Playing the Hits

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, September 21, 2026

 

The devil on my shoulder keeps whispering to me to enjoy the petulant Kennedy Center fiasco. And the petulant new White House press ban. And even, God help me, the jamboree of postliberal chuds petulantly whining about nonwhites enrolling in “our” universities.

 

Americans voted to be governed by malevolent populist children, he says. They deserve every ounce of national embarrassment those children can cause them. And that’s true. They do.

 

But there’s a second dimension of pleasure in each of these episodes. They’re pathetically feeble.

 

Twenty months into the president’s second term and six weeks out from a national election, the great causes in which the conquering MAGA army of 2024 is now invested are affirmative action for white underachievers, bulldozing a former president’s memorial because the current president can’t put his name on it, and, as of Friday afternoon, whether CNN, MS NOW, and Politico can be barred from the White House grounds.

 

The postliberal revolution was supposed to have grander achievements than that. Or was it?

 

“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,” Donald Trump declared in announcing the press ban. A moral case could be made in defense of that position—if, by “FICTION and LIES,” he meant actual fiction and lies.

 

But he doesn’t. “There’s something wrong with a country that can allow people to write purposely negative stories,” the president said of the ban on Friday. “I don’t have to let them into my—into the people’s house.”

 

It’s revealing that he described the White House as “my” house before catching himself, a pithy insight into how postliberals see no distinction between their public office and their private interests. But the more revealing slip is Trump complaining about “purposely negative stories” rather than “fiction and lies,” which shifts his complaint away from whether a story is false and toward whether it’s damaging.

 

They’re not the same thing, needless to say. There’s a lot of purposely negative coverage of the administration in my own newsletter, but it sure ain’t based on fiction and lies.

 

Treating “negative” and “false” as synonyms is the fruit of decades of right-wing rhetoric about liberal media bias, conditioning the Republican base to presume that any unflattering information about its leaders must have been distorted for Democratic advantage. Trump turned that presumption into an appetite for pure propaganda—to MAGA, whether something is “true” now depends mostly on whether it’s politically useful—and here we are, with “purposely negative” but accurate coverage grounds for barring a media organization from the White House.

 

Something to ponder, which might sound like a trick question but isn’t: What problem is this targeted media ban supposed to solve?

 

Solutions without problems.

 

Any official action by a president should aim to be productive, one would think. How will banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House productively address the crisis of the media supposedly trafficking in “fiction and lies”?

 

It’s not going to stop them from covering the Trump presidency. It will stop their reporters from asking questions during the daily White House briefing, but so what? Most contact between journalists and their sources happens on the phone or digitally. If anything, the ban will incentivize the three outlets to prove that they can still do their jobs of breaking news about the administration despite the president’s effort to sabotage them.

 

Even if it did end up handicapping their ability to gather facts, that handicap wouldn’t necessarily work in Trump’s favor. A hostile press supposedly prone to “fiction and lies” logically wouldn’t report more accurately once it’s cut off from access to the administration. It would report less accurately. Deprived of its ability to run down leads by checking with people in the know, its coverage might grow more sensational and irresponsible.

 

The ban is also stupid as a demagogic “Us and Them” ploy. On Monday morning, Fox News joined ABC, CBS, and NBC by standing in solidarity with CNN, announcing that it won’t perform White House pool duties in CNN’s absence. Numerous Fox News contributors likewise denounced the press ban after Trump ordered it Friday afternoon, realizing how a future Democratic president will exploit the precedent to ban their own network from White House privileges someday (as Barack Obama’s administration briefly tried to do in 2009 before relenting).

 

The network press-pool boycott means that the most narcissistic president in American history has temporarily deprived himself of a TV crew hanging on his every move (With amusing consequences). And it almost certainly means this is destined to be yet another issue in which Trump ends up aligned with a smallish minority of public opinion against nearly all Democrats, a heavy majority of independents, and a meaningful number of Republicans.

