Trump’s war on the free press is continuing. Last night, Scott Nover of the Washington Post reported that the White House would not allow reporters from CNN on Air Force One as part of the press pool to cover the president as he traveled to Tennessee for a college football game. CNN is a member of the pool made up of the five major TV networks. The other two outlets Trump tried to ban from the White House, MS NOW and Politico, are part of a different pool. CNN was scheduled to provide the television footage for the trip.
At 6:51 this morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “Why should perpetrators of FAKE NEWS, like CNN and MSDNC, be allowed access to a very sacred place, the White House? Despite my big Election Win, almost 100% of “TRUMP” coverage is negative, and has been for years!”
He followed up at 8:22 with “FAKE NEWS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED IN THE WHITE HOUSE!!! IT HAS GONE ON FAR TOO LONG, AT A TREMENDOUS COST TO OUR COUNTRY.”
Later in the morning, he told reporters: “I love an open, free press. What I don’t like is the fake press. What we don’t want is—we don’t want fake news.”
As bad news continues to plague the administration, Trump has reasons for wanting to control the press.
On Thursday, in a scathing letter, a key prosecutor in the case of the six people charged with felonies after a protest outside the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Broadview detention facility in Illinois—the Broadview Six—resigned under protest.
Sheri Mecklenburg was a career prosecutor in the Department of Justice who was near retirement and appeared to have doubts about the felony charges against the six protesters. In the protest, people surrounded an ICE vehicle, but only the six, all of whom were active in Democratic politics, were charged.
When the cases fell apart because of prosecutorial misconduct, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Andrew Boutros, a strong Trump supporter, laid all of the blame for the misconduct on Mecklenburg, claiming he had been out of the loop in how the case was progressing.
But in her resignation letter, Mecklenburg said she was retiring so she could defend herself. She wrote that she had kept Boutros fully informed of the case and that he was using her as a scapegoat for his own misconduct. She said he had “personally directed” the felony prosecution after she objected “that the case was better suited to misdemeanor charges.” She says he threatened to fire her if she tried to push back on the false allegations.
Mecklenburg’s resignation and allegations illuminate the Trump administration’s efforts to persecute political opponents. Boutros’s tenure as U.S. attorney has been so problematic that there had been an exodus of senior officials from the office, and more than 100 former prosecutors signed a letter warning of failure of leadership in the office and the poisoning of the office with “once-forbidden political considerations.”
Perhaps of more concern to Trump is the report yesterday from Julia Jacobs of the New York Times that whistleblowers who used to work at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts say that six months ago, Trump loyalists running the center cancelled plans to fix the leaking roof they now claim is so dangerous the center must be closed and repaired. Those repairs, they say, will require the addition of Trump’s name to the building.
The whistleblowers claim that the center’s board put the $1.4 million that had been allocated to fix the roof toward Trump’s repainting of the building’s columns, which cost $4.4 million.
As his job approval numbers continue to decline and as individuals and the courts try to stop his unlawful actions, Trump is pushing ever harder to cement his power.
The courts have given him leeway in national security, and he is using that leeway. A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed that 69% of the American people disapprove of Trump’s handling of the war in Iran—59% of them strongly—and only 27% approve (15% strongly).
And yet, on Friday, September 25, Alexander Ward and Summer Said of the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump has told aides that he is planning to start bombing Iran again after the midterm elections. Iran has offered to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and reopen talks about nuclear weapons if the U.S. ends its blockade of Iranian ports, but Trump has rejected the offer, and his belief that the Iranians won’t meet his demands makes him think he’ll need to ramp up strikes again.
But, the reporters say, Trump’s views could shift over the coming weeks as conditions, including the midterms, change.
At the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, September 22, Trump told the heads of state and heads of government in the audience that his administration is “seeking a fundamental change” in the government of Cuba.
James LaPorta of CBS News reports that the U.S. Army Reserve is considering whether it can provide support units, including police forces and medical personnel, to the U.S. Southern Command, which covers Latin America south of Mexico, the waters around Central and South America, and the Caribbean, including Cuba.
The memo CBS reviewed doesn’t say for what operation the troops would be needed “in 90 to 120 days,” but LaPorta reports that “multiple U.S. officials” said the planning is for a potential operation aimed at Cuba.
On Wednesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Trump has invited Russia’s president Vladimir Putin to the Group of 20 (G20) summit in December in Miami, Florida. The G20 is a forum of the world’s biggest advanced and emerging economies to coordinate economic policy, and by extending the invitation, Trump is offering to welcome Putin back into global organizations without ending his invasion of Ukraine. The administration suggests that Putin will be more likely to end the war if he is included than if he is not, a position critics note gives Putin legitimacy without changing his behavior.
Yesterday, as Casey He of Politico reported, fourteen senators led by Armed Services Committee chair Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the top-ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, urged Trump to rescind the invitation. “President Putin bears sole responsibility for launching Russia’s full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine,” they wrote. “Allowing him to participate in a G20 Summit in the United States raises serious concerns about legitimizing and normalizing a government that continues to attack Ukrainian civilian targets every day.”
Today, Pranshu Verma of the Washington Post reported that earlier this month, the U.S. and Russia worked together to weaken a United Nations plan to regulate AI weapons. They stripped out a provision to make sure humans review the targets AI has selected for a military strike—a provision that would likely have avoided the U.S. strike on the Iranian school at the start of the Iran War—and took out requirements that AI systems must act in a “predictable” and “reliable” manner. They also removed a requirement that those using the systems take “ethical considerations” into account.
At the same time he is flexing U.S. muscle internationally, Trump is also continuing to try to cement as much power as he can at home.
Continuing to try to lock the United States into the use of fossil fuels, Today he announced he was getting rid of the vehicle fuel economy standards established under former President Joe Biden.
Yesterday the administration announced it is refusing to spend $810 million Congress appropriated on a bipartisan basis to fund research in Health and Human Services and for programs that serve immigrants and minority groups, calling it “wasteful and harmful government spending that does not benefit American citizens.”
The Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that watches over how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars, is very clear that such “pocket rescissions” are illegal. The Constitution places the power of the purse in Congress alone, requiring the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” If the president can decide not to fund programs Congress has appropriated funding for, he effectively takes over the power of the purse. And yet, director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, has claimed the right to such power.
As Frank Thorp V and Kyla Guilfoil of NBC News reported, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), vice chair of the Appropriations Committee, called the move a “theft from the American people.”
“Russ Vought’s message to Congress is that your votes don’t count, and your laws are optional,” Murray said. “It is now time for my Republican colleagues who said they would never let this happen to stand up and join us to stop this, and remind this administration this is not how this works.”
And so, while Trump is trying to cement power, opposition continues to grow.
But now it appears that Trump has yet another power move on his mind.
Jake Spring and Stephanie Apstein of the Washington Post reported tonight that the administration is considering hosting a Major League Baseball game at a national park. It has been scouting where it could build a baseball facility in Grand Teton National Park.
