Out of the blue, Trump twitted that he’s banning CNN, MSNOW and Politico from the White House, with “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow.”

Calling critical and unflattering media coverage “fake” has long been a ubiquitous Trump tool to persuade the MAGA faithful to ignore reality and believe him instead. Trump, and others in his administration like Hegseth and FCC chair Brendan Carr, have tried desperately to silence or chill speech that fails to please and support Trump’s claims of greatness.

The unsurprising initial reaction is to the fairly flagrant unconstitutionality of the president banning the media from the White House (what exactly that means is unclear) because its coverage hurts his feelings. As Eugene Volokh explains, there are things Trump can do and things he cannot.

According to the D.C. Circuit (the federal appellate court with jurisdiction over D.C.), it’s

• unconstitutional for the government to exclude press outlets based on viewpoint from spaces that have been broadly opened to the press, such as the main White House press briefing room but
• constitutional to do so as to spaces that aren’t generally open to the press, such as interviews in the Oval Office.

The key precedent on this in AP v. Budowich (D.C. Cir. 2025), which upheld the exclusion of the AP from the Oval Office (because of AP’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico “Gulf of America”), but reaffirmed (citing Sherrill v. Knight (D.C. Cir. 1977)) that

When the White House opens its facilities to the press generally, as it does in the Brady Briefing Room, it cannot exclude journalists based on viewpoint. Sherill v. Knight.

Of course, the president has used the Oval Office almost daily as the locus of his press briefings, making the rationale behind the AP decision dubious. When the Oval Office morphs from a private presidential space to a public forum for the president to be questioned by the media, it becomes the White House briefing room by usage despite the fact that this shift is a product of Trump’s choice rather than necessity.

Press attention is like air to Trump. He not only loves it, but needs it. He needs to be the focus of attention at all times for all things. He believes he “sells” himself and his actions far better than anyone else could or would. He is, at least in his own twisted mind, the center of the universe.

At the same time, he desperately needs the validation and adoration that comes with positive attention. It’s why he gets his news through Natalie Harp, who feeds him a stream of news that flatters him and reinforces his preferred reality where he is loved and admired, even if it’s only by a small fraction of sycophants for whom he can do no wrong.

In Trump’s fertile imagination, an Oval Office presser would include such piercing questions as “if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?”, or “You’re looking particularly slim and healthy today, are you working out?”

Even if it were lawful for Trump to ban media outlets that harsh his mellow from the White House, it wouldn’t change the fact that they will report his words and actions. Calling them “failing,” an absurd attempt to simultaneously denigrate their worth while justifying denying them access because they do too much harm by reporting “fake” news, doesn’t stop people from watching, reading and learning from the same media outlets Americans have relied upon for decades.

This is not to say that legacy media is invariably accurate and unbiased. It’s not. It can be wrong, and it can reflect deep bias. Remember when the cry was for “moral clarity” rather than factual reporting? The media has gotten much better since the days of “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.”

But this isn’t nearly good enough for Trump, who can’t understand why the media won’t report things the way he wants them to, needs them to. Regardless of the constitutionality of his impetuous ban, the hard cold reality is that Trump has finally drawn his line between the media he wants and the media that reports facts that infuriate and humiliate him. Trump has made clear that not only does he deem unflattering media “fake,” but he’s had enough of it and will use whatever power he can muster as president to silence it.

As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter in 1787,

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

If CNN, MSNOW and Politico, not to mention the “failing” and “disgusting” New York Times and Washington Post, weren’t critical to informing the American public, Trump wouldn’t care about their existence. He does care, and cares so deeply that he felt compelled to ban them. Like a corollary to Dick the Butcher, the real problem is that Trump wants his reality to become reality, and that won’t happen as long as there is a functional media to give us the facts.