Conservative media turns on Trump as broken promises further fracture his base
President Donald Trump suffered a major blow in his attempt to ban three media outlets that are critical of him — CNN, MS NOW and Politico — from covering him at the White House.
"Judge Kelly's hearing on President Trump's media ban," reported Politico's Kyle Cheney on X. "Immediately makes clear he's bound by D.C. Circuit precedent that upholds due process protections for WH reporters who hold hard passes."
Judge Timothy Kelly directly said, "I think it is fair to say that the process ... wasn't followed here."
Earlier on Wednesday, MS NOW's Rachel Maddow explained why she thinks those networks have been targeted.
"I have always had this theory that Trump doesn't come after MS NOW more than he does other news organizations — even though I think of all the mainstream media organizations, we're probably the most critical of him," Maddow told her audience. "I've always thought that he maybe doesn't come after us in a more concerted way because he's talked himself into the idea that that will help us, right? That that will elevate us, and so he shouldn't pay us attention because we're always going to be, you know, who we are and that it'll only help us, and therefore hurt him to give us too much attention."
Maddow added, "So he decides to sort of diffuse the attention on us by bringing in these other news organizations. But in so doing, he ends up taking this swipe that just seems sort of weird and inchoate and also very clarifying to the news business that this is the kind of thing that we ought to all stand up against together."
Trump's press team openly admitted when kicking out those reporters that they did so because they felt the publications were "fabricating facts or reporting verifiable falsehoods from inside the White House complex is an intentional breach of professional decorum and it is severely disruptive to the mission and purpose of the White House.”
Former Trump Homeland Security official Miles Taylor explained on Tuesday that the Trump White House actively gloats about penalizing reporters who write things they do not like.
"Anyone hoping the losses (in 2018) would humble him was sorely mistaken," Taylor said. "Donald Trump was on the attack. He fired his attorney general, spoke openly about ejecting his chief of staff and set his sights on Cabinet members who challenged his erraticism and frequent impulses toward illegality. He didn't want anyone around to say 'no' to whatever his warped conscience cooked up next. On the same day, Trump blew up at CNN's Jim Acosta during a post-election press conference for asking uncomfortable questions about the Russia investigation and the president's immigration policies."
He added, "Afterwards, Trump decided he would simply throw him out of the White House, breaking with decades of norms that credentialed members of the press are given access to cover the American presidency. That night, I was at dinner in the restaurant of the Trump Hotel with a member of the president's Cabinet and senior national security officials. A few tables away sat the White House communications chief with a group of aides. They were openly gloating and celebrating, before the story had even hit the news. They'd had the Secret Service stop Acosta and take away his pass. If the press didn't report on Trump the way Trump wanted, he'd censor them."