President Donald Trump and his administration are already facing backlash over their decision to bar major news outlets from the White House, MS NOW host Jen Psaki said Tuesday on “The Briefing” — and are now inventing excuses to defend the move.
The ban has kept reporters from covering some of Trump’s events and has triggered a major lawsuit from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, which legal experts believe has a strong chance of succeeding.
Psaki, who previously served as White House press secretary under President Biden, said the rollout has been rocky from the start. “So far, this whole thing has not been going especially well for Donald Trump and his administration,” she said, adding that officials are “struggling to come up with an even remotely logical explanation for why the president is blocking press access just 42 days before the election, perhaps because there isn’t one.”
She said the administration is now pushing internal talking points to justify the decision after the fact. “The White House is circulating a set of very, very defensive talking points to try and, I guess, retroactively justify the president’s latest completely rash decision,” Psaki said. “And unsurprisingly, none of their justifications hold water whatsoever.”
One of those talking points, she said, claims Democratic administrations engaged in similar behavior — specifically pointing to a claim that the Obama White House deliberately excluded Fox News from a round of interviews. Psaki, who worked on the Obama communications team at the time, said she was in a position to correct the record.
According to Psaki, the real story was far less dramatic: in 2009, the Treasury Department simply left Fox News off a list of outlets set to interview an official on a particular day, because Fox News hadn’t requested an interview in the first place. Once Fox News raised the issue — backed by other networks — the Obama White House quickly granted them one.
Psaki pushed back on the idea that this reflected friendliness toward Fox News. “Is that a reflection of everyone in the Obama White House loving Fox News, wanting to sing kumbaya together and loving all their coverage? Of course not,” she said. “That’s not the point. I mean, that is the point, actually” — suggesting that granting access wasn’t about favorability, but about maintaining fair treatment of the press regardless of coverage tone.
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