Has Trump's war on the press just spectacularly backfired?

Jon Sopel (0:02)

This is a Global Production.

Lewis Goodall (0:04)

It is not difficult to find cases of Trump suing journalists. And I don't mean this time round. I mean, literally, you go back to the 80s, he was doing it.

Jon Sopel (0:15)

Donald Trump has posted this morning on Truth Social, and this is what he said. The White House is not instituting an assault on the free press, something which I cherish. It's instituting an assault on the fake news.

Lewis Goodall (0:27)

As ever with Trump, it's what he's done in a sort of continuum of just sowing distrust. You know, it's always been about enemies of the people. It's always been, which has obviously taken from, you know, Nazi Germany and before even.

Jon Sopel (0:42)

Has the American media, to some extent, brought this on itself by the way that it has behaved in the second term?

Lewis Goodall (0:51)

All right, the breaking news. Diesel prices are at a record.

Jon Sopel (0:54)

Republicans are trailing in midterm polling.

Lewis Goodall (0:56)

And the president is banning reporters from the White House. And now this morning, CNN, MS Now and Politico are suing the Trump administration.

Jon Sopel (1:05)

That is CNN this morning. And their third story is they're suing the president over a ban on their reporters being allowed into the White House.

Lewis Goodall (1:17)

Trump has been bullying the media for decades, since before he even got into politics. But is he doing it now out of desperation?

Welcome to The News Agents.

SPEAKER_3 (1:33)

The News Agents.

Jon Sopel (1:34)

It's Jon.

Lewis Goodall (1:35)

It's Maitlis.

Jon Sopel (1:36)

And it's not just CNN that Trump has banned from the White House. It's MS Now, which is kind of a similar sort of TV station to CNN and Politico.

And he said he's banning them because they're fake news.

Now, last week, it's worth remembering that Trump wanted the Supreme Court to approve his changes to mail-in ballots, and the Supreme Court had the temerity to say, bugger off. And then he wanted the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, and they raised them. And he wanted a federal judge to say he could have his name on the Kennedy Center. And the federal judge said, no, you can't. And so Donald Trump, out of desperation, having lost three times, does what a desperate man does. He lashes out, and he's lashed out, and tried to ban these three new news organizations from the White House.

Lewis Goodall (2:31)

Yeah. So I guess the first thing you have to understand about America is that this will not get past the Constitution. The First Amendment prevents Trump from doing this. And that's why within the space of 24, 48 hours, all three, CNN, MS Now, and Politico have filed their First Amendment lawsuit to restore their access. In other words, they just say, shut up, out the way, we're going straight to the courts. And as of this moment, the courts are still managing just about to hold it together to deliver some readings and some hearings that are going against Trump. But I guess there is something that you kind of need to understand about the way this works. And it is not difficult to find cases of Trump suing journalists. And I don't mean this time round. I mean, literally, you go back to the 80s, he was doing it. You go back to the 90s, he was doing it. When he was a businessman in New York, he took against somebody, quite often women, and just decided to pursue them in the courts to try and shut them down, throw legal weight against them and say, you're not allowed to do this. He did it in the early days of his second term when he tried to ban Associated Press. What was their crime? I think they failed to call the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America.

And we have seen it, I think, consistently in the way that Trump has taken on ABC, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and tried to essentially shut them down, right? He has decided whether it was an ABC interview that he tried to get money from, whether it was reporting from the Wall Street Journal over the Epstein birthday book, whether it was the New York Times reporting. I think that still stands, doesn't it? I mean, there are still cases going on. There are a lot of cases going on.

Jon Sopel (4:27)

And of course, the case against the BBC.

And when I was out in Washington in the first term, there was a time when the BBC was banned, from, he tried to ban because he said that we're not on an approved list of groups that could go in to a briefing with the press secretary and was saying, hang on, what do you mean?