Trump Kicks Out CNN Again Despite Judge’s Order

President Donald Trump blocked CNN from the White House press pool Thursday morning, continuing his feud with the network despite a court order allowing them on the White House grounds.

Trump removed CNN journalists from his upcoming trip to Texas and Oklahoma after they were scheduled to fly on Air Force One in order to report on his visit to a truck manufacturing facility in Denton, Texas, and a speech in Durant, Oklahoma. CNN was also barred from traveling with the president last weekend when he went to Tennessee.

While U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly’s order last week preventing Trump from blocking CNN, Politico, and MS NOW was limited to media access on the White House premises, the president’s actions Thursday are still “a blatant violation of the First Amendment and due process,” said Theodore Boutrous, an attorney representing the media outlets, in a statement.

“The White House is persisting in unpredictably and inconsistently implementing the President’s unconstitutional ‘ban on the free press’ by barring CNN from fulfilling its role as a designated television network pooler—to the detriment of CNN, its fellow pool members and, ultimately, the American public,” Boutrous’s statement said.

All three media outlets had asked a federal court Monday to continue preventing Trump from blocking their access, warning that “the White House’s words and actions leave little doubt that it will immediately reinstitute a complete ban of CNN, MS NOW, and Politico if allowed the opportunity.”

That was apparent last week, when Trump continued to bar media outlets from covering the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House and an official state dinner later in the day. It seems that Trump will continue to thumb his nose at the First Amendment as long as he can get away with it.

Congressional staffers were planning to take a luxury trip to Europe, complete with stops in Milan, the Champagne region of France, and a Ferrari factory in Bologna, Italy, just weeks before the midterms, organized by a top aide to House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Then NBC News obtained the draft itinerary for the trip, which included both Republicans and Democrats, and asked Johnson’s office about it. The trip was immediately canceled.

“Senior congressional staff of both parties routinely lead staff delegations to allied countries and trading partners for parliamentary and private sector engagements to strengthen the working relationships between our countries and their key industries,” said Johnson’s office in a statement.

According to a staff memo, the reason for the trip was “to engage European and U.S. government and industry officials related to the impact of U.S. tariffs and taxes.” Such trips are not uncommon, as congressional staffers and delegations often take fact-finding trips to learn about policy issues. But this trip has some apparent warning signs, an ethics watchdog told NBC News.

“In theory, you want members of Congress and their staff to be going into the field and learning something and maybe investigating something, getting some up-close and personal understanding of the issue that they’re supposed to be legislating on. That’s probably a good use of time in a lot of cases,” Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight, said to the news outlet.

“But what they end up being, or at least what they look like, is just a taxpayer-funded vacation to exotic locations. You’ve got the Ferrari racetrack that you get to play around on, or the Louis Vuitton gift bag you might be getting in Milan. I’m sure those are enjoyable inducements to the whole enterprise.”

According to Johnson’s office, the trip was canceled due to a schedule conflict. But Democratic and Republican staffers traveling together when there are stark, seemingly unsolvable legislative conflicts between the two parties raises eyebrows. And such a trip, when the House is out of session until the midterms, doesn’t look good at a time when Americans are struggling with the expensive cost of groceries and sky-high gas prices, and can’t afford vacations to Europe.

Republican Senator Eric Schmitt was warned that his attempt to trap former special counsel Jack Smith might be baseless—before he humiliated himself on the Senate floor anyway.

Republican staff on the Senate Judiciary Committee warned Schmitt that the text messages he was planning to use to accuse Smith of holding secret meetings in Atlanta were “unvetted,” MS NOW reported Wednesday.

Schmitt accused Jack Smith during a hearing Tuesday of sneaking to Atlanta to meet with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis and prosecutor Nathan Wade, after they revealed their affair in February 2024. The Missouri Republican claimed to possess text messages proving that Smith had plans to attend an Atlanta Hawks game, but unfortunately for Schmitt, the texts were actually about Smith’s plans to attend a University of Iowa Hawkeyes women’s basketball game in Maryland.

The Department of Justice shared materials with GOP staff on the Judiciary Committee ahead of the meeting, sources told MS NOW. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley’s team compiled most of the important information into a memo, but did not include the supposedly damning texts in their assessment, one source told the outlet.

Grassley did not share the texts with Democratic senators ahead of the hearing, deepening the suspicion that Schmitt’s failed “gotcha” moment was secretly engineered by the Trump administration, one source told MS NOW.

Democrats aren’t the only ones suspicious of the source of Schmitt’s viral face plant.

A senior Republican senator also believes the Trump administration was working to nail the president’s longtime foe. “I’m pretty sure the White House asked him to do it,” they told RawStory. “And, probably, the White House provided the material.”

Schmitt’s blunder would probably be another blip in the news cycle, except that it came just hours after Axios reported that the Missouri Republican was gaining “buzz” as a potential running mate for JD Vance in 2028. Clearly, somebody thought Schmitt was about to make waves, but he only made himself a laughingstock.

An unvaccinated resident of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, was confirmed to have died from measles, according to an announcement by the state Health Department Wednesday.

The death marks the fifth measles-associated death in the Keystone State this year, per state statistics. At least 943 measles cases have been reported within the state so far.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were, comparatively, far behind in recording national figures related to measles: As of Tuesday, the CDC reported just two measles deaths in the entire country.

That discrepancy has sparked a fierce debate between Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the health agency’s decision not to rely on state data but instead to use mortality figures from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Reuters Tuesday that the incongruous statistics could undermine public confidence and even lend ammunition to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine followers who would argue that the deaths were “invented or inflated.”

“To the public, that gap looks like either incompetence or concealment,” Adalja told the newswire.

Kennedy’s flippant and dismissive rhetoric regarding the measles vaccine has left many Americans confused as to his own stance on the jab. A survey published Tuesday by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that just one in three Americans believe Kennedy recommends the MMR vaccine, despite his belated decision to support the scientifically backed shot on August 2.

Yet the measles situation has only become more grave as the country descends into the cold season. Pennsylvania authorities reported 114 new cases over the last week, a third of which were children under the age of 18. Overall, there have been 176 hospitalizations.

But those who are vaccinated against the virus stand a much better chance of remaining healthy: Less than one percent of the total number of cases involved people who were fully vaccinated against measles.

Measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. in 2000, a status determined by the lack of continuous transmission of the disease over a period of 12 months or more. That designation could be lost in November, when the U.S. is scheduled to undergo another review.

As of September 24, at least 3,659 measles cases were confirmed by the CDC—by far the highest count across the country since 1991.

Pete Hegseth’s “State of the Force” address Wednesday was a bizarre journey in which he rehashed or remixed his most common talking points in TED Talk fashion.

Hegseth got to the culture war stuff early on in his address, bragging about firing a slew of longtime military leaders at the beginning of his tenure as defense secretary.

“I think the generals heard the message. Those who responded positively … are leading newly focused, and newly empowered and disciplined formations,” Hegseth said. “Those generals who did not? Who clung to the woke department, or seemed to think civilian control of the military is simply a suggestion? Well, they no longer work here.

“It’s worth saying again, so that the fake news understands it. We are no longer the ‘woke’ department, or the ‘weak’ department. Simple translation of that? No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos,” Hegseth said, calling back to an often used slogan and transphobic slur. “No wimps, no radicals. Just warriors. Just tough, ready, committed troops … the ideological clowns are out,” he continued. “The patriotic cowboys are in—with testosterone testing on top.”

Hegseth also took time to take cheap shots at the press, of which he used to be a part.

“Our so-called ‘press’ makes Iranian state media look reasonable,” Hegseth said. “Our media’s shameful lust for political retribution blinds them to the consequences of reckless, so-called ‘reporting.’ So-called ‘journalists’ juiced up on Trump Derangement Syndrome think they’re fighting against our president. But they’re really undermining you. Our warfighters.”

The defense secretary also announced Project Meridian, a massive upcoming study on the “future of warfare” led by Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey. He unveiled the Office of Religious Affairs, an outfit that will report “straight to the top” to “strengthen religious support,” and revealed that he’d be making a further 20 percent cut to military leadership.

The defense secretary sounds ridiculous. Patriotic cowboys and testosterone testing are not things you want to hear coming from the mouth of the head of the largest military in the world. And yet here we are.

“Send me,” Hegseth concluded, heavily paraphrasing the Bible. “Send me to fight the redcoats. Send me to fight the Communists. Send me to fight the Islamists. Send me.”