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Trump banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico, then wrote the plaintiffs’ brief for them; the networks covered their own refusal to cover a helipad; and the Eighth Circuit gave Missouri’s map its ninth life.
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Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Thanks for your patience yesterday. Everything went smoothly and your author is back at the grindstone in fine fettle. Your roundup includes: three banned news outlets sue the President before the same judge who handed Jim Acosta his pass back, and Trump helpfully files the evidence for them in capital letters; corporate media covers its own refusal to cover a helipad, silently; the White House launches Trump TV to the tune of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’; CNN pleads for independence from government on the same afternoon it accepts an owner-appointed fairness board; and the Eighth Circuit gives Missouri’s congressional map its ninth life in a 40-page opinion that reads like a legal thriller written by someone with a head injury, featuring a Secretary of State held in contempt for obeying a federal judge.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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Last Friday, President Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. On Monday, the three outlets sued him in D.C. federal court— a 27-page complaint, fronted by First Amendment heavyweight Ted Boutrous of Gibson Dunn, naming Trump, Communications Director Steven Cheung, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and the Secret Service director, on the apparent legal theory of “sue everybody and let the Kaiser sort it out.” The Hill wrote an entire streaming series about the conflict, beginning with: “Outlets Trump banned from White House sue administration on First Amendment grounds.”
A lawsuit was inevitable, which is a shame, because the parties were having so much fun manufacturing evidence against themselves. Let’s start with the evidence locker President Trump is filling against himself.
Trump didn’t just ban the three outlets. He explained himself. At great length. In writing. In all caps. He said they write “FICTION and LIES.” He said they have “an obligation to be fair.” He called the whole thing, in his own words, “an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America.” He threatened that “other Fake News Media Outlets” would follow.
Anything you post can and will be used against you in a court of law.
When a reporter asked him whether there was a particular story behind the ban, he said no. “It’s really just cumulative stories over the last few years,” coverage he considers “one-sided” and “never good” because “they want to try and diminish the Republicans.” Asked if he was trying to intimidate the press, he replied: “No, no, no, no; I dislike dishonest press like you. I think you’re terrible.”
Now, the President wasn’t wrong about anyof those points. But, it might’ve been better had he kept off social media. Legally speaking, Trump probably could have gotten away with it if he’d just kept his thumbs quiet. There is no constitutional right to a White House press pass. A federal appeals court said so last summer, ruling he couldexclude AP reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One —his ‘private workspaces’— over the whole “Gulf of America” standoff.
But once the government opens its doors to the press generally, it can’t slam them on certain viewpoints. That’s the ruling of Sherrill v. Knight, a 1977 D.C. Circuit case holding that press credentials are a liberty interest: reporters get notice, an appeal process, and their credentials can’t get revoked just because the president thinks their coverage stinks. (Even if it does stink.) In the AP case, a Trump-appointed judge put it plainly: “if the Government opens its doors to some journalists… it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints.”
So now Trump’s lawyers get to walk into federal court and argue, with straight faces, that when the President of the United States says “I’m banning these outlets because of their coverage,” he doesn’t actually mean he’s banning them because of their coverage. We lawyers call this the “He Was Just Kidding” defense. It has a mixed track record.
And the scope doesn’t help: Last year’s Associated Press fight was just about the Oval Office and Air Force One. This ban covers the entire White House grounds— and not just one reporter, but three whole news organizations, in a wholesale lot. It’s the difference between disinviting someone from your dinner party and bricking up the front door.
He’s been through all this before. More than once. He knows the rules. It’s almost like Trump picked this fight, wanting maximum publicity, and on purpose. And then he got the worst possible judge.
🔥 The case drew D.C. Judge Timothy J. Kelly for Wednesday’s emergency hearing— a Trump appointee and, in a twist the networks’ lawyers must have savored like a $400 California cabernet billed to CNN, it was the same judge who ordered the Trump 1.0 White House to give Jim Acosta’s press pass back. Trump, who on Friday mused that the ban’s survival “depends on the judge you get, to be honest with you,” got this judge.
