President Donald Trump revoked access to CNN, MSNOW and Politico on Friday, and the reporters were removed from the White House on Saturday. Axios co-founder Jim Vandehei knows why.
Speaking to CNN's Audie Cornish on Monday morning, Vandehei explained that Trump just had the worst week of his entire political career. He's been pushed into a corner, and Vandehei thinks the president is lashing out at the only things he can control.
After calling it "small, silly and stupid," Vandehei noted that nothing Trump does will alter coverage of him or chill free speech about him.
"Eventually you're going to have everyone just doing their job the way they should do it," he said. "I hate the precedent of it, and the reason that it's happening is the president feels the walls are caving in. It was a terrible week for him, last week. Everyone around him knows it."
"You're increasing the Fed rate," he said about the Federal Reserve increasing the interest rate. It's generally seen as an indication that inflation is a serious enough problem that they're stepping in. "You're having the courts tell you you can't do things that you want to do. You have a Republican congresswoman shooting an ad, basically saying what Democrats have been saying about how he's handling immigration."
Cornish added that new polling data shows "Hispanics feel betrayed by how Trump is behaving.
"Like that's bad," Vandehei agreed. "Gas prices hit a new high; diesel hits a new high. Inflation is high. Poll numbers are low. Republicans are in the tank. Generics are bad."
He noted that those who know Trump well and are around him understand that the "worst version of Trump" comes out "when he feels powerless."
"It's kind of a taste of what's to come because he is a lame duck president, and he has defied political gravity in ways we've not seen other presidents," Vandehei said. "But political gravity is real. He has two-plus years left in office. Republicans are looking at those polls. They're thinking about survival."
Meanwhile, he said, the media knows it'll long outlast a single president. The courts understand they'll still be there long after Trump is gone, and their careers will not be defined by what a president is upset about regarding a ruling.
At a later part of the discussion, Vandehei mentioned that he thinks the reason that Trump is refusing to regulate AI and step in to pause it is that the U.S. economy is being propped up by AI.
"The president just doesn't want to because he's very worried that if you put any limits on artificial intelligence, the entire economy could come grinding to a halt because so much investment is going into that technology," Vandehei said. "So, what I would say to your viewers is this is the single most important topic you're probably ever going to face. You should really pay attention to it. You should try to learn different dimensions of it, because there's going to be a lot of big decisions that this country is going to have to make, and they're not just going to be Trump decisions; they're going to be public decisions. They're going to be media decisions."
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