David Ellison Dines With Trump and Xi as CNN Banned From White House

The soon-to-be owner of CNN ate with President Trump Thursday night at the White House’s state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping while Trump still barred the broadcast network from the premises.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison was among the guests at the event, reports Deadline, as he awaits a judge’s approval of a settlement in Paramount’s merger with CNN’s parent company, Warner Bros. Meanwhile, neither CNN nor MS NOW were allowed to cover Xi’s evening arrival at the dinner, despite a Wednesday court order giving them and Politico access to the White House.

On Thursday morning, the three outlets were also barred from covering Xi’s arrival to the White House in defiance of the order, and they immediately notified the court. In response to U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly, the White House claimed in a court document that access was restored to Politico, CNN, and MS NOW as of 9:55 a.m. In reality, the outlets reported not being allowed on the premises until around noon, long after the press conference with Xi.

Trump again revived his ban later that evening, showing his contempt for Kelly’s ruling and daring him to take further action. Trump’s disdain for the free press seems to match his disdain for federal judges who rule against him, and Ellison is demonstrating that he will suck up to Trump instead of standing up for any of his journalists. 

Paramount also owns CBS, which was boycotting broadcasts of the president along with the rest of the White House press pool. Ellison, though, is more concerned with making money off of a $110 billion merger instead of any kind of critical journalism.  

The Trump administration is preparing for possible military action in Cuba.

Documents reviewed by CBS News reveal that U.S. Southern Command is exploring the availability of combat sustainment, engineering, and medical units—as well as a military police brigade—within the next “90-120 days.”

The administration and USSOUTHCOM have remained vague about their intentions for these units.

“Due to operational security concerns, we do not disclose details or comment on U.S. operational movements or potential deployment timelines associated with current or future operations, contingencies, or planning,” a spokesperson for USSOUTHCOM told CBS. “However, U.S. Southern Command continuously coordinates with the Joint Force to assess a range of potential requirements across its [area of responsibility] in support of assigned missions.”

This comes just days after Trump’s incendiary United Nations General Assembly speech in which he called for the downfall of the Cuban government, claiming that “freedom will be coming to Cuba” while the Cuban delegation walked out.

This recent development also aligns with Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s aggressive, paternalistic approach to the island, slowly choking it to death—blocking key resources and enacting harsh sanctions—while claiming that the government is a “state sponsor of terrorism that spies on America.”

“What we’re trying to teach them is there are no escape valves.... Every time they create a new mechanism in which they try to get out of the noose, we just close it off,” Rubio said last month. “They certainly can’t wait us out. Certainly this isn’t going to go away for the next [two and a half] years.”

Cubans have suffered immensely since President Trump’s return to power. The administration has carried out a blackout-inducing oil blockade since January that has directly contributed to widespread food insecurity, economic collapse, and death, as infant mortality doubled on the island. The U.S. has attacked Cuba on multiple fronts, from accusing its doctor export program of human trafficking to claiming that it’s aiding international terrorism. Now, with this recent USSOUTHCOM report, military intervention seems imminent.

One of our closest allies now believes that it can’t rely on the United States under President Donald Trump’s leadership.

Belgium’s foreign ministry warned that America was “no longer the ally it has been in the past,” according to a late-2025 strategy document reviewed by the Financial Times.

The Belgian document called for a “thorough re-evaluation of the relation between the European Union and Belgium on the one hand, and the U.S. on the other hand.” It argued that the current political dynamics in the United States were “likely to compromise several vital interests of Belgium and the European Union.

The document maintained that engagement with the Trump administration was “indispensable,” but also acknowledged that it was mostly a lost cause. The document advised that a dialogue with levels below the federal government should be “significantly reinforced,” that discussions should be held with Democratic opposition, and that Belgian officials should focus on “identifying the new generations of bipartisan elites that could play a role in tomorrow’s America.”

The document was produced around the same time that the Trump administration issued its controversial 2025 National Security Strategy, which showed a clear ideological shift to implicitly condemn centrist and liberal governments in Europe, and boost the right-wing groups that opposed them, warning them to curb immigration or risk “civilizational erasure.”

Simultaneously, the Trump administration continued in its unwanted advances to acquire Greenland from Denmark, while flubbing its proposed peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Clearly, European countries would be right to be concerned: since then, the president has continued issuing threats to pull U.S. forces out of Europe altogether.

The president’s unprecedented decision to ban members of the press have inspired his political disciples.