Kelly is one of Trump’s worst judicial picks ever. For instance, Judge Kelly sentenced Proud Boys’ Enrique Tarrio —who wasn’t even at the Capitol— to twenty-two years in federal prison. It was the record longest J6 sentence. No other judge got close. (Trump undid Tarrio’s twenty-two years with a pen on his first afternoon back. The judge, unfortunately, is still there.)
Meanwhile, the entire corporate media has gone to war. Even Fox. But passive-aggressively, of course.
🔥 Yesterday, Trump inaugurated his new White House lawn helipad —a parking space for helicopters— and corporate media treated its own stubborn refusal to cover the event like it had won the Cold War. It reported this like breaking international news, which is pretty rich, because on any normal day a helipad ribbon-cutting would get less airtime than a weatherman’s birthday.
The Hill —which isn’t even part of the conflict— ran a whole separate story on media’s courageous Helipad Snub. To make sure everyone got the point, media ran the ribbon-cutting film, but absent any presidential audio:
The media’s non-coverage of the helicopter parking spot became media’s big story, because the people who decided not to cover it covered their decision not to cover it.
With no pool crew on hand to supply a microphone, the White House’s own feed had no audio: a silent movie of a man inaudibly cutting a ribbon beside a noiseless helicopter pad. It was the first soundless inauguration since Calvin Coolidge, without anchors describing their takes on how dictatorially Trump held the giant golden scissors. (To me, this was an improvement.)
🔥 Beyond the lawsuit, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox also cut their pool coverage in solidarity. CNN had been scheduled to run the pool camera for Trump’s U.N. trip —the one crew whose footage feeds everybody— and when CNN was barred, the others refused to step in. “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information,” they declared jointly, moments before guaranteeing the public would receive none.
The Hill managed a third story about there being no story, this time about the non-existence of the pool coverage.
The Washington Post, unwilling to be outdone in the bravery department, announced it would delay publishing any pictures until last night. The Administration is said to be reeling. (Sources confirm it is not.)
As if that weren’t enough, Trump used the media circus to launch his own network Monday afternoon: “Trump TV,” a 24/7 YouTube livestream called The Essentials Station, broadcasting what it calls the administration’s “greatest hits, unfiltered.” The launch montage featured clips from The Office, Seinfeld, Family Guy, Friends, and SpongeBob SquarePants, set to the Buggles’ 1979 hit “Video Killed the Radio Star.”
What a timeline. A government launching a television channel to a 47-year-old song about new media devouring old media is either the most self-aware thing this administration has ever done or the craziest. Either way, it’s predictably giving Democrats endless fodder for new complaints.
For instance, oleaginous California governor Gavin Newsom, whose hairdo has its own gravitational field, declared it “quite literally state-run TV” and “truly autocratic behavior from a failed President.” Well. To be fair, dark warnings about autocracy from the man who banned Californians from the beach and closed schools for two years while fine-dining at the French Laundry don’t quite hit the same.
All these media and progressive knee-jerk reactions, and his utter lack of care for the legal niceties, make me suspect Trump created the whole thing on purpose for his own reasons. It’s not clear why he co-opted the news cycle. Maybe to launch Trump TV. But there was an even bigger story, behind the story. Some dots we need to connect.
🔥 In all their many breathless stories about Trump’s 2026 War on Media, there’s one thing nobody’s mentioning— all three of the banned outlets showed up to this First Amendment fight already bloodied by earlier rounds.
First, MS NOW is the network formerly known as MSNBC, spun off by Comcast last November and rebranded with a name that sounds like a teenage influencer with a Shein try-on channel or a hub for Multiple Sclerosis news. It is suing the President of the United States as a “legacy institution” under a name that did not exist a year ago. Irony. The complaint even had to include an explanatory paragraph about the name change, which is what happens when your own lawyers aren’t sure the judge knows who you are.
