Donald Trump Is Turning the Press Pool Into a MAGA Echo Chamber

Donald Trump escalated his crackdown on the free press Tuesday, with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announcing that the administration would take control of the press pool. That would mean wresting authority away from the White House Correspondents’ Association, which has managed the rotation since the 1950s, and giving the president himself the power to decide which outlets and reporters cover him. “For decades, a group of DC-based journalists…has long dictated which journalists get to ask questions of the president of the United States in these most intimate spaces,” Leavitt said at a briefing. “Not anymore.”

Leavitt insisted the change was a “long overdue” corrective to an “outdated” system, which gave “left wing stenographers” a “monopoly” on access. But the real message behind the move was plain: The Trump administration will punish news organizations for unfavorable coverage and uncomfortable questions. “Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin’s reign, this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access,” the New York Times’ Peter Baker wrote Tuesday. “Given that the White House has already kicked one news organization out of the pool because of coverage it did not like, it is making certain everyone else knows that the rest of us can be barred too if the president does not like our questions or stories.”

“Give me a break, Peter,” Leavitt replied.

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“Guess he won’t be a pooler anytime soon,” Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller and adviser to Elon Musk, chimed in.

The taunts are part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to bully the press: It had already restricted the Associated Press’s Oval Office access over the outlet’s refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” as the president demands. Then, on Wednesday, it kicked Reuters and HuffPost out of the pool, while adding right-wing, pro-Trump outlets Newsmax and the Blaze to the rotation. “This move does not give the power back to the people,” Fox News’ White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich wrote Tuesday, rejecting Leavitt’s Orwellian framing. “It gives power to the White House.”

Though the administration is obsessed with projecting strength, the effort to replace independent press with friendly, uncritical coverage is fundamentally “cowardly,” as HuffPost editor-in-chief Whitney Synder put it Wednesday: “Americans deserve fair and honest reporting on their president.”

They’ll still get that: As Baker noted, “Government efforts to punish disfavored news organizations will not stop independent journalism.” Hard-hitting accountability reporting, as Seth Stern of the Freedom of the Press Foundation emphasized after the AP ban, does not “require access to ceremonies and spin sessions” with the president.

But it will be more challenging to do so, as Trump tries to cow news organizations with lawsuits, his cronies threaten to go after “enemy” reporters, and some media chiefs bend to his will—or not-so-subtly embrace him, as Jeff Bezos seems to be attempting to do with the Washington Post editorial pages. And, in seeking to turn the press pool into a propaganda machine for his administration, it will become even harder for the public to get a read on what Trump, his Cabinet, and the other plutocrats, extremists, and grifters in his orbit are up to.

Which is precisely the point, of course. While Trump, Musk, and their allies have been brazen in their antidemocratic power grab, authoritarianism flourishes in the shadows, and could be exposed for what it is under the bright and unflattering glare of independent coverage. “This move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States,” WHCA President Eugene Daniels said. “In a free country, leaders must not be able to choose their own press corps.”