The Trump administration has repeatedly lost in court over its attempt to ban Politico, CNN, and MS NOW from the White House because these outfits “purposely write negative news.” Someone may have mentioned the First Amendment to the president at some point, but it apparently didn’t take. Even after a judge ordered their access restored, White House officials kept turning the reporters away for hours, and a Secret Service agent confiscated their passes, according to the outlets’ lawyers. None of that has dampened Trump’s enthusiasm for threatening the free press.
Axios reports:
The White House counsel’s office warned Politico in a Monday letter that it had 48 hours to retract or correct recent stories about alleged staff drama, or it would suffer unspecified consequences. ... In his letter to Politico, White House Counsel Will Scharf singled out three stories concerning White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles despite “on-the-record refutations” or contrary evidence supplied by senior staff and even the president. Scharf wrote that “freedom of the press is not a professional exemption from accountability. I therefore demand that Politico immediately correct or retract these publications, issue a prominent and public apology to the President of the United States and to Ms. Wiles, and remove the false reporting from your digital archives.” Otherwise, he wrote, the White House would conduct an “immediate review of Politico’s relationship with the White House, and, of course, consideration of all other appropriate and available legal remedies.”
Politico corrected one of the three stories after follow-up reporting, the way news organizations routinely fix errors, and stood by the other two. Accuracy was never really what the White House was after. Scharf also wanted the stories wiped from Politico’s archives and a “prominent and public apology to the President of the United States,” the kind of ritual groveling expected of state media. The threatened “review of Politico’s relationship with the White House” is a promise to try again what a Trump-appointed judge has already blocked: kicking Politico out of the building over coverage the president dislikes.
The deadline for the threatened consequences passed on Oct. 22 with no word from the White House.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
© The UnPopulist, 2026
Follow us on Bluesky, Threads, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and X.