Mary Spicuzza, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, was barred from covering Representative Tom Tiffany’s gubernatorial campaign stop in Milwaukee on Thursday. 

The Pulitzer finalist’s crime? Investigating Tiffany’s alleged tax fraud. Spicuzza has also reported on Tiffany’s various policy positions, including his choice to play dumb about Donald Trump’s scheme to limit mail-in voting, as well as Tiffany’s billionaire-funded campaign.

Being a good journalist and holding a public figure to account was apparently tantamount to being a “liberal activist” in the eyes of the Wisconsin Republican. Tiffany’s campaign communications account tried to explain away its ban against Spicuzza, stating that the campaign had permitted a Journal Sentinel photographer to cover the event, and that Tiffany welcomes “all balanced journalists across Wisconsin.”

However, just hours earlier, the campaign account had apparently deemed the Journal Sentinel balanced enough to cite it against a critic claiming that Tiffany had given local data centers a $68 billion tax break.

Another Journal Sentinel reporter, Jessie Opoien, took to X to defend her colleague, writing that Spicuzza is “a fair reporter and a good person who takes her job seriously, and that’s true of our whole team.”

Tiffany’s campaign spit back, responding to Opoien that if Spicuzza’s coverage “is truly balanced and ‘fair,’ why has she written MULTIPLE negative headlines about Tom and ZERO negative headlines about David Crowley since August? How is that balanced journalism?”

But in doing so, Tiffany’s team revealed a wild degree of ignorance regarding basic journalistic practices. Journalists don’t balance their coverage by writing an equal number of positive or negative stories about public figures. They provide a public service by uncovering hidden truths,  holding public figures responsible for their actions, and sharing accurate and verifiable information with their audiences.

Yet Spicuzza wasn’t the only journalist that Tiffany tried to silence. Journal Sentinel reporter Laura Schulte wrote on X that she had been similarly informed by the Republican’s campaign just last week that she “wouldn’t be let into events if [she] wasn’t a fair reporter. “

“Earlier this week, Tiffany said all reporters would be let into his events, even me, when he was asked about Trump’s ban on TV stations,” Schulte continued. “Now they’re blocking my colleague.”

The power play was clearly influenced by what happened at the White House last week, when Trump barred CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from reporting at the executive mansion. The trio of outlets immediately filed a lawsuit against the administration to undo the ban. In the days since, more than 49 news organizations from across the country have signed on to an amicus brief to defend their colleagues and competitors’ First Amendment rights. U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly reinstated the outlets’ access Thursday. It will last for two weeks while the legal case makes its way through the courts.

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.”

The California Supreme Court ordered Republican Sheriff Chad Bianco in Riverside County, California, to return ballots that he illegally seized from election officials.

The New York Times reports that Bianco took about 650,000 ballots cast in California’s 2025 special election on congressional redistricting, as part of an investigation into voter fraud that California officials called baseless. The court had already ordered Bianco to end his investigation in April while it considered the state’s case against him, and on Thursday the court ruled in two cases that the sheriff lacked the authority to take the ballots.

“I would underscore the seriousness of the violation here. This is not a case involving a few documents,” Associate Justice Goodwin H. Liu wrote in a concurrent opinion. “It involves the unlawful removal and handling by armed deputies of over 1,000 boxes of documents—and not just any documents, but the most precious documents of the citizenry in a democracy: their votes.”

Bianco claims that he received complaints from county residents that the vote count from last year’s election didn’t match the number of ballots received. The alleged discrepancy would not have affected the outcome of Proposition 50, which passed with 64 percent approval and allowed California to redraw its congressional districts to favor Democrats.

The sheriff happened to be running for governor of California at the time he began his investigation, but finished fourth in June’s primary election, failing to qualify for November’s general election. Bianco was unrepentant on Thursday, attacking Attorney General Rob Bonta, who brought one of the cases against him.

“This is about an attorney general who believes that he can stop an investigatory process into something that he doesn’t want us to know the answer to, and that was not the intention of our Founding Fathers,” Bianco said. “That was not the intention of the writers of our Constitution.”

President Trump has fueled election fraud conspiracies in the Republican Party for years, and anytime his followers don’t like election results, they attack the results as fraudulent or rigged. Bianco is one of many Republicans who keep demonstrating that these accusations are in fact confessions.

With the president and GOP polling at record lows, November’s results could have many conservatives crying foul because they can’t fathom losing. Hopefully, the courts will withstand their attempts to undermine the coming votes.