Friday was another banner day for freedom of the press in America as Donald Trump, a man who has a pile of rusty nails where his brain should be, announced he was banning three media outlets from the White House for the crime of being very mean and nasty to him. Boy, we bet the White House Correspondents Association is really going to let him have it at their next annual dinner! Maybe they’ll tell the waiters to take a long time to refill his water glass, that will teach him.
Trump made the announcement in one of his typically rambling, poorly punctuated TruthSocial posts. He wrote — or more likely, Natalie Harp wrote for him — that he was “proud” to ban CNN, MSNOW, and POLITICO from the White House “as a result of their constant ‘reporting’ FAKE NEWS!” Presumably, the Gateway Pundit and whoever is covering the White House these days for pillow man Mike Lindell’s YouTube channel will be unaffected.
It is unclear if there is something specific that drove this latest tantrum. Trump’s entire personality is holding grudges every moment that he’s conscious, which means there is an almost infinite number of possibilities. Anderson Cooper didn’t invite him to appear on his annual rockin’ New Year’s Eve broadcast? Rachel Maddow stubbornly remains a lesbian? Kaitlan Collins wouldn’t pull his finger during an interview?
After he posted the announcement, Trump held one of those events in the Oval Office where he alternately rambles interminably and dozes off in his desk chair surrounded by Cabinet members while Bobby Kennedy burps that in his experience, vaccines make it impossible for women to orgasm.
But when he wasn’t dozing, Trump was giving the outlets’ lawyers some nice clips for the inevitable lawsuit that will likely be filed on Monday:
He literally calls it “a ban on the free press” with exactly zero sense of irony. The man’s brain is a marvel. He should donate it to science after he dies so neurologists who study concussions in football can determine how he somehow developed the worst case of CTE ever seen that didn’t involve getting repeatedly hit in the head by Aaron Donald.
The WHCA immediately put out a milquetoast statement stating that the American people deserve “a full and independent account” of a president’s activities and the group stands with the banned outlets and blah blah blah. We’re sure WHCA president Jacqui Heinrich will also waggle her finger to show her disapproval.
The WHCA is reaping what it sowed here. It has bent over backwards to convince Trump to come to its annual dinner, which is supposed to celebrate the First Amendment. It has withstood harsh criticism for inviting him, and for being so hidebound in its tradition of inviting the president no matter who the president is, as Heinrich recently put it to New York. And the organization is discovering, as if it didn’t already know, that there is no pleasing or being nice enough to satisfy Trump. He just keeps coming back with more demands.
This is not the first time Trump has tried to ban reporters and outlets from the White House only to have a court remind him that it’s not his house. Last year the Associated Press sued and won after the White House tried to ban it because the organization kept calling the Gulf of Mexico its correct name instead of the Trump-made-up Gulf of America. And during Trump’s first term, CNN sued and won when the White House banned one of its reporters, Jim Acosta, after a confrontation between the two men and an aide during a press conference.
The rest of the White House press corps will do absolutely nothing, just as they did absolutely nothing the other times Trump tried to ban entire outlets. But when the shoe was on Fox News’s foot, by which we mean the president of the United States criticized an outlet to its face, well, that was a four alarm fire for press freedom, because.
What will it take to get the WHCA to stop putting on its annual wankfest of a dinner for all of Donald Trump’s remaining time in office, anyway? Or at least stop inviting him? How about if he tells Kash Patel to arrest journalists for being mean to him, would that do it? If he spends an entire interview with Jake Tapper grabbing the anchor’s arm and swinging it at his own face while asking “Hey Jake, why are you hitting yourself?” Or how about if during a press conference, he grabs his crotch and yells, “Epstein this” at the assembled media?
Of course the White House press corps could always surprise us and take a moral stand … HA HA HA, oh we have fun.
Help keep Wonkette alive and we will never, ever go to the White House Correspondents Dinner. That’s the Wonkette promise.
Another day, another nightmare/fresh hell.
We already have full on concentration camps, armed toughs terrorizing civilian populations, all with minimal protest, so why not bans on the Lügenpresse, perhaps some killings to drive the message home and all the other accoutrements of a completed fascist takeover?
(it is what we will see rapidly if the midterms are not a complete victory for the Democrats)