Trump said Friday afternoon he’s banning CNN, MSNOW and Politico from the White House over their coverage, and warned that more outlets are coming. “Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” he wrote on Truth Social at 3:04 p.m.
He said media outlets “shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES” when covering the president or the administration. MSNOW is the network that recently rebranded from MSNBC.
About that $8 million
Trump justified including Politico by describing an “illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them ‘alive.’” He added: “Seems like corruption to me!”
That number is real. What it describes is not.
The roughly $8 million is what every federal agency combined spent in 2024 on Politico subscriptions. Not a payment. Not a grant. Subscriptions, mostly to Politico Pro and E&E News, which are expensive paywalled products that track legislation and regulatory activity. Agencies buy them the way a law firm buys Westlaw, because staff need to follow policy in their own field.
USAID, the agency at the center of the original version of this claim, paid about $24,000. Going back to 2014, federal agencies have spent around $34.3 million on Politico products in total, again overwhelmingly subscriptions. Politico has said flatly that in 18 years it has “never received any government funding — no subsidies, no grants, no handouts.”
So the government did spend $8 million. It bought a product. Calling that a subsidy to keep a newsroom “alive” gets the direction of the transaction backwards.
This has been to court already
The AP went through a version of this in 2025. The White House cut off its access to the Oval Office, Air Force One and other small events after the AP kept using the name Gulf of Mexico. The AP sued.
It won at first. District Judge Trevor McFadden ruled in April that the administration had to restore access while the case proceeded. Then the D.C. Circuit paused that order 2-1. Judge Neomi Rao, joined by Judge Gregory Katsas, wrote that the injunction “impinges on the President’s independence and control over his private workspaces,” and said the White House would probably win outright.
Judge Cornelia Pillard dissented, writing that the majority’s reasoning can’t be squared with “any sensible understanding of the role of a free press in our constitutional democracy.”
That’s the live precedent. An appeals court has already signaled that the president has wide latitude over who gets into spaces he controls.
The other claim today
About an hour earlier, Trump reposted a claim that his approval rating among Republicans is “now 95%, A RECORD,” with Ronald Reagan second at 86%. No poll matching those numbers has surfaced, and he didn’t name one.
For context, his approval with the country as a whole is near the low end of his presidency. A recent Reuters/Ipsos survey put it at 35%. Those two things aren’t contradictory, since one measures his own party and the other measures everyone, but only one of them has a poll attached.
The BeezLoop Take
Presidents have always managed access, and a seat in the briefing room has never been a constitutional right. We’d be careful with anyone describing this as straightforwardly illegal, because the D.C. Circuit has already leaned the other way.
What bothers us is the stated reason. The posts don’t allege anything specific: no story, no correction demanded, no factual error identified. The trigger is coverage the president dislikes, said out loud. And the justification for one of the three outlets rests on a claim that falls apart the moment you check what the money bought.
Where we aren’t convinced: we don’t know yet what “banning” means operationally. The AP case involved specific spaces, not the building. Whether this is a hard credential revocation or something narrower will determine both the legal exposure and the practical effect, and the announcement didn’t say.
Sources: CNBC · Snopes · FactCheck.org · NBC News
