President Donald Trump said Friday that he is banning MS NOW, CNN and Politico from the White House over their coverage of him.
Trump said in a Truth Social post that those outlets “shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America.”
“Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow,” he added.
In the Oval Office later Friday afternoon, Trump said he was imposing the ban in response to “cumulative stories” by the three outlets.
“You get sick of it,” he said.
The White House under Trump briefly tried to suspend a CNN reporter’s press pass in 2018, and it is currently in a lawsuit over an attempted ban of Associated Press journalists from certain spaces.
Trump said Friday that the effort to bar news outlets is worthwhile, even if it does not hold up in court.
“I think it’s good to point it out whether it survives or doesn’t,” Trump said.
Trump has long targeted news outlets and individual journalists over what he claims is unfair coverage. He encourages his supporters at political rallies to boo and jeer at reporters present, and he regularly takes to social media to call out journalists by name and insult them in personal terms.
But the attempt to block White House access to disfavored news outlets takes Trump’s open hostility for critical reporting to a new extreme.
It could also draw legal challenges over violations of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects the freedom of the press.
“We have a right under the U.S. Constitution to do that reporting without hindrance or interference from the government,” CNN said in a statement later Friday defending its White House team.
“Should the ban which President Trump threatened go ahead, it would be an illegal assault on that fundamental and constitutionally-protected right,” CNN said.
Politico said in a statement on X that it “will continue to fairly report on this White House and future ones.”
“We will vigorously defend our First Amendment rights against any attempt to restrict them,” the outlet said.
Responding to another of Trump’s remarks, Politico said that claims of it receiving government subsidies “are false and have been thoroughly debunked.”
MS NOW had no immediate comment.
Arthur Spitzer, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, told CNBC that his organization believes Trump’s post is unconstitutional.
“He’s plainly discriminating against them because they don’t like the way they report the news, and the government isn’t supposed to do that,” Spitzer said of Trump. “Certainly, our view is the president cannot control, or try to control, the news by banning outlets from official events because he doesn’t like the way they’re reporting on him.”
Spitzer is representing the ACLU in an ongoing case related to Trump’s ban of AP journalists from certain smaller spaces including the Oval Office and Air Force One.
Trump sought to bar the wire service from those places following its decision to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its centuries-old name despite Trump’s attempt to rename it the “Gulf of America.”
A federal judge ruled in April 2025 that Trump’s action against the AP was “contrary to the First Amendment.”
A federal appeals court prevented that ruling from taking effect while the Trump administration appeals it. But in a footnote, the appeals court said that the White House could not deny so-called hard passes to larger spaces, such as the East Room, “arbitrarily or based on the content of a journalist’s speech.”
Asked for comment on Trump’s Friday post, the White House referred CNBC to the president’s latest comments in the Oval Office.
The Department of Defense, which last year imposed press restrictions that led many news outlets to pull reporters from the Pentagon, “fully supports President Trump’s decision,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on X.
“We are grateful these outlets already chose to self-deport from the Pentagon,” Hegseth wrote, accusing them of having “endangered our troops” and “trafficked in fiction and lies about the President, our Warriors, and their mission.”
White House Correspondents’ Association President Jacqui Heinrich said reporters from the targeted outlets are “being singled out for doing their jobs.”
“This is about more than the rights of journalists. It is about the right of the American people to receive a full and independent account of the activities, policies and decisions of whoever occupies the nation’s highest office,” said the statement from Heinrich, a senior White House correspondent for Fox News.
Weija Jiang, who was WHCA president until July, responded to Trump’s Friday post by quoting the First Amendment.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances,” the amendment reads.
Disclosure: CNBC and MS NOW are divisions of Versant Media.
