Why Trump’s War on the Press Is Different This Time

MAGA can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas. So the Trump administration keeps trying to find ways to cram right-wing media down our throats.

Donald Trump spent Friday night at a party in his own honor, in a ballroom he built, thrown by the very press corps he’s spent over a decade trying to destroy.

The rescheduled White House Correspondents’ Dinner — postponed since a gunman opened fire at the original April event — finally happened Friday at the Waldorf Astoria, the hotel Trump used to own and still can’t stop bragging about. “It’s great to be back at a place that I know very well,” he told the room, “because I built it.”

He then spent the next hour doing what he always does: insulting reporters by name (he berated Kaitlin Collins again for “never smiling” and comparing her to trans influencer Dylan Mulvaney) and recycling old nicknames against his political enemies (he weirdly recounted a supposed debate whether he could call J.B. Pritzker a “fat pig.”) The Daily Beast reported he appeared to doze off (again), while CNN’s own panel declared he “objectively bombed.”

But Trump made sure to give shoutouts to friendly media executives, namely Larry and David Ellison, the father-son duo who now run Paramount and are circling Warner Bros. Discovery next.

That’s the split screen of Trump’s second term: contempt for the press as an institution, and special treatment for the owners he’s helped install.

It’s worth remembering that in his first term, Trump wouldn’t even show up to the event, filled with an audience of people he’d already decided were his adversaries.

This time he came, he saw, he conquered (albeit by cracking tired jokes at the media’s expense before nodding off). Something has shifted, and it isn’t that Trump has softened.

A few months before the shooting canceled the original dinner, Trump made a startling admission. At a black-tie dinner in February, he told a room full of reporters he wouldn’t call them “fake news” that night, adding: “The press has been relatively fair to me over the last year — meaning they’ve been bad, but not horrible.”

That’s not a compliment. It’s a stinging assessment of the beltway press’s performance as a watchdog, and Trump is telling us he’s satisfied with their fealty. That’s not an olive branch. That’s an indictment.

Notably, the WHCA dinner was held less than 24 hours after the public learned just how far his administration had gone to attack press freedom. On Thursday, outlets reported that Trump’s Justice Department had subpoenaed phone records belonging to New York Times reporters (as well as their spouses and one reporter’s mother) in a hunt for the sources behind reporting on security flaws in the Qatari-gifted jet Trump is using as Air Force One.

Prosecutors hand-delivered grand jury subpoenas to reporters’ phone carriers a day after the story ran, seeking records for family members who had nothing to do with the reporting. A federal judge tore into the government and the DOJ backed off — but only after a First Amendment advocate noted that “even the Mafia says families are off limits.” And no, it’s not reassuring that the subpoenas got dropped. They never should have been issued in the first place.

This is the actual story of Trump’s second term, and it’s significantly different than his first. Trump has called the press the enemy of the people since at least 2017 and his supporters have long been fond of the Nazi term “Lugenpresse” (German for “lying press.”)

What’s new is that the rhetoric now comes with government machinery ready to act. There’s now a coordinated effort by the Trump administration to change who owns the microphone rather than just yelling at the people holding it.

Let’s start with the Federal Communications Commission. Chairman Brendan Carr has made a habit of threatening broadcasters’ licenses whenever someone displeases the White House, warning networks over Iran war coverage. More recently, Carr suggested ABC’s decision not to air Trump’s election lie speech live this month would factor into the FCC’s review of Disney’s station licenses.

The FCC’s own rules say it can’t censor broadcast content — that’s supposed to be the point of the First Amendment — but Carr keeps finding a broadcast license renewal to dangle anyway. He also cleared the $6.2 billion Nexstar-Tegna merger, which Trump personally endorsed by posting that “we need more competition against THE ENEMY, the Fake News National TV Networks.” In one stroke, Carr approved a local-news conglomerate reaching 80 percent of American households.

Then there’s the Federal Trade Commission, which under Chairman Andrew Ferguson has turned its subpoena power on the press’ fact-checkers. The agency went after Media Matters over its reporting on advertiser boycotts of X, and it’s suing to unwind NewsGuard, the ratings service the FTC accuses of suppressing conservative speech simply for rating the reliability of news sites. Media Matters fought back and won; NewsGuard is still in court.

Regardless of the outcome of these actions, the fact that two agencies have spent most of Trump’s second term functioning as his media enforcement arm is a page straight out of the authoritarian playbook.

And then there’s the machinery of ownership itself. Self-declared Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth ridiculed a CNN story about the Iran war and said the quiet part out loud: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.” Ellison’s Skydance has acquired Warner Bros. Discovery — which is the parent company of CNN (although a federal judge has blocked the deal, so far).

But Skydance had already taken over CBS, installing Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief, a reshuffle that came with the firings of veteran 60 Minutes journalists, including Scott Pelley and Bill Owens (which NPR called part of “the fight for media control in the age of Trump.”) So CBS’s MAGA makeover gives us a pretty good preview of what’s likely to come at CNN if the merger is ultimately approved.

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Meanwhile, the Pentagon press pool got a makeover this year, with the administration carving out space for friendlier outlets — OAN, Real America’s Voice, the Epoch Times, Lindell TV — while veteran wire services lost their regular spots. That came after the department announced restrictions requiring journalists to submit stories to the press office before publication, prompting most reporters to turn in their badges in protest.

None of this is subtle. Hegseth demands “patriotic” headlines instead of accurate ones. Carr wants broadcasters to self-censor ahead of license renewal. Trump rewards a pliant press with warmed-over insults at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

What all this underscores is the fact that MAGA has been losing the argument in the actual marketplace of ideas. So the strategy has shifted from winning over voters to cramming right-wing media down our throats. And using subpoenas, license reviews, antitrust waivers, and merger approvals to shrink the space where fact-based reporting competes at all.

It doesn’t always work. The DOJ dropped the Times subpoenas. The FTC backed off Media Matters. A judge has, for now, stopped the Warner Bros. Discovery deal. But that doesn’t change the fact that press freedom is under an unprecedented assault.

And an administration willing to subpoena a reporter’s mother to find a source doesn’t need to win every round. It just needs corporate boards to keep calculating that capitulation is cheaper than a fight (like CBS and ABC did by settling bogus lawsuits filed by Trump). So far, that bet keeps paying off.

Trump didn’t need a truce with the media this year. He needed the press to stop being able to afford to hold him accountable. After more than a decade of vicious attacks on the First Amendment, hundreds of journalists showed up Friday night to honor him anyway, in a ballroom where his name used to adorn the walls.

Sure, Trump may have bombed his set that night. But the whole event was an incredible self-own for corporate media — so he was always going to come out a winner.

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