Second is Politico, which arrived at the legal Octagon fresh off losing its biggest subscriber. In February, 2025, DOGE canceled $8 million in annual federal Politico Pro subscriptions ($80 million every ten years), and according to sources, when it clicked ‘cancel,’ even declined Politico’s retention discount. (The $8 million figure itself turned out to include every agency’s subscriptions plus $26 million from Biden, including from USAID —a fact the complaint called, in Trump’s version, “a categorically false and debunked claim”— but the cancellation was real, and so was the giant revenue hole.)
Third is CNN. The network, which now has fewer regular viewers than reruns of “Law and Order SVU,” has just been snapped up by Paramount Skydance. The $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, cleared its final legal hurdle on Monday, the same day as the lawsuit, when twelve blue-state attorneys general led by California settled their antitrust case. The suit had held off the merger since February, but last week, Paramount threatened to pull out of California. The blue states caved.
Get this: the settlement includes a “News Editorial Independence Board” for CNN and CBS News: five journalists, serving three-year terms, appointed by Paramount’s board of directors, empowered to resolve newsroom disputes over “reporting bias” and “fairness standards” — and to monitor editorial independence, quote, “from ownership and shareholders.” Paramount is owned by conservatives Larry and David Ellison.
In other words, the board guaranteeing CNN’s independence from its owners will be appointed by its owners. A CBS staffer called the plan “utter garbage.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation called Ellison “a compromised oligarch with a history of throwing journalists under the bus.” Connecticut’s attorney general, who had originally demanded Paramount sell CNN outright, said he was “deeply disappointed we could not do more.”
Progressive wails are deafening.
You can’t make this stuff up. CNN is suing the President to defend “independent journalism free from government interference”— on the same day it settled for being monitored for “fairness” by a board appointed by its new conservative billionaire owner. MS NOW is defending the free press under a name its interns invented last fall. And Politico is defending its White House access after losing the entire federal government as a customer.
Ouch.
Even supposing they win, which, given the judge and Trump’s tweets, they probably will— what have they actually won? A court order gets the press passes back. It doesn’t get them called on; no judge can order the press secretary to take their questions. It doesn’t get them the good rooms— the AP already learned that the Oval Office and Air Force One can be carved right back out. It doesn’t get them the pool rotation, which, since early last year, the White House now controls outright. And it doesn’t get them subscriptions, liberal owners, or non-moronic names.
A Pyrrhic victory. They may get their passes back. The White House they get back into won’t be the same one they left. TAW.
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This could be the craziest gerrymandering case in U.S. history. Yesterday, WRAL News reported, “Appeals court favors Trump-backed Missouri congressional map, but Supreme Court will have final say.”
Yesterday, the U.S. Eighth Circuit weighed in, 2–1, in an unsigned opinion —nobody wanted their name on this thing— ordering Missouri to use the Trump-backed 2025 map for November’s election. Then, in the same breath, the court stayed its own order for seven days so the U.S. Supreme Court can take yet another look. Which means: the map is alive, but only on life support, pending a decision due by September 28th at 5 p.m. Central.
Ironically, September 28th is the one-year anniversary from when Governor Kehoe signed the new map into law.
🍿 The saga’s timeline must be seen to be believed. It reads like a legal thriller written by someone with a head injury:
September 2025. It started when the Missouri legislature, in an extraordinary session, passed a new 7–1 Republican congressional map. Before the ink dried on the governor’s signature —the Eighth Circuit’s words, not mine— a Soros-funded group called People Not Politicians filed a referendum petition to kill it. The map’s most controversial feature: it dismantled Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City-based Fifth District by stretching it into rural Missouri like taffy.
Fall 2025 – summer 2026. People Not Politicians sued, and sued, and sued, and sued. (Literally. Four lawsuits.) Missouri courts rejected every challenge: the special session was fine, redistricting twice in a decade was fine, the map’s shapes were fine, the referendum doesn’t automatically suspend anything. As the Eighth put it, “Until September 3, 2026, the 2025 map withstood every legal challenge against it.”
August 4, 2026. Missouri held its primary using the new 2025 map. Over 1.2 million people voted. Candidates spent $6.5 million on ads. Rick Brattin won the GOP primary in the new Fifth District, earning the right to challenge Cleaver. The same day, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins certified that PNP’s referendum petition was insufficient, on the grounds that you can’t hold a referendum on a federal congressional map at all.
One hour later, PNP’s Executive Director Richard von Glahn sued in state court. (One hour. Somewhere there’s a well-paid lawyer who had the complaint pre-drafted, and finished a little prematurely.)
August 19. The trial court sided with chrome-domed Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, correctly noting that switching maps “would move hundreds of thousands of voters into different districts.” Moving the map moves the voters.
September 3. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed —one day after oral argument— ordering Secretary of State Hoskins to put the referendum on the November ballot, enjoining him from using the 2025 map, issuing its mandate immediately (no stay for any appeal), and prohibiting any post-judgment motions. Translation: “We’ve already decided. No take-backs. Get lost.”
September 4. Hoskins asked for a stay. Denied, in what the Eighth Circuit delicately called “an unreasoned order.” That’s judge-speak for “they didn’t even bother making up an excuse.”
September 8. Hoskins took it up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Kavanaugh said no. But a few hours later, federal Judge Stephen Clark granted a temporary restraining order requiring the 2025 map anyway, on the grounds that switching maps would “wreak havoc.” So by sundown, Missouri had one federal judge’s order and one Supreme Court justice’s denial pointing in opposite directions, like a weathervane in a tornado.
September 9. The Eighth Circuit declined to stay Judge Clark’s order.
September 10. But the Supreme Court —which had just said ‘no’ to Hoskins— said yes to People Not Politicians and stayed Judge Clark’s order. Forty-eight hours, two opposite answers. This is fine. Everything is fine.
Mid-September. Here’s the best part. The inevitable Catch-22. Secretary of State Hoskins, wedged between a federal order saying “use the 2025 map” and a state supremes order saying “use the 2022 map,” did what any sensible official would do: he obeyed the federal court, then obeyed the U.S. Supreme Court’s stay, then got hauled into expedited contempt proceedings by the Missouri Supreme Court— which held him in contempt, then immediately found he “purged the contempt” by doing what it told him. He was held in contempt for obeying a federal judge and un-contempted for obeying the state judges.
Meanwhile, Boone County’s clerk was being simultaneously ordered by different courts to use two different maps. Just a normal month in election administration. Nothing to see here. Please vote!
September 21. Yesterday, the Eighth Circuit ruled on the merits. They held that switching maps between the primary and the general violated Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires —here they boldly applied common sense— “continuity in the constituency throughout all stages of a single election.” In other words: you can’t hold the first half of the game in Kansas City and the second half in Springfield and call it one football match.
The court did the math. 1.4 million Missourians live in different districts under the two maps; 284,000 voted in one district in August and would vote in another in November; 57% of the Fifth District’s residents would be relocated— not because they moved, but because the district moved out from under them, like a rug in a slapstick routine. As the court put it in a footnote for the ages: “The protected right of participation in the choice of representatives cannot be satisfied by giving voters two halves of two different procedures.”
Remember— this whole thing is a battle over a single congressional seat. That’s where we are right now. That’s how valuable a single seat is.
🍿 The 8th’s unsigned opinion runs 40 pages, and for those of you who enjoy the legal insider takes, it’s got some terrific stuff.
The order took pains to note that, at oral argument, counsel for People Not Politicians conceded that a Supreme Court case, Lance v. Dennis (2006), was “a problem” for their legal analysis. Imagine paying a lawyer who stands up in federal court and admits the other side’s legal precedent is “a problem.” That’s like a one-star Yelp review written by your own attorney.
The court also noted, with all the warmth of a tax audit, that PNP counsel claimed Mr. von Glahn lived in a different district under the new map— then drily observed: “The Court has not found the factual support for this representation in the affidavit that von Glahn filed or elsewhere in the record.” Translation: nice story, counselor, where’s the evidence? Did you make that up? Because it sure reads like you made that up.
Then there was the ‘three-judge-court’ argument. PNP insisted it had “requested a three-judge panel.” The court’s response: “but it never did.” Four words. A complete legal argument gutted by four words. Somewhere a law professor is framing that sentence.
🍿 And the amicus briefs! The county clerks’ association filed a “friend of the court” brief warning about the horribly time-intensive burden of implementing a new map— only for the court to quote one of the brief’s own signatories as having previously assured the Missouri Supreme Court that “the Court need not consider that concern in this case.”
The court caught the clerks contradicting their own clerks. It was like watching someone argue with their reflection. (This is what happens, by the way, when the legal system tries to go fast.)
Then came the Campaign Legal Center, which is backing People Not Politicians here, but last month had argued in a Texas case that switching maps between primary and general violates the Equal Protection Clause— an opposite position it somehow forgot to mention in its brief to the Eighth Circuit. But the court noticed. Oh, the court noticed. “Without evidence” and “but it never did” are this opinion’s love language.
My favorite maneuver, though, was the Purcell judo. People Not Politicians argued the Purcell principle —to avoid chaos, there should be no late changes to election rules— barred the federal courts from intervening. The Eighth Circuit agreed Purcell applies, then pointed out that the status quo had been the newer 2025 map, which Missouri had used for a year; it was the Missouri Supreme Court that “upset it”; and “it is our duty, consistent with Purcell, to at least preserve the possibility of restoring it.”
The Eighth Circuit judges took PNP’s own principle, turned it around, and smashed them with it. “Refusing to correct an erroneous, ‘late-breaking’ state court decision based on the Purcell principle would ‘turn Purcell on its head,’” the court wrote, quoting Justice Kavanaugh. It’s the legal equivalent of grabbing someone’s sword by the blade and then bashing them with the handle. Don’t bring a principle to a principle fight unless you’re sure which side it’s on.
Oh, and the closing line offered to the Missouri Supreme Court, after describing the whole contempt saga: “The Court trusts that the Missouri Supreme Court will respect this Court’s decision under the Supremacy Clause.” That’s not trust. That’s a threat in a black robe. (Footnote: the court also added that it trusted counsel “will not instruct local election authorities to violate the Constitution,” citing civil-rights liability statutes, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1985(3), in case the hint wasn’t clear enough. It was less of a footnote and more of a loaded gun in a gift box.)
The dissent, by Trump appointee Judge Stras, was the most interesting part: he agreed the map-switch was probably unconstitutional, but said People Not Politicians lacks standing to appeal— which is a dissent the way a bouncer is a greeter.
So now we wait for September 28th, when the Supreme Court gets its third bite at this particular apple. Note the Eighth Circuit closed the run-out-the-clock loophole: without an expedited deadline, PNP could have waited until December 21st to seek cert, mooting the whole thing since the election would be over. Somebody on the 8th Circuit panel has seen this movie before.
One footnote for the road: the opinion observes, almost in passing, that nine states have now redrawn their congressional maps mid-decade with an eye on these midterms — California, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah — with three more warming up in the bullpen: Marylan, Mississippi, and New York. And it quotes, with what I choose to read as a straight face, that “partisan advantage is a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.”
The gerrymander wars are no longer a Texas story or a Missouri story. They’re the whole map. And Missouri’s Republican-friendly map —slain in the state supreme court, revived by a federal judge, stayed by SCOTUS, dragged through contempt proceedings, revived again yesterday— has more lives than that Warner Bros. cartoon cat that was always chasing the tweety bird around.
I tawt I taw a dead putty tat. We’ll see whether the latest feline incarnation survives the 28th and gets nine lives. No predictions.
Have a terrific Tuesday! Sail back tomorrow morning, for the latest installment of C&C’s essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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Rose Rambles... 