Reagan to address higher Black infant mortality rates. HHS informed Congress earlier this year that it would use the funds to cover RFK Jr.’s security costs, which grew from $10 million in 2025 to $17 million in 2026, according to the Journal’s sources.

In response to the report, HHS spokeswoman Emily Hilliard said the cuts to the key agency “reflect HHS priorities and programmatic assessments—not the Secretary’s security needs.”

“Secretary Kennedy faces a security environment that differs significantly from that of previous HHS secretaries,” Hilliard added. “His protection reflects the threats he faces, his extensive travel, and the security required for him to safely carry out his duties nationwide.”

When he first started, Kennedy Jr. requested to be protected by the U.S. Marshals Service rather than the security the Office of the Inspector General provided to him.

Kennedy stopped speaking at outdoor events after a man wearing a bike helmet rushed at him last year.

Donald Trump told Republicans to vote as if he were on the November ballot. But Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, doesn’t want the whiff of that directive lingering as the party heads toward a likely brutal November upset.

“If the Republicans lose the midterms it’ll be because [Senate Majority Leader] John Thune didn’t get the SAVE America Act passed,” Miller wrote on X Tuesday, adding that the predicted loss coming for the conservative caucus “rests solely on John Thune’s shoulders.”

It’s easy to see why Trump’s deportation chief would uplift the SAVE America Act as an election cycle Hail Mary.

The original iteration of the SAVE America Act proposed numerous amendments to the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, chief among them a requirement that voters bring either a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Critics argued that the mandate would have unduly restricted millions of Americans from voting, pointing out that half of the country’s population lacks a passport and, furthermore, that the legislation would have made it difficult for anyone who changed their name—including married women—to register at all.

Nonetheless, the White House heralded the voter restriction bill as a critical component to ensuring America’s election integrity and voter security. Trump went so far as to predicate his support for any other legislative efforts on the SAVE Act’s passage, repeatedly insisting that it should be Congress’s top priority for the year.

But the whole initiative came to a standstill over the summer when, after many failed efforts to pass the bill on its own, House Republicans tied it to the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act. That, in turn, has stalled the typically uncontroversial defense bill in the upper chamber.

Now the SAVE America Act is just one of 650 bills awaiting Senate action.

Meanwhile, Republicans are expecting some sorry losses during the midterms. Attention has recently shifted toward Alaska and Ohio—states that have historically been reliably red—and away from purple regions such as North Carolina, which Politico reported Tuesday has been perceived as a “money sink for Dems.”

President Donald Trump is personally making tens of millions off of the AI industry. 

In financial disclosures filed Tuesday, Trump revealed that he’d made a total of 1,156 securities transactions in the month of July, CNBC reported. The president purchased at least $43.6 million worth of shares and sold at least $35.6 million.  

The largest transactions were sales of Microsoft and Amazon shares on July 20, which totaled between $5 million and $25 million each. A few days later, Trump reported buying between $100,001 and $250,000 of Microsoft and between $1,001 and $15,000 of Amazon. 

It’s particularly disturbing considering that the president has emerged as a champion for artificial intelligence and data centers—an industry that Microsoft and Amazon have invested billions of dollars in. At the same time, these companies are paying straight into the president’s pockets for his various vanity projects. 

Also concerning: The filing revealed that the president sold between $250,001 and $500,000 of Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense company, on the same day he signed an executive order that would tighten supply chain requirements for defense contractors. 

The president’s trades totaled between $79 million and $270 million—up just slightly from June, when he traded shares worth between $78.1 million and $263.1 million. Trump has long maintained that trading is done by independent advisers on his behalf and that his portfolio is managed without his input. 

I guess we’ll just have to take his word for it, as Trump continues to get richer and richer. The president’s 2025 financial disclosure showed that he made more than $2 billion during his first year back in the White House, thanks to cryptocurrency, foreign real estate, stock trading, and more. In 2025, the president bought or sold stocks 21,000 times with companies he talks about publicly, but his initial self-reporting of his trading last year showed only 800 transactions—way less than what he actually did.