 

On top of everything else, I suspect the president will lose the lawsuit that the three news organizations have filed seeking to restore their access. “Once a government official has opened up a space to journalists more broadly, then that official can’t then say, ‘But you can’t come in because I don’t like your reporting … because of your viewpoint,’” one expert told Axios. If the White House really were Trump’s house, he could discriminate based on whether an outlet’s coverage was “purposely negative” or not. Because it’s the people’s house, as he belatedly admitted on Friday, he probably can’t.

 

So, to repeat: What was the point of the ban? If it’s more likely to hurt the president than it is to hurt CNN, MS NOW, or Politico, how did he and his team arrive at the conclusion that this was a good idea?

 

They didn’t.

 

According to three people close to the White House who spoke to, er, Politico, “Many senior staff were surprised by the directive, which happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town, and weren’t aware it was coming until they saw the post.” More than a dozen other current and former Trump officials allegedly told the now-banned outlet that they too were “puzzled” by the move.

 

It may have been “The Human Printer,” aka Natalie Harp, who set the president off. She showed him clips on Friday of MS NOW anchors criticizing his administration, per the Wall Street Journal; apparently that sent him spiraling, propelled by longstanding grievances that his allies aren’t defending him more doggedly on television and that—no joke—“prominent figures in Washington hadn’t publicly thanked him for trying to overhaul the Kennedy Center.”

 

The ban wasn’t designed to solve a problem. Almost the opposite: It’s the sort of thing one does when one has given up on solving problems.

 

‘Playing the hits.’

 

It’s not a coincidence, I think, that the media ban arrived at the same time that the president is weighing whether to open a new front in the Iran war by attacking the Houthis in Yemen.

 

The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump twice changed his mind this weekend about riding to Saudi Arabia’s rescue in that conflict. Initially he opposed the idea, then ordered the Pentagon to prepare to intervene after a phone call with the Saudi crown prince, then instructed it to stand down upon discovering that most of his inner circle “was either deeply skeptical or outright opposed to joining the Saudi fight against the Houthis, especially given the existing strains facing the U.S. military in the war with Iran.”

 

Escalating the war would invite Iranian reprisals against oil infrastructure in Saudi Arabia and beyond, sending already sky-high diesel prices God knows where. Not escalating the war risks leaving the Houthis in control of the Bab al-Mandab Strait—bottling up Saudi oil indefinitely in a second major transit point, potentially destabilizing the kingdom, and signaling to U.S. allies globally that we lack the will or the capacity to assist them in a pinch.

 

Either way, gas prices are sure to climb further before the midterms. There’s no way out absent an unlikely Iranian capitulation caused by America’s naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.

 

There’s also no way out of the broader affordability crisis. The Federal Reserve’s decision last week to raise interest rates doubled as a formal admission by the federal government that the cost of living will continue trending in the wrong direction before Election Day. The one tool in Trump’s toolkit to mitigate that problem would be to lift tariffs, but he’s as likely to do that as Vladimir Putin is to retreat from Ukraine. Strongmen have a remarkably high tolerance for pain, political and otherwise, when the alternative is to confess error and lose face.

 

The Trumpist political project is collapsing in real time, in short, and there’s nothing the president or his supporters can do about it. Even their sleazy bid to avert an electoral calamity by meddling with voting by mail has hit the rocks. Is it surprising under the circumstances that they’d resort to showing their ass politically, lashing out petulantly to reassert power over favored scapegoats as a way of coping with failure?

 

MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow interpreted the White House ban on her network that way. “He’s in a really low place politically, and so I think this is him playing the hits,” she said of Trump. “I think this is him going back to something that he knows his base will enjoy, and he wants that feeling again.” The same is true, I suspect, of degenerate populists (which now includes the U.S. Department of Education, apparently) who rallied behind Bo French last week after he complained about the number of Indian American students at the University of Texas. Fantasizing about a whites-only country while Democrats’ lead is widening on the generic ballot is “plotting the architectural expansion of Berlin as the Soviets close in on the bunker” levels of denial.

 

If you can’t solve real problems that Americans care about, you can still pretend to solve fake problems that you care about. Just pick a traditional cultural enemy—the media and nonwhites this week, probably something to do with transgenderism in the next—and purport to put them in their place, regardless of whether what you’re doing is ineffectual or even counterproductive.

 

And it is counterproductive. We’ve reached the point of public exhaustion with Trump’s antics where even 92-year-old Pat Boone feels obliged to gently remind the president that he can always choose to talk less. If a lifelong Republican like him has reached his saturation point, imagine how an average joe who’s tearing his hair out over gas prices feels upon hearing that the White House’s newest priority is … fighting with CNN.

 

Things to come.

 

That said, I don’t think the White House media ban will last long.

 

Either a court will enjoin it temporarily while litigation proceeds or Trump will reverse himself once he realizes that the networks’ boycott of his events is cutting into his camera time. Depriving a media whore as insatiable as him of TV coverage is more tactically ruthless than Iran sealing off the Strait of Hormuz. I doubt he’ll last 48 hours.

 

By Wednesday, perhaps, this’ll be just another Trump outrage that’s been buried under six new outrages and forgotten. But in the meantime, the devil on my shoulder is still whispering.

 

For one thing, he and I are unimpressed that Fox News and old-school Republicans like Karl Rove have finally drawn lines in the sand with respect to postliberal cretinism this conspicuously late in the game. The time to worry about Trump muzzling his critics in the press or “conservatives” wetting themselves over a statue of a Hindu deity in Texas was years ago. Waiting until year 10 of the populist nightmare to stand on liberal principle, conveniently at a moment when a giant blue wave is cresting because of widespread dissatisfaction, feels not so principled.

 

Also, while it’s reassuring to know that the three banned outlets will likely win their lawsuit against Trump, official executive action against the media isn’t the real threat anymore. The real threat is the president leaning on a media mogul privately to make sure the outlets he owns don’t make trouble for the White House, knowing that federal regulators might make trouble for his other ventures in turn if they do. Trump doesn’t need to test the First Amendment by squeezing CBS News himself to get more favorable coverage if he can skirt around it by having CBS News’ parent company do the squeezing itself.

 

As I was writing this column, in fact, news broke that Paramount has struck a deal with several state attorneys general to resolve an antitrust claim related to its purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. CNN is a subsidiary of the latter company; Paramount is led by David Ellison, a Trump ally. The deal reportedly obliges Paramount to “establish a board to ensure the editorial independence of CNN,” but at least one attorney general involved feared that that’s insufficient and lobbied unsuccessfully to have CNN excluded from the deal altogether.

 

If CNN’s coverage of the White House turns softer, it won’t be because the White House ban taught the network a lesson. It’ll be because Trump and his friend David are doing favors for each other beyond the reach of courts.

 

The last thing the devil is whispering is this: If ever there were a moment for the president to hard launch a version of honest-to-goodness American state media, this is it.

 

You know he wants to. It’s in the authoritarian character to crave total control over information, particularly information that pertains to him. As sycophantic as Fox News, One America News, Newsmax, and a gajillion slobbering right-wing platforms are to Trump, he doesn’t actually control what their cameras record. The fact that the White House press pool has momentarily ceased functioning means that, for once, he has a monopoly over the transmission of his own events.

 

Why not hire a camera crew or two, ban the rest of the White House press corps from recording him (which would solve the problem of viewpoint discrimination), and start streaming his own appearances on the White House and Truth Social websites? The networks might refuse to air video taken from the stream at first—but they’d eventually give in, compelled by events to show newsier moments from Trump’s public appearances.

 

The president would have to get used to being on TV less than he used to be, but he might be willing to make that sacrifice in return for total unfiltered authority over his communications to the public. And members of his party would love it: One of the best things that could happen to Republicans between now and November would be fewer opportunities for Donald Trump to remind Americans why they don’t like him.

 

If he’s going to spend the rest of his presidency showing his ass, he might as well be in charge of the show.