Republicans are supporting President Trump’s ban on three left-leaning news outlets from the White House, arguing that Mr. Trump has been more accessible to the press than any other president and that President Biden did more to restrict press access.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Mr. Trump “is absolutely within his rights” to bar CNN, Politico and MS NOW from the White House if he believes those news organizations “are not behaving in good faith as journalists.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Louisiana Republican, brushed off concerns that Mr. Trump was restricting media access to the White House.
Mr. Trump has spent countless hours answering questions from dozens of media outlets inside and outside the White House, far surpassing any of his predecessors, Mr. Scalise said.
Many reporters have his cellphone number, and when they call, he answers.
“I don’t think we’ve had a president that’s been more open to the press,” Mr. Scalise said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican, told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the three-outlet ban does not violate the Constitution.
“The press has an obligation to report fairly. And the president doesn’t see it happening that way,” Mr. Barrasso said.
The three officials were among several Republicans who stood by Mr. Trump’s sudden removal of the media outlets.
The ban went into effect Friday afternoon.
The president said they were kicked out “as a result of their constant reporting Fake News!”
Legal experts, however, predicted that the courts would force Mr. Trump to rescind the ban.
“What’s going on here is a flagrant violation of the First Amendment,” said Conor Fitzpatrick, a First Amendment expert with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free speech advocacy group.
“I would expect the courts to very quickly enjoin these three organizations from being ejected from the White House,” Mr. Fitzpatrick told “This Week.” “The precedent on this point is clear.”
White House officials carried out the president’s order.
All three outlets said their reporters were denied access to the White House on Saturday and had their badges confiscated.
Politico Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Greenberger, in a statement to the newsroom, pledged to “not be deflected from our duty to hold the government and other public bodies to account.”
MS Now said in a statement that it will “take any and all steps necessary to defend our First Amendment right and the essential role of independent journalism in our democracy.”
On Sunday, however, conservatives pointed out that Mr. Biden also moved to pare White House access by revising rules on who qualified for the passes. The Biden-era requirements were aimed at eliminating credentials for outlets that did not regularly report from the White House.
The resulting new standards culled several hundred outlets previously allowed into the White House, including the Daily Signal and other right-leaning outlets.
On Sunday, Mr. Trump doubled down on his decision, posting a photo of three black garbage bags outside the White House fence. The trash bags were labeled with the names of the three ousted media outlets.
While the president’s supporters have rallied to his side on the ban, mainstream media outlets and Democrats condemned the move.
CBS News senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang, who served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association from 2025 to 2026, said expelling news outlets from the White House is unprecedented and risks establishing a cycle of bans by future administrations, further restricting press access.
“It would set a precedent. It would draw a red line and then who knows what’s to come for future administrations who might do the same on the other side of it,” Ms. Jiang told “Fox News Sunday.” “So that’s why it is so worrisome. That’s why every outlet, every reporter, every member of the public who consumes the news should be worried about this.”
Sen. Cory Booker, New Jersey Democrat, said both the ban and the Justice Department’s recent investigation of Trump administration leaks to the media “clearly” violate the Constitution.
“This president has no regard for the First Amendment. He’s going after reporters, and this ban just doubled down on that,” he said.
The president has been dueling with the press since his first term in office, arguing that the media has reported stories that are flat-out untrue, chief among them the claims that Mr. Trump colluded with Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.
Mr. Trump stepped up attacks on mainstream news outlets in his second term.
He has sued The New York Times, CBS News and other media organizations over their coverage of him and his administration, and he successfully ended guaranteed access to the White House press pool for The Associated Press and other wire services. The wire outlets now take turns in the pool rotation like all other news outlets.
Last year, the Trump administration tried to bar journalists from the Pentagon unless they agreed to restrictions on coverage.
A judge blocked that policy, but an appeals court has, for now, upheld a Defense Department rule restricting journalists’ access to the Pentagon building unless they are escorted.
On Friday, former President Barack Obama weighed in on Mr. Trump’s ban during a discussion on artificial intelligence hosted by Colgate University.
“I’m trying to think what would have happened if I had said, ’You know what, Fox News, you’re out of here!’ It’s unimaginable!” Mr. Obama said.
Yet his administration in 2009 attempted to bar Fox News from a pool of reporters scheduled to interview Treasury Department official Kenneth Feinberg, whom Mr. Obama appointed to scrutinize Wall Street compensation packages.
Obama administration emails from October 2009, obtained by the watchdog group Judicial Watch, showed that Jen Psaki, then the White House deputy communications director and now an MS NOW host, told Treasury Department spokeswoman Jenni LeCompte that “I’m putting some dead fish in the fox cubby - just cause.”
Dag Vega, White House director of broadcast media, wrote to Ms. LeCompte in another email that “we’d prefer if you skip Fox, please,” for interviews with economic officials.
When Fox News reported on the exclusion, Ms. Psaki wrote in a White House email that “brett baier did a stupid piece on it — but he’s a lunatic.”
The Obama administration ultimately decided not to exclude Fox News from any interviews.